This essay will be published in the forthcoming book Academic Ethics Today: Problems, Policies, and Prospects for University Life, ed. Steven M. Cahn (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). This collection of thirty-one new essays will focus on ethical questions raised by institutional policies of colleges and universities. As a service to readers, over the next several months the APA Blog will publish four of these essays in their entirety, including articles on the role of adjuncts (Alexandra Bradner), assessing publications for tenure (David Shatz), student discipline (David Hoekema), and the responsibilities of administrators (Karen Hanson). All materials are copyrighted by the publisher and reprinted with permission. The entire list of topics and authors can be found online.
Tenured professors are permanent employees of their institutions. They enjoy a unique level of job security for a number of reasons that are often hard for laypeople to understand. To solve emergent problems and innovate, our society must nurture and protect a community of people with deep, hard-won knowledge of their very particular subject areas on the chance that a few might produce something curative, transformative, or new. Knowledge can take a long time to emerge, and it can have fits and starts. You might miss it if you fire someone with advanced expertise just because their early ideas have not panned out. Knowledge is also socially produced. We have the best chance of generating it when we can assemble communities of experts who can support and talk to one another for extended periods of time.
Non-tenure-track (NTT) professors are generally people who have earned doctorates, like their tenure-track colleagues, but who are not allowed to apply for tenure. The working conditions of some NTT faculty are similar to the working conditions of most working people: as long as they do a good job, they won’t be fired unless their employer is forced to cut staff. But most NTT faculty do not have automatically renewable contracts. To ride the waves of shifting enrollments and tenure-track faculty leaves, colleges and universities have moved to a system—the adjunct system—in which NTT faculty are hired temporarily (i.e., “contingently”) at comparably minimal wages by the single semester or academic year. These itinerant teachers move from institution to institution, patching together different low-paid teaching gigs until they are earning a living wage.
I have worked within this system for fourteen years at a wide range of institutions up and down the academic food chain: elite research universities, flagship state research universities, top fifty liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensives, religious institutions, and two-year colleges. Conditions for adjuncts vary among institutions according to the resources available and the prevailing ideas on campus about the value of education. At wealthier, higher-ranked schools, adjuncts are typically treated equitably as valued members of the faculty. At under-resourced, lower-ranked schools, adjuncts are typically underpaid and marginalized. My intention in this essay is to draw attention to the many sources of wrongness in the adjunct system without blaming, offending, or minimizing the supportive individuals who have made my career possible. Adjuncts rely for their livelihoods upon the goodwill of department chairs and their tireless efforts to push past existing institutional constraints. The system is unjust and cruel. But reflective individuals working within it give everyone hope for a better day.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System estimates that part-time, non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty in 2011 represented more than 51.2% of the instructional faculty among nonprofit institutions, while full-time NTT faculty constituted 19.1%. Tenured and tenure-track faculty, on the other hand, composed only 29.9% of the faculty, down from approximately 78.3% in 1969. More recently, the NCES reports that in 2018–2019, 45.1% of faculty at institutions with a tenure system had tenure, down from 56.2% in 1993–1994. These percentages were even lower at four-year doctoral institutions (which fell from 47.6% to 37.6%) and at two-year colleges (which fell from 47.9% to 28.8%). More than half of the faculty teaching right now are temps.
Data on the NTT faculty population is difficult to gather because institutions are reluctant to report unflattering numbers; the NTT faculty population is transient; and the working conditions of such positions vary widely. But additional data is available from the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW, 2012), the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (2014), TIAA-CREF (2015, 2021), the New Faculty Majority (http://www.newfacultymajority.info/), and the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success (https://pullias.usc.edu/delphi/, 2012, 2014, et al.), which has published a number of valuable reports and assessment tools for institutions hoping to improve the climate for NTT faculty, such as Adrianna Kezar et al.’s 2004 “The Imperative for Change.”
Injustice and Deceit
The unsatisfactory working conditions of nonunionized NTT professors have been widely reported for more than a decade:
- Short-term (one-year or one-semester) contracts that are renewed unpredictably, if at all.
- Low wages, ranging from $1,800 per course part-time and $24K full-time at public institutions to $7,500 per course part-time and $60K full-time at private institutions, regardless of length of service. The 2010 per-course median was $2,700.
- No health insurance for part-time positions.
- No retirement account contributions.
- Last-minute hiring and firing without due process as enrollments shift.
- No limits on hours worked for those who must cobble together a living wage by teaching at several different institutions.
- Heavy courseloads of up to six courses per semester to get to that living wage.
- Expectations to work for free before and after one’s contract: designing syllabi, writing recommendation letters, grading incompletes, etc.
- No private offices (necessary, among other reasons, to prevent FERPA violations).
- No faculty development or travel funding.
- No take-home tech and no reimbursement for the personal computers, glasses, or internet services that one needs for work.
- No staff support for nonteaching professional activities.
- No scheduling preferences or parking privileges for those who have to travel between campuses in the middle of the day.
- And no meaningful representation in university governance.
Like other short-term positions in the gig economy, where workers are paid by the task, laboring in the “gig academy” is precarious. People can quickly adjust to unpredictable changes in the weather. But changes every five months in one’s salary, housing, and medical access are harder to absorb. Moreover, realities specific to adjunct teaching make the gig academy an especially difficult corner of the gig economy. Adjunct professors have specialized areas of expertise. The threshold of entry for these positions is high. You spend five to ten years in training to land a job that lasts only five to ten months. And you cannot work just anywhere. Like the army, you must move to wherever there is an opening, which might mean across the country, away from your support systems, to where your partner cannot find work, etc.
Despite these overwhelming challenges, NTT faculty dutifully fulfill their stated job requirements. The members of this contingent army show up, deliver their lectures, and grade their papers. Many adjuncts feel lucky to be working at a job in which their body doesn’t hurt at the end of the day. They are worldly and educated enough to be aware of their relative privilege. However, there is little feeling that they are part of something larger than themselves, constitutive members of an intellectual community working toward the shared goal of human progress through education. They are bean-counting—calculating the few hours for which they are paid; working up to, and not beyond, that limit; and detaching emotionally from a job that treats them so inequitably. Scholars of student learning in higher ed from the research-based Delphi Project have found that the overreliance on adjuncts has at least eight negative effects on student learning, effects that stem largely from reduced contact time and lack of energy for high-impact teaching practices.
This is not the student-professor relationship that colleges are selling. According to the slick brochures sent to high school seniors and their families, students are educated in small classes by professors who are passionate about their work and singularly devoted to their students’ intellectual growth. That message resonates because it feeds into a deep-seated dream on the part of caregivers who want their kids to be excited by school—to be self-driven. Families send their children off to college hoping they will discover a subject interesting enough to sustain them emotionally and financially in perpetuity. And we all know what it takes to light that kind of fire: a happy, well-supported teacher who has the time to attend to the needs of individual students. When institutions staff their courses with NTT faculty, it is a bait-and-switch.
Thus, the adjunct system is morally problematic because it is unjust. The treatment of NTT faculty is unfair in both John Rawls’s and Robert Nozick’s senses: colleges are paying people with the same credentials drastically different wages for the same work, and colleges are not paying individuals what they deserve. But the system is also morally problematic because it draws institutions into a lie. Families do not pay $20–40K a year to have their kids take classes from a rotating series of newly minted PhDs on five-month gigs whose attention is consumed by their low salary and job insecurity. The alighting of a student’s passion, the discovery of a student’s vocation, the opening of a student’s world, passed down with care from mentor to student, is not a transaction.
Negative Consequences
The move to adjunct labor has set into motion a number of broader, longer-term harms as well. These include the homogenization of the academy, as only well-heeled professors have enough support to last more than a few years as adjuncts and only people without physical challenges can move easily between campuses; the emergence of proprietary teaching materials that disappear with their independent contractors; sourness and pessimism in the ranks, as tenure-track and NTT faculty have been duped into believing that they have conflicting interests; the institutional burden of processing an endless stream of new hires and fires; the growing risk of legal exposure as NTT faculty organize and chairs hire without national searches; an instructional gap that tracks the wealth gap between rich and poor institutions; and the erosion of tenure and ensuing narrowing of the innovator pipeline. Beyond innovation, the erosion of tenure is tied to the erosion of critical reflection. Universities are uniquely valuable to their societies because, unlike other institutions, universities can improve in response to criticism. Tenured professors can raise unpopular but helpful objections without fear of reprisal.
Administrators and state legislators with misaligned, anti-intellectual, mission-hostile priorities are working to minimize and devalue the reflective and stabilizing role of the university in our society. No longer the incubator of open innovation through the nurturing of a community of experts protected from poverty and backlash, no longer a preserver of knowledge through the effort to sustain departments during periods of threat, the university is becoming a mere peddler of transferable skills, a credentialing entity in the service of outside employers. Colleges should exist not to produce winning athletic teams; sustain multilayered administrative bureaucracies; deliver fine food, fancy gyms, and luxury housing; or even find jobs for students. They exist to educate a populace, secure the peace of our republic, seed innovation, and model virtue.
Administrators respond that quality instruction and low-enrolled linguistics/philosophy/French/physics/etc. courses simply cost too much. But this is just silly. Institutions establish priorities to determine where they want to spend their money. Creative solutions abound. You cannot promote yourself as an educational institution and then outsource your instructional needs. Perhaps it’s reasonable for a serious restaurant to outsource its laundry, but to outsource its menu, food prep, and service? A dedicated faculty is the heart of the institution—the talent. If there were any single cost item into which university administrations should pour resources, a top spending priority, it would be instruction. The professors are the front line, the hour-to-hour face of the institution, the soul of the physical plant.
Thus, the adjunct system is morally problematic because it generates negative long-term consequences for our society. It is shortsighted, ill-conceived, and unsustainable. But there are even deeper, more human concerns. The second half of this essay offers an argument that administrators, legislators, tenure-track faculty, students, and families do not hear, because they are not listening: relying upon adjunct labor is wrong, because it is cruel. The system capitalizes upon the desperation of a vulnerable population, profits from that population’s labor, and then willfully turns its back on the needs and suffering produced by the conditions of the population’s employment. The adjunct system not only uses people, it uses people up.
Making the Cruelty Visible
Working as an adjunct professor comes with many of the challenges experienced by people living in poverty. To start, adjunct professors don’t just teach six courses a semester to earn their $32K, they usually have a side hustle: driving for a rideshare company, reselling clothes, painting houses, . . . even plumbing. We complain to our institutions when our students try to take a full load of courses alongside a demanding job, but many of our professors are attempting a similar feat. A second job in your back pocket is important. If your teaching contract is not renewed, your annual income can fluctuate from year to year by more than $50k. How can a single parent live or plan with swings like that? Or is being healthy, wealthy, and childless an academic job requirement?
Well-paid professionals outsource their domestic responsibilities so they can use their nonworking hours either to get more work done or to relax and return to work fully restored. NTT faculty, in contrast, return home from work only to do more work: cleaning, cooking, shopping, lawn care, childcare—all of which take disproportionately more time when there is no car, dishwasher, washing machine, or nanny.
Summers are particularly precarious. Unlike tenure-track faculty, whose nine months of pay are divided over twelve months, most NTT faculty do not receive paychecks in June through August. Full-time adjuncts on one-year contracts lose their health insurance over the summer, which adds an expensive COBRA fee to the monthly bills. Of course, part-time adjuncts rarely have institutional health insurance in the first place. The choices reported in the news between one’s medication and preventative care, on the one hand, and one’s rent, on the other, are familiar to these professionals. Wants are off the table, as adjuncts are always picking and choosing from a long menu of needs, scrambling to do without something vital: dental care, gas money, functional glasses.
NTT faculty move frequently to chase job openings, but few schools offer moving allowances to adjuncts. If you move sixty boxes of books and an apartment full of furniture once a year for four years, that’s minimally $12K on your credit cards. You cannot do your job without a computer and internet service, which adds $2K to the bill. Then, without available credit, even if you have a faculty development account, you cannot purchase conference registrations, flights, or books without a cash advance from your institution, which is embarrassing to request, if the option is even available at all.
Young adjunct professors and professors with access to familial wealth can absorb these costs for three to four years. But the financial issues become more serious eight to ten years in as one’s debt and exhaustion builds. A single unexpected expense, like a major car repair or health scare, can have ripple effects that end up destroying an NTT professor’s career and bankrupting their family. If an adjunct happens to make it through to retirement, they often retire without any 401K savings, for most institutions will only begin retirement account contributions after a worker has served for a year in a position. Conveniently, for the institutions, adjunct contracts are rarely longer than one year.
If the financial barriers sound exhausting, there are physical tolls as well. It is physically demanding to be “on” lecturing at the front of a classroom for 18 hours each week. There are no TAs to do the grading. There is no break in the day (add meetings, 12 to 15 office hours per week, and an explosion of student email to those six three-hour courses), and there are no future escapes to dream about: no monthly dinners out at a restaurant, no annual coastal vacations, and no semester-long sabbaticals to conduct research or design a new course. All of your research, grading, course prep, and service work have to happen late at night, because there is no time during the day for anything but that 6–6 load.
The actual instructional work adjuncts perform is harder due to the low levels at which they routinely teach. Introductory students have more needs than majors. NTT faculty in the humanities, for example, are often charged with the task each semester of teaching eighty intro students how to write. That is simply more taxing than teaching sixteen upper-level majors and eight graduate students something in your scholarly field while advising three to four doctoral students, the typical instructional load for a faculty member on the tenure-track at a research university.
Unlike most tenure-track faculty, who slow down post-tenure to explore a hobby unrelated to their work, adjuncts must perform in perpetuity at the very highest level so their contracts will be renewed. Every position requires new syllabi. Very little can be reused from year to year. There can be no parental complaints, no failed teaching experiments, and no devastating student course evaluations. To enhance your value, you take on extra unpaid and underappreciated departmental, institutional, and professional service, which further constrain your schedule. That service, which should feel like a meaningful contribution to the field, ends up feeling like a waste when it remains invisible and undervalued in fields that promote scholarly publication above all.
NTT faculty are always on the job market. Throughout the year, they apply to academia-adjacent positions in high schools, nonprofits, publishing companies, educational software services, and college administrations. Every year around February, they neglect their 150 students to apply to academic jobs, re-calling their recommenders, rewriting cover letters, re-preparing applications, arranging interviews, and visiting campuses.
The minor annoyances don’t help either. With every institutional move, you have to reprogram all your learning management system course shells. You must transition all your email. You have to learn a new system of general education and major/minor requirements. And you must endlessly retake all the time-consuming tutorials required by each institution on sexual harassment; diversity, equity, and inclusion; cybersecurity; and responsible research. When you work at multiple campuses at the same time, you are always leaving books, keys, and files at the wrong school. Publishers, whose software is programmed to assign only one institution to each instructor, mix up your textbook orders. And you have to spend double or triple the time on each campus making small talk with your colleagues and the administrative staff, attending holiday parties, and going out for Friday night drinks when you have very little unscheduled time available for such frivolities. These are all serious concerns. But we might recognize an even deeper order of damage and destruction in the emotional taxation and in the destruction of intellectual community, that is, in the corrosive effect of the adjunct system upon one’s relationships with one’s tenure-track colleagues.
The low wages and the frequent moves can destroy a family unit. Your children are forced to master a series of new schools, teachers, and math curricula. Teenagers have to leave their friends. Partners must leave their jobs. You never have the clothes, braces, trips, and houses of the Joneses. Worse, as someone who values education, you cannot afford to live in the best public school districts or send your kids to the best independent schools. You are certain that your self-interested career choices are clipping your children’s wings. Your own precarity transforms into pressure on them to succeed. You frustrate and alienate your partner. You worry about money all the time. And these anxieties, in turn, affect your health, your job performance, your children, and your most important relationships. Scarcity, as we know, eats away at our cognitive and emotional resources.
Beyond regret, sorrow, anxiety, and fear, NTT faculty live with toxic feelings of failure. Nothing has turned out the way it was supposed to be. None of the brilliant ideas for papers were ever written up. When rare scholarly opportunities come your way, you don’t have the time, resources, or knowledge to do your best work. Your students grow up and lap you. There’s nothing about your life that your advisor can boast about or that your parents can cheerfully share with their friends. The conference nametag of a middle-aged professor that says “lecturer,” “instructor,” or “visiting assistant” is embarrassing. No one can see the thirty years of successful teaching and the thousands of students served behind that junior title, which never changes.
There is anger. You are angry at the universe that determined your entire future by the chance number of listings in your field and the chance number of competing candidates who happened to emerge during the two to three years after you completed graduate school. There is anger at your discipline, which values scholarly research over the difficult, socially relevant, and transformative classroom work that you do every day. There is anger at your institution, which hands out teaching awards to tenure-track faculty members for doing with more amenable students only a share of the pedagogical work you do. There is anger at your department for not consulting you on the student and curricular issues you are better placed than they are to assess. Last, there is anger that all this anger interferes with your productivity and, more importantly, with your relationships. And when all this anger begins to feel outsized and aberrant, it morphs into feelings of shame and foolishness.
Then there is the guilt. Every adjunct professor understands, more than most, that landing a teaching job at the college level—any teaching job—is a privilege. One of the benefits of the adjunct life, one of the only benefits, is the expanded capacity for empathy and humility that comes with the territory. Adjuncts live in the mental space between their preoccupation with the injustice of it all and their knowledge that they have no right to complain. During the sharpest moments of self-doubt, when they entertain the possibility that they simply weren’t good enough to land a tenure-track job, they feel grateful to work in their chosen field at all, in any capacity and under any conditions.
Feelings of gratitude prepare the way for love, love for the student accomplishments that emerge from struggle, love for your partner’s unwavering support of your failed career, love for your graduate mentors’ humor and encouragement during the darkest times, love for the camaraderie and commiseration you find among fellow NTT lifers, love for colleagues who send professional opportunities your way, and love for your discipline, which, due to the breadth of your teaching, you know better than most tenure-track faculty members. This last love leads to pride, pride in your ability to teach almost anything and any population well, and pride for the fact that you (kind of) made it—you’re a working professor living the life of the mind. Even with the bare-bones paycheck, teaching the canonical works of our culture can be an abject thrill.
But mostly, there is overwhelming sadness. NTT faculty do as much as they can for their students within the existing constraints but know that their teaching falls short. More time and attention are needed to get their students where they need to be, to compete with the wealthier kids whose parents hire tutors and test prep companies at the first sight of a B. But there is simply no way to offer developmental assistance to 150 students. It is hard enough to learn their names. So, instead of delivering what these students need (more writing, more close reading, more calculating, more tutoring, more time, more hope, more inspiration . . . ), adjuncts are forced, in their daily quest for self-preservation, to look for creative ways to minimize student contact, and this genuinely haunts us. Faculty who are given the resources to do their jobs well do not have to carry the emotional burden that follows upon one’s daily neglect of the needy.
NTT faculty routinely serve more students and a wider range of students each semester than tenure-track faculty, so adjuncts more frequently absorb the heartbreak when a young person’s potential is lost to drugs, alcohol, family dynamics, sexual assault, underpreparation, or financial strain. Tenure-track faculty see only the students who have survived the gauntlet. Roving adjuncts have a front row seat to the structural failings and corruptions of higher ed writ large. A low hum of mourning sets in as they witness the failures of institutions with the potential to rescue underserved students against the successes of institutions designed to catapult privileged students into the stratosphere, just because the former have fewer resources than the latter. Our country showers instructional resources upon students who do not need assistance and withholds resources from students who could most benefit from them.
These are just a few of the thoughts swirling around in the minds of your NTT professors, friends, and colleagues as they process their fragile situations. But the adjunct system does even broader damage. It undermines our intellectual communities, our collective minds.
Given the information shared above, how are NTT faculty supposed to feel when they meet a tenure-track colleague at the photocopier, and that colleague, exasperated, rehearses their lengthy to-do list? How should NTT faculty respond when they read about a tenure-track faculty member’s research award in a department newsletter or come across a faculty reading group sitting around, leisurely discussing a fashionable new book? How should NTT faculty members react when their department decides to advocate on the part of their (comparatively well-supported) graduate students, instead of their adjuncts, for higher salaries, job market assistance, summer funding, travel stipends, and institutional representation? “What a monumental failure of moral imagination” is what the NTT faculty are thinking as they feel themselves becoming more and more emotionally distant from the very people whose power they most need.
True privilege manifests when the work you perform generates some reward. When the work you do never generates any praise, when it never generates any respect, when it never generates any advancement in rank, when it never generates enough money to care for yourself and others, and when it never generates its desired impact, the work takes on an air of futility that is difficult to endure.
In Conclusion
The adjunct system is immoral by any philosophical measure. The system is not equitable—no one would choose the adjunct life from behind a veil of ignorance. Institutions treat adjunct faculty as means rather than ends, so adjunct faculty treat students as means rather than ends. No one is accorded their due dignity. The system will not produce high-quality happiness for our society. NTT faculty have no chance at the good life, without material preconditions and a virtuous community in which to grow. The needs of NTT faculty are not being fulfilled by their more powerful colleagues, who should be attentive and responsive to those needs. And the needs of our most neglected students are not being fulfilled by NTT faculty, who are so mentally, physically, and financially taxed that they can barely care for themselves.
Most uncomfortably, however, the adjunct system is cruel in the useless, unnecessary, and preoccupying disorder it brings to a person’s mind, family, and community. If you are an administrator, legislator, tenure-track faculty member, or paying education consumer, and you are not actively fighting against the adjunct labor system in higher ed, you are maintaining it. You are a callous or willfully ignorant person taking part in a harmful deception.
NTT faculty cannot advocate for themselves without threatening their livelihoods. As a vulnerable population without representation, they must have your help. If you are lucky enough to have the security that every human worker needs, please look for ways of extending that security to your needy colleagues. We need longer contracts, representation, benefits, and $8,000 per course. Inaction is threatening the very heart of the academy—its mission-essential and socially vital charge to teach well and to innovate.
Alexandra Bradner
Alexandra Bradner is an adjunct philosopher of explanation and understanding, care, and pedagogy who has taught more than 80 sections of 25 courses at institutions including Northwestern University, University of Michigan, Marshall University, Denison University, University of Kentucky, Bluegrass Community and Technical College, the Fayette County Public Schools (k-12), Eastern Kentucky University, Capital University, and Kenyon College. She served on the APA Board of Officers from 2014-18 as the chair of the APA Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy, and she presently serves as the Executive Director of the American Association of Philosophy Teachers.
THANK YOU. This is long, long overdue. I only wish I believed anything will change.
Right, it’s like the childcare issue, in that once people get to the other side of it, they don’t look back; they don’t reach back/down to help the new strugglers. I find that there’s a lot of interest among TT faculty in advocating for grad students, but not much interest in advocating for adjuncts.
To be honest, my senses of anger and resentment are directed (rightly or wrongly) much more at the TT folks than at administrators. Administrators gonna administrate, and in a climate federal and state educational austerity, one can’t necessarily blame them for cost-cutting measures. That is what they were hired to do. But the TT folks, especially in the humanities, strike me as particularly grotesque. They are the direct beneficiaries of contingent labor many times, and that labor is provided by people who are at the very least as qualified as they are (and probably as smart/talented). They proclaim progressive politics and work to welcome grad students and undergrads from under-represented cultures, they often examine social and economic disparities in their work, all while doing almost nothing to assist their contingent “colleagues.” If anything is to change, we need solidarity. Waiting for an oceanic shift in economic and educational policy is a fool’s game. TT faculty need to recognize that their work is founded on exploration of the grossest variety, and to use their collection power to help change things. But they generally do–as far as I can tell–NOTHING. It’s hard to not call it vile.
exploitation not exploration
“[T]he TT folks, especially in the humanities, strike me as particularly grotesque. … They proclaim progressive politics and work to welcome grad students and undergrads from under-represented cultures, they often examine social and economic disparities in their work, all while doing almost nothing to assist their contingent “colleagues.” … TT faculty need to recognize that their work is founded on exploitation of the grossest variety, and to use their collection power to help change things. But they generally do–as far as I can tell–NOTHING. It’s hard to not call it vile.”
Very well said. Thank you for calling it out so clearly.
I agree with you that T/TT faculty have a moral duty to work to change this system. Period. However, it’s morally inaccurate to say that the they are in general “grotesque.” I also don’t think calling things out this way will help the issue pragmatically.
The larger issue here is the capture of university governance by the administration and by BOTs resulting in the relative weakness of meaningful faculty self-governance. T/TT faculty are so divided, harried, and disempowered in many ways that their work lives are typically fragmented and relatively specialized. It would take too much space to go into it all here. The point is: they do not have a moral excuse for not caring, I agree; but they do have reasonable excuses for being behaviorally impotent.
These observations suggest why it would be good to have mass, collective organizing across not just a single university but the entire higher ed. market. One point of that organizing should be robust faculty governance with all faculty included.
Maybe then, too, we could reassert control over the idea of education: that education should not be about providing students with amenities but rather with the power to keep learning whatever they need or think best; that we have a duty to structure society so that everyone can have the advantages of education, not just the elite.
And then on the pragmatic side: we know that university administrations have used a divide and conquer tactic against organizing by mobilizing T/TT faculty against NTT unionization. It’s not a good idea to pit the two groups against each other.
Hi Jeremy, I agree with most – if not all – the points that you raise.
That said, I do wish to second what I took to be Ian’s central point: There is something palpably “grotesque” occurring when humanities professors who spend their careers advocating for social justice do so while living comfortably in houses paid for through the merciless exploitation of their contingent collogues. From the perspective of the exploited, the hypocrisy at work does strike me as “vile” and, for my part (I doubt I’m alone in this), leaves with little interest in solidarity.
Hey Paul, It’s good to read you here.
I don’t know the context behind these comments. But just to say: I am sorry to hear the echoes of it. What a sh***y thing to live through and work in when one has given one’s heart to education. I only know in some detail the contexts where I work, and even there it is hard to get clarity because of a lack of organizing. The thing that strikes me most is that until we organize, we cannot get what Kristie Dotson calls the “open consolidation processes” going to surface the particular dimensions of oppression. We can’t get a full picture of what’s going on in our specific context. There’s an epistemic consequence of organizing that is really important.
I also think it is good to use appropriate moral language to light a fire under people’s derrieres when they are sitting pretty in oppression. So I can’t object to what you are saying on trust that it speaks to some particularly hypocritical “social justice warriors” in name alone. And, like you, I have met them. At the same time, thinking of the social justice scholars here at my institution, I can’t think of a single person that your description fits.
For all that, I do think we are tarnished by the system, and what I see is the daily ambivalence of trying to live within this condition. Growing up in America has been a process of growing up grimy. But then I am also a pragmatist about institutions in the colonial matrix of power. In no part of the system do I get clear of the taint, but only in specific moments can we see that another system is possible. I try to work pragmatically where I can, and none of it is fully satisfying in terms of justice. It won’t be without organizing.
I wholeheartedly agree that solidarity is key, and that TT folks across the nation need to worth with non-TT instructors to achieve any kind of change. I hope that was implicit in my earlier post, but I want to make it clear here. What we need, really, to make a change is probably something like a nationwide general strike in support of adjuncts. I am pessimistic that such a thing will ever happen, due to the reasons Jeremy alludes to as well as to good, old base self-interest.
That said, I disagree with the notion that moral language and even condemnation are not pragmatically useful here. If I may loosely quote Frederick Douglass:
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the [university]’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of
the [university] must be quickened; the conscience of the [university] must be roused; the propriety of the [university] must be startled; the hypocrisy of the [university] must be exposed.”
TT folks at state universities are living the lives of Dorian Gray with their 3/2 loads and living wage. For that I do not begrudge them so much. But for the fact that this belief is made directly possible due to the misery others WHO ARE JUST AS QUALIFIED AS THEY ARE, I do. As far as I can tell, the tremendous majority these TT faculty have little to no concern–beyond lip service–for contingent faculty.
As I type this, I am sitting in an office that I share with at least four other contingent instructors at one of two of my teaching jobs at state universities (I work 1.75 FT jobs. This year I will teach 15 courses). Surrounding me are TT faculty offices, many of which are adorned with stickers of allyship — for veterans, for undocumented students, for LGBTQ students, for the neurodiverse. On the listservs from “my” universities, listservs from which I cannot unsubscribe, I am bombarded by emails in support of trans lives, anti-racism, end AAIP violence, advocacy for first gen students and so forth. To be clear, all of this is great. I fully support all of it. But there is radio silence on contingent labor.
The department from which I received my PhD has at least two dyed-in-the-wool TT Marxists in it, with two or three more TT folks at the very least highly sympathetic to Marxist analysis. I work, nominally at least, in that same department, as I have off and on for seven years. Not once, at any time, has a TT faculty member reached out to me, much less shown any political or even theoretical interest in adjunctifaction.
Again, as far as I can tell, TT folks at state universities are by-and-large doing absolutely nothing about adjuncts. Meanwhile, I don’t even have a guaranteed job next year despite 10 years of teaching experience, strong evals, publications, conference presentations, even an invited talk back in the day. Earlier in my contingent career, I lost my job and thus my healthcare (and I’m in my 40s, so healthcare is an issue) without “proper” cause or even explanation. Other contingent faculty have it far worse, of course–I won’t go into the horror stories we all know.
The point is that I am angry. I have been betrayed not just by the system, and of course the system could care less, but by “my” university, “my” department, and “my” “colleagues.” They are either profoundly ignorant, or willfully blind, deaf, and–critically–mute.
TT faculty at state institutions are not my enemies. Neither are they my friends, as they themselves have shown. To upset them, to anger them in order to inspire change, may be all I have.
Thank you Ian, once again, for capturing the moral realities so clearly.
Thank you, a powerful and lucid piece. Not adjunct, but NTT outside the US here, and much of this hits so close to home.
Thank you for your comment.
“Colleges should exist not to produce winning athletic teams; sustain multilayered administrative bureaucracies; deliver fine food, fancy gyms, and luxury housing; or even find jobs for students. They exist to educate a populace, secure the peace of our republic, seed innovation, and model virtue.”
This is such a good article — powerfully written and lucid on a number of levels. Thank you.
I have forwarded this to the Faculty Personnel Committee, which I chair. In that committee, I have made it an agenda item to work on faculty governance for NTT non-voting members. But as you so well state, that is only one item. I also forwarded your post to concerned colleagues on campus. You are right that the academy has a moral obligation to address this issue persistently and fairly.
Did you read Sidra Shahid’s post with Alex Wolf-Root? https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/03/25/wall-to-wall/. In addition to the idea of wall to wall organizing, another route is for students and faculty to work together on securing a good learning environment. Students have a great deal of power, are often ignorant of these structural issues we are discussing, and do not want sub-standard education. They have a lot to learn from faculty on this issue, just as faculty have a lot to learn from them. But together, faculty and students could effectively point universities in a better direction, reorient administration to its functional role of serving learning, and help convey to BOTs what the trustees should, in their commitment to education, be seeing.
Just my two cents. Thank you again for writing this.
Yes, I did read the Alex Wolf-Root interview. It was great. Your institution and its NTT faculty are so fortunate to have your support. I completely agree that the undergraduates would make powerful allies. In a Facebook response to this post, a colleague of mine wrote the following suggestion: Add to the US News criteria a measure of the number of students taught by NTT faculty in 100- and 200-level courses (i.e. during students’ first two years). I thought this was genius and asked her to write it up for public consumption. She said she might have time to write it up this summer.
That is a good idea.
I also think an administrator to faculty ratio number would be a good idea, as well as some measure of the autonomy of faculty governance and the extent to which all faculty (NTT inclued) have some rights to self-governance.
I am not anti-admin. I just think that it should do what it means: to serve the learning process. And I worry when any part of an institution is relatively unchecked.
Those would be two very meaningful additions. Every time a university wants to add a capacity, like a center for community-based learning, it ends up adding three layers of admin, one to run the center, one to do the actual work of the Center (because the first person wants to articulate a vision and attend meetings, but doesn’t want to do the actual work of visiting and keeping track of sites), and one vice provost at the senior level to manage the first person. The great Kimberly Van Orman (leader in the philosophy teaching community) was the source of suggestion that US News should count the number of adjunct instructors in 100-/200-level courses. There are articles every year explaining why the US News rankings are not meaningful. But I haven’t seen an extended article on the constructive side, re what would make the rankings meaningful, an article that would hook into the all of the emergent problems in higher ed. Maybe you and Kimberly could team up and write one! I think it would get a lot of attention.
“If you are an administrator, legislator, tenure-track faculty member, or paying education consumer, and you are not actively fighting against the adjunct labor system in higher ed, you are maintaining it. You are a callous or willfully ignorant person taking part in a harmful deception.”
This should be required reading for everyone with a permanent position in the academy.
Thank you for your comment. I hope that sentence wasn’t too harsh. But I really do believe that institutions are deceiving students and their families by hiding the overuse of NTT faculty.
You’re welcome. I didn’t find that sentence too harsh … just true, at least in my case, to my experience.
Yes. I am retiring after 30 years of teaching introductory students. The part of this that resonates most is what you say about “anger at your institution, which hands out teaching awards to tenure-track faculty members for doing with more amenable students only a share of the pedagogical work you do.”
Thank you for your comment. Sometimes I think institutions restrict the teaching awards to TT faculty, because it would become embarrassing once the NTT faculty started to win all of them. You just have to perform at such a high level in the classroom all the time, in order to keep your job. Phoning it in, or letting your teaching take a back seat to your research, is just not an option.
“To start, adjunct professors don’t just teach six courses a semester to earn their $32K, they usually have a side hustle: driving for a rideshare company, reselling clothes, painting houses, . . . even plumbing.”
There is satisfaction to be had by becoming a plumber and adjuncting on the side, if someone really really wants to adjunct. I come from a family of painters and plumbers. They have it better than adjuncts, so go do that instead if you want stable work and benefits. The barriers to entry are low, while the barriers to entry for adjuncting remain high.
If adjuncting is so bad, why do it? Go do something else. My response is not sympathetic, but I struggle to understand why my peers keep running on the adjunct treadmill when plentiful plumbing jobs are there for the taking. Universities won’t change until people start declining to adjunct, and in most cases it is clear you should decline to adjunct.
Hi Kevin,
I’ve thought of things like this, often, too. But I think one thing we need to talk about more is the value of being in education — teaching, research and school design/organization. Something that isn’t discussed enough is why people would go through such lengths and hardships to continue in education. This applies to graduate school, too, not just the rough road after out in the market.
The deepest underlying issues is political: U.S. society does not actually value education for what it’s worth. Bringing out why people sacrifice something of their lives to remain in education is part of the discussion headed toward why U.S. society should support universal education through higher education as a basic right, drive down tuition costs, and open up support for all educators – childcare through K-12 included.
I am not speaking exactly to your point, but riffing off it. We could use more of a worker-scholar culture in the U.S., I agree, and some of my friends in Cleveland fit that description. The organization of U.S. life unravels and re-organizes once one pursues the thread you are drawing attention to: how our political economy is structured and what it tacitly and explicitly values.
I’m glad you mentioned that line, because I’ve been worried about it. The “even” there was really intended to refer to the amount of time and effort it takes to become a plumber, not to the class of work. So, unlike the gig economy side hustles, like Uber driving and consigning, NTT faculty even have fully additional side careers. The example was not a throwaway hypothetical either. I work with a French adjunct who is also a plumber. I think your other objection is a good one as well: If your life is so miserable, make a change. No one is forcing you to teach philosophy. Why are you punishing yourself? It’s true that any individual adjunct could just leave. And my experience-informed guess would be that most do, after 3-4 years. (I personally think that asking fully trained philosophers to leave would be a loss for the cosmos, on the grounds of both dreams deferred and the reduction in the number of veteran teachers. Teaching gets better with age and experience.) But the perhaps more popular response is that another adjunct would just take their place. The structural injustice would remain; the bait-and-switch would remain; and, worst, the students’ needs would remain unfulfilled. I like the idea of adjuncts trying to stay in as long as possible to reform the system, on the model of Wolf-Root. It’s the successful, more authoritative, senior adjuncts, whose positions are more secure, who can best make change.
“similar to the working conditions of most working people: as long as they do a good job, they won’t be fired unless their employer is forced to cut staff.”
This statement is not true. You can have non-tenured faculty doing excellent work, who don’t have their contracts renewed because of the whim of one chair or director and even worse, this non-tenured faculty member as recourse; no way to appeal. Tenure track faculty are protected. Staff are protected from unfair termination by HR policies. There is no protection for un-tenured faculty including do a great job.
I found this article, and the discussion following it, very helpful. My Provost met with NTT faculty last week, and I shared this article with him. Hopefully, the NTT faculty will be following up with him soon.
My work on radical change has led me to the conclusion that all change requires using diverse yet interconnected methods that tackle the problem at multiple levels at the same time. No program for radical social change has ever worked without the adaptive tactics of people on the ground.
Regarding NTT/TT dynamics, I like the strategy suggested by the recent successful unionizers of Amazon. They used an “inside/outside” approach and focused at the beginning on building relationships to ease tension and anxiety. I encourage anyone interested to read the following interview with them in its entirety:
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/4/4/workers_organize_first_amazon_labor_union
This is such an important and illuminating piece. I am an adjunct and have been struggling for years. Thank you for writing this.
I am glad to see this honest and illuminating piece. I might add that there IS a contingent faculty MOVEMENT out there and has been for over 25 years nationally, and longer in some places. This history and ideas for strategy for the future are the topics of Helena Worthen’s and Joe Berry’s (myself) 2021 book from Pluto Press, Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the contingent faculty movement in higher education. https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745345529/power-despite-precarity/ or from Powells through the ILWU local 5 portal https://www.powells.com/?partnerID=35751. Another hopeful sign is the very recent development of the coalition High Education Labor United, which really gives the contingent (and grad worker) majority its due. http://www.higheredlabor.org
I have been an adjunct since 2004. Every single line of this piece is spot on. It’s so agonizingly true that I actually broke down sobbing about halfway through and had to read the rest of it through that. Thank you for writing this. It’s absolutely, crucially necessary.
Many of my tenured and TT colleagues are genuinely ignorant of the adjunct’s situation. When in conversation I’ve mentioned that I regularly teach 4/4/5 (fall, spring, summer), the shock on their faces isn’t feigned. When they learn what I actually make (currently $2100/course, but in the past I’ve been paid as little as $1500/course), they’re deeply uncomfortable. They lightheartedly ask why I’m not taking the summer off; I tell them I can’t because that’s the only time I can make any money, since rates are the same for everyone over the summer. (That’s why THEY aren’t teaching in the summer; it’s a huge paycut for them, but a significant raise for me.) Even so, ignorance isn’t much of an excuse. Learn better; do better.