Thursday, February 16, 2017

Professor Glenn Reynolds: Trump should pity the poor PhD

Professor Glenn Reynolds reports:
As a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports: “Tenured faculty represent only 17% of college instructors. Part-time adjuncts are now the majority of the professoriate and its fastest-growing segment. From 1975 to 2011, the number of part-time adjuncts quadrupled. And the so-called part-time designation is misleading because most of them are piecing together teaching jobs at multiple institutions simultaneously. A 2014 congressional report suggests that 89% of adjuncts work at more than one institution; 13% work at four or more. The need for several appointments becomes obvious when we realize how little any one of them pays. In 2013, The Chronicle began collecting data on salary and benefits from adjuncts across the country. An English- department adjunct at Berkeley, for example, received $6,500 to teach a full-semester course. It’s easy to lose sight of all the people struggling beneath the data points. $7,000 at Duke. $6,000 at Columbia. $5,950 at the University of Iowa.”

And those are the high-paying schools. The article reports that the average salary received by an adjunct for a single course is just $2,700, and 31% of part-time faculty members live below the poverty line. We’ve heard a lot about low-paid Walmart employees having to collect food stamps to make ends meet, but what about adjunct professors? It’s gotten so bad that in 2014, over 500 adjuncts petitioned the Labor Department over working conditions.
Modern day exploitation by tenured Marxists.