What can we tell about schools that have tones of open part-time positions

[Ruralguy]

In addition to what Caracal said, in the "good old days" you would probably be dead already or have had some sort of debilitating condition. Also, if not a white male, its very unlikely you would have ever had the job to begin with.

[clean]

Wish I were born over 100-200 years ago when there were a few PhD and they were well respected with good job security.

Those instructors didn't share your rosy view of their jobs. M

I dont know much about the history of being a professor.  I watched some short on Turner Classic Movies that discussed the early 1940s and there was some line about "you dont become rich being a college professor" followed by the working conditions of old, drafty, unheated, offices and such. 

I think that the 'good ole days' of being a professor, if one ever did a comparison, would be the 1950s to mid 70s.  This era would have been covered first by the GI Bill and the growth that would happen by the returning WWII Veterans, followed by the Baby Boom era. Also the Great Society era would have helped.  In addition, Vietnam draft deferments would have kept some attending college perhaps longer than they might have otherwise. The Higher Education Act started the ball rolling for grants and low income loans for education.  Finally, the baby boom would have led to a disequilibrium in 'the trades' as those with only a high school education would have faced lower pay and fewer job prospects.   

Also, for better or worse, the era saw age discrimination laws come into play. While many tenure programs initially had mandatory retirement ages associated with them, the age discrimination laws made them unenforceable.  So once someone earned tenure, they could literally hold the job for the rest of their life!  Of course this set up the unintended consequence of setting up an oversupply of PhDs that many majors still have not overcome. 

For what it is worth, these are my pontifications on the topic. 

[hamburger]

Wish I were born over 100-200 years ago when there were a few PhD and they were well respected with good job security.

Those instructors didn't share your rosy view of their jobs. Most of them spent a lot of time complaining that the students were rich entitled jerks who were only in college to make social connections and get in trouble.  Faculty were also in charge of discipline, sometimes this resulted in them quite literally being attacked by students  when they tried to break up parties. They didn't think they got paid enough to deal with all of this. Also some Masters could choose only students with good characters to teach rather than whoever could pay.

I think at least at those time, there was no RMP and no students calling themselves customers. Professors were more powerful and students did not dare to abuse the term "violation of human right". Certainly no SNS to boost the ego of those young people and professors were not expected to reply emails within 2 hours or faced complaints by students. Professors probably had more freedom as they did not need to worry about people taking a video of what they did in public or posting a screenshot of what they wrote.

[clean]

Perhaps you should take a visit to the University of Virginia and Montecelo.

What is now an honorary dorm residence for undergraduates was once faculty housing.  They had a small area where they grew their own food!  They lived ON Campus, so it looks like they were on the job 24 hours a day!  They lived with the college students. Many were rich kids and were likely older teens as no one was required to stay in high school until 18! 

I freely admit that I am no expert in this area, but I dont think that living on campus, growing my own food, and living with a bunch of late teens 24 hours a day for months on end is a replacement for winey students that expect 2 hour replies to emails.

After all, you can send the same apology to via email to the students I send, "I am sorry that someone misinformed you that faculty are required to reply to your emails with 2, much less 24 hours, OR even at all on weekends!"  I reply to emails every  weekday from 11 to 1 pm every day in the order they were received."

And while the students were not 'the customers', they were certainly not underprivileged!    No way a family would send a working age teen to college unless they had enough wealth to support such a thing!  There were certainly no 'student loans' or financial aid in those days! 

Spend a day surfing the net to see what it may have been like to work for the most likely religiously affiliated places!

Jump ahead to the 1860s and see what became of colleges.  Entire university classes formed regiments to support their side 'of the cause'.  If as a professor you were too infirmed to join your students, there was no job for you once they left, and in the South, there was not much of a call after the war ended as there were no longer wealthy folks able to support a college lifestyle.   

But I doubt that there is much of a call to study the life of a professor through history.

The bottom line is that every age has its problems.  Go back far enough in time and you will find that every time had their own problems, whether it was segregation issues, polio, The Spanish Flu, WWI, WWII,  the 'duck and cover' 1950s, ...

And finally, for Hamburger, you may not have had the issues with emails, but we also were not using even hand held calculators!  TO the extent you could run a regression for your research, you did it by hand, or IF you were at a university WITH A computer, you dealt with punch cards and waited your turn to run them! 

The 'good ole day's ' really never were! 

[Mobius]

I just don't get the idea that Hamburger can only be an adjunct, full-time CC instructor, or work retail with an IT/CS background.

[Ruralguy]

In the 90's my school had its most rapid student and faculty growth. We thought this would go more or less unchecked and we'd have to force a cap. You can probably guess that it never came to that (though it got sort of close a few years ago), and now is in a downturn. You an maybe call the 90's the good old days. At least I could because I got hired then. I certainly didn't get more respect!  Honestly, more students meant more people who shouldn't be there, and definitely didn't want to learn and resented you for trying to get them to learn. Not that there aren't some like that now, but at seems as if its a both a lower total number and a lower percentage of the total.  Unfortunately, we probably will have to go back to the 90's practices and get every student we can regardless of whether or not they want to be there.

[Ruralguy]

Reply to Mobius:

He's geographically bound due to family issues, and tried to get employed in the industry but was stymied because it appears that in that area folks want to hire a younger, less experienced crowd. At least, that's what he has told us. I don't think it means  only adjunct or retail, but it partly explains why the IT/CS options are problematic.

[polly_mer]

I just don't get the idea that Hamburger can only be an adjunct, full-time CC instructor, or work retail with an IT/CS background.

No one does.  It's a weird blind spot that many graduate degree holders have where the choice is somehow a crap adjunct job or a minimum wage dead end job.

It's usually correlated with folks whose social network isn't mostly professional class and a practically nonexistent professional network.

[Mobius]

In the 90's my school had its most rapid student and faculty growth. We thought this would go more or less unchecked and we'd have to force a cap. You can probably guess that it never came to that (though it got sort of close a few years ago), and now is in a downturn. You an maybe call the 90's the good old days. At least I could because I got hired then. I certainly didn't get more respect!  Honestly, more students meant more people who shouldn't be there, and definitely didn't want to learn and resented you for trying to get them to learn. Not that there aren't some like that now, but at seems as if its a both a lower total number and a lower percentage of the total.  Unfortunately, we probably will have to go back to the 90's practices and get every student we can regardless of whether or not they want to be there.

My undergrad had a cap. Didn't mean much for faculty hiring as there was a highly educated adjunct army around. Grew up in a city with large CCs with class sections full to the brim. Again, adjunct army at the ready and the colleges didn't hire full-timers to meet demand.

Don't know if whether an adjunct or FT faculty teaching in a program really matters for enrollment and retention at the open admissions places. Don't think it mattered much at my undergrad institution, either.

[polly_mer]

Reply to Mobius:

He's geographically bound due to family issues, and tried to get employed in the industry but was stymied because it appears that in that area folks want to hire a younger, less experienced crowd. At least, that's what he has told us. I don't think it means  only adjunct or retail, but it partly explains why the IT/CS options are problematic.

hamburger is in a major metropolitan area with multiple universities.  The logical conclusion is not that the local non-academic job market is nonexistent.  The logical conclusion is someone refuses to play the game to win.

[Caracal]

Wish I were born over 100-200 years ago when there were a few PhD and they were well respected with good job security.

Those instructors didn't share your rosy view of their jobs. M

I dont know much about the history of being a professor.  I watched some short on Turner Classic Movies that discussed the early 1940s and there was some line about "you dont become rich being a college professor" followed by the working conditions of old, drafty, unheated, offices and such. 

I think that the 'good ole days' of being a professor, if one ever did a comparison, would be the 1950s to mid 70s.  This era would have been covered first by the GI Bill and the growth that would happen by the returning WWII Veterans, followed by the Baby Boom era. Also the Great Society era would have helped.  In addition, Vietnam draft deferments would have kept some attending college perhaps longer than they might have otherwise. The Higher Education Act started the ball rolling for grants and low income loans for education.  Finally, the baby boom would have led to a disequilibrium in 'the trades' as those with only a high school education would have faced lower pay and fewer job prospects.   

Also, for better or worse, the era saw age discrimination laws come into play. While many tenure programs initially had mandatory retirement ages associated with them, the age discrimination laws made them unenforceable.  So once someone earned tenure, they could literally hold the job for the rest of their life!  Of course this set up the unintended consequence of setting up an oversupply of PhDs that many majors still have not overcome. 

For what it is worth, these are my pontifications on the topic.

Yeah, that's probably broadly true. The problem for colleges in the 19th century was that very few people actually needed a college education. Really, unless you were going to be a minister for certain denominations, or a doctor, there was no particular reason you needed to get a college degree. Democratization made even degrees less valuable for even those professions. Evangelicals tended to think that formal education wasn't necessary for ministers, and the trained Galenist doctors lost a lot of their prestige. What colleges taught was mostly Latin and Greek, but they were teaching it to people who were mostly just their because people of their class went to college. Sure, some of them were interested in the academics, but most of them weren't and it didn't really matter for the most part if you got a degree, since you were going to go back to the family business. Hence the heavy drinking, general lack of interest in school and rioting.

Edit: And before anyone says sounds like now. 19th century heavy drinking was in a category of its own. One college student at Dartmouth told the president that at minimum he needed a quart of whiskey a day. And the rioting often involved violent confrontations with faculty where students threw stones.

[Caracal]

Wish I were born over 100-200 years ago when there were a few PhD and they were well respected with good job security.

Those instructors didn't share your rosy view of their jobs. Most of them spent a lot of time complaining that the students were rich entitled jerks who were only in college to make social connections and get in trouble.  Faculty were also in charge of discipline, sometimes this resulted in them quite literally being attacked by students  when they tried to break up parties. They didn't think they got paid enough to deal with all of this. Also some Masters could choose only students with good characters to teach rather than whoever could pay.

I think at least at those time, there was no RMP and no students calling themselves customers. Professors were more powerful and students did not dare to abuse the term "violation of human right". Certainly no SNS to boost the ego of those young people and professors were not expected to reply emails within 2 hours or faced complaints by students. Professors probably had more freedom as they did not need to worry about people taking a video of what they did in public or posting a screenshot of what they wrote.

No, they just had to worry about armed student militias.
https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/university-of-virginia-riot-of-1836/#heading3

I highly recommend reading the entry, but some highlights.

"The Volunteers insisted that the faculty had no right to dictate terms to the company, and the following night Davis recorded in his journal that several students set off "six or eight very loud reports of musket fire" in protest."

"The following evening, a student committee met with the faculty to present their own set of resolutions. They boldly proclaimed that "the company is not disbanded" and that it would continue drilling in defiance of the faculty. "While the committee met with the faculty, the other University Volunteers began shouting and firing their muskets on the Lawn. Davis wrote that the "roar of musketry" was so deafening that it interrupted their conversation."

"Students rioted until 2 a.m. and resumed four hours later. They shattered windows with rocks and musket fire, broke doors with sticks, andrangthe Rotunda bell throughout the day."

"Professors began arming themselves, preparing to defend their families against physical violence. To restore order, Davis wrote to the Albemarle County deputy sheriff and two justices of the peace asking for help. Armed soldiers arrived on November 15"

"In the ensuing years, November 12—the anniversary of the 1836 riot—became a day of revelry, as students celebrated the riot as a victory over faculty authority"

"Two masked students—William Kincaid of South Carolina and Joseph Semmes of Georgia—paced up and down the Lawn "firing their pistols at professors' doors. When Davis attempted to remove Semmes' mask, the young Georgian aimed his pistol and shot Davis in the stomach. He died two days later, on November 14, 1840."

But hey, at least they didn't have RMP!

[Puget]

Wish I were born over 100-200 years ago when there were a few PhD and they were well respected with good job security.

Those instructors didn't share your rosy view of their jobs. M

I dont know much about the history of being a professor.  I watched some short on Turner Classic Movies that discussed the early 1940s and there was some line about "you dont become rich being a college professor" followed by the working conditions of old, drafty, unheated, offices and such. 

I think that the 'good ole days' of being a professor, if one ever did a comparison, would be the 1950s to mid 70s.  This era would have been covered first by the GI Bill and the growth that would happen by the returning WWII Veterans, followed by the Baby Boom era. Also the Great Society era would have helped.  In addition, Vietnam draft deferments would have kept some attending college perhaps longer than they might have otherwise. The Higher Education Act started the ball rolling for grants and low income loans for education.  Finally, the baby boom would have led to a disequilibrium in 'the trades' as those with only a high school education would have faced lower pay and fewer job prospects.   

Also, for better or worse, the era saw age discrimination laws come into play. While many tenure programs initially had mandatory retirement ages associated with them, the age discrimination laws made them unenforceable.  So once someone earned tenure, they could literally hold the job for the rest of their life!  Of course this set up the unintended consequence of setting up an oversupply of PhDs that many majors still have not overcome. 

For what it is worth, these are my pontifications on the topic.

Yeah, that's probably broadly true. The problem for colleges in the 19th century was that very few people actually needed a college education. Really, unless you were going to be a minister for certain denominations, or a doctor, there was no particular reason you needed to get a college degree. Democratization made even degrees less valuable for even those professions. Evangelicals tended to think that formal education wasn't necessary for ministers, and the trained Galenist doctors lost a lot of their prestige. What colleges taught was mostly Latin and Greek, but they were teaching it to people who were mostly just their because people of their class went to college. Sure, some of them were interested in the academics, but most of them weren't and it didn't really matter for the most part if you got a degree, since you were going to go back to the family business. Hence the heavy drinking, general lack of interest in school and rioting.

Edit: And before anyone says sounds like now. 19th century heavy drinking was in a category of its own. One college student at Dartmouth told the president that at minimum he needed a quart of whiskey a day. And the rioting often involved violent confrontations with faculty where students threw stones.

Correct me if I'm misremembering, but weren't faculty in the early European universities essentially tutors hired and paid directly by the students, who would withhold tuition or fire them if they were displeased?  Talk about students as customers!
(I also remember reading that our heavy doctoral robes with the big sleeves that can cover your hands are a remnant of what everyone wore in the universities then to stay warm in the cold and drafty buildings).

And I'm sure there were scribes complaining about how unfair it was that the printing press was putting them out of work, so some things never change.

[hamburger]

Before the pandemic, a shopkeeper asked my job hunting condition. I told her that I had an unstable adjunct professor job. She told me that her daughter just graduated with a BS degree and she was also an adjunct "professor" at a local university. I had people from the industry telling me that are also adjunct "professor". These days anybody can become a "professor". I know at least two students' advisors in my former department teaching part-time as professor.  Too many PhD cannot find a job. This kind of teaching positions should be reserved to real academic.

[spork]

Before the pandemic, a shopkeeper asked my job hunting condition. I told her that I had an unstable adjunct professor job. She told me that her daughter just graduated with a BS degree and she was also an adjunct "professor" at a local university. I had people from the industry telling me that are also adjunct "professor". These days anybody can become a "professor". I know at least two students' advisors in my former department teaching part-time as professor.  Too many PhD cannot find a job. This kind of teaching positions should be reserved to real academic.

Complaining about academia is not going to get you a full-time job outside of academia.