“The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyone’s Problem”
“In 2012, I got my Ph.D. and left academia with no
regrets. Like all decisions based on financial stability, it was not so much a
decision as a reaction.”
“Academia, I had discovered, was not an industry in which
one works for pay but one in which you must pay to work. New Ph.D.’s are
expected to move around the country in temporary postdocs or visiting professor
jobs until finding tenure-track positions -- financially impossible for me as a
mother of two – or stay where they are and work as adjuncts with no job
security and an average wage of $2,700 per course. While making an income below
the poverty line, a new Ph.D. is expected to spend thousands of dollars on job
interviews at conferences in expensive cities and write paywalled papers for
free.”
“Labor
exploitation is not the new normal. Adjunct professors are distinct from other
low-wage contract workers only by virtue of degree – that is, the Ph.D. Like
other exploited workers, adjuncts are told that their low pay and mistreatment
are the deserved consequence of poor choices. While low-wage workers without
college degrees are told to get an education, adjuncts are asked what they
thought all that education would get them. The plight of the adjunct shows one
can have all the education in the world and still have no place in it.”
Read the whole
thing here: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/762-the-adjunct-crisis-is-everyone-s-problem?cid=VTEVPMSED1
This is not a
new issue and in my opinion, it is getting worse. There is an underclass in an industry
that should be more enlightened.
What do we do?
Dr Flavius A B Akerele III
The ETeam
The only way the plight of the adjuncts will change is if colleges are made to change, i.e. their accreditation. An example would be: In order to keep accreditation, a college can have no more than 25% of the faculty as adjunct. A college must have 75% of the faculty as full time.
ReplyDeleteColleges hire lots of adjuncts because they can.