The Cruelty of the Adjunct System by Alexandra Bradner

[downer]

https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/04/13/the-cruelty-of-the-adjunct-system/

To be honest, I couldn't make it through the whole thing.  I found the tone a bit much and it overgeneralizes. But still, it is a sustained analysis of an important issue, and the basic ideas are plausible enough.

[marshwiggle]

https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/04/13/the-cruelty-of-the-adjunct-system/

To be honest, I couldn't make it through the whole thing.  I found the tone a bit much and it overgeneralizes. But still, it is a sustained analysis of an important issue, and the basic ideas are plausible enough.

From the article:

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%.

It's 4 paragraphs down before the first mention (above) of the distinction between part-time and full-time NTT faculty, and the distinction is glossed in much of the analysis. This is misleading since the vast majority of the problems traditionally discussed apply much more to part-time positions.

[mahagonny]

It's not a bad life if you like it. What galls me is how they still get away with discrimination against people of color in hiring. Most of the hiring gets done by last minute asking around - who do our adjunct faculty know who's good and available? This is how the adjunct ranks stay so lilly-white. They're supposed to do real advertising and searching but they skirt around it.

[dismalist]

I did read the whole thing.

Summarizing a litany of remonstrances:

I want more!

Like two-year olds and the rest of us.

[mahagonny]

I did read the whole thing.

Summarizing a litany of remonstrances:

I want more!

Like two-year olds and the rest of us.

I read more in it than that. I think they made a good case that having academic labor done by people with crappy jobs is bad for students. Bait and switch. So while all of us are pretty much resigned to the situation as it is (although some of us fight it as best we can through unions), only some of us are getting rich on such a crooked arrangement.

[Hibush]

From the article:

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%.

It's 4 paragraphs down before the first mention (above) of the distinction between part-time and full-time NTT faculty, and the distinction is glossed in much of the analysis. This is misleading since the vast majority of the problems traditionally discussed apply much more to part-time positions.

The many different situations where NTT faculty are used really needs to be distinguished. Some are good, some are bad. Even the full-time vs part-time distinction is not enough. I'm on a committee to look at NTT issues at my school. There are about a dozen different titles, and within each title there is still meaningful variation. Being hard money vs soft money matters a lot, yet the same title can apply. Being hired because the need was identified and the job was filled with a national search is different from "this is a really valuable person and we don't want to lose them so let's make an NTT position" in evaluations, supervision and lots of other central functions of the job.

It may be more valuable to parse out some distinct scenarios, describe the positive and negative aspects and suggest potential improvements that can be accomplised realistically.
"Realistic" vill vary. Getting respect may be easier or harder than getting a raise, depending on the instutuional culture.

[mahagonny]

From the article:

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%.

It's 4 paragraphs down before the first mention (above) of the distinction between part-time and full-time NTT faculty, and the distinction is glossed in much of the analysis. This is misleading since the vast majority of the problems traditionally discussed apply much more to part-time positions.

The many different situations where NTT faculty are used really needs to be distinguished. Some are good, some are bad. Even the full-time vs part-time distinction is not enough. I'm on a committee to look at NTT issues at my school. There are about a dozen different titles, and within each title there is still meaningful variation. Being hard money vs soft money matters a lot, yet the same title can apply. Being hired because the need was identified and the job was filled with a national search is different from "this is a really valuable person and we don't want to lose them so let's make an NTT position" in evaluations, supervision and lots of other central functions of the job.

It may be more valuable to parse out some distinct scenarios, describe the positive and negative aspects and suggest potential improvements that can be accomplised realistically.
"Realistic" vill vary. Getting respect may be easier or harder than getting a raise, depending on the instutuional culture.

And you think that is extent of the dysfunction in the family?
The current situation is the adjunct faculty pretend to respect the full time faculty in order to keep getting hired and the tenured faculty consider adjunct faculty invisible.

ETA: The best selling point for adjunct work is the solitariness of it. Your relationship with tenured faculty is minimal, and both parties want it that way.

Here's some more information about the author: https://www.kenyon.edu/directory/alexandra-bradner/

To me the story is people staying a college way too long and then forming a self-identity built entirely around their scholarship. It becomes a kind of addiction. This woman has way less education than I have, apparently no good ways to make money outside of teaching, and a worse existence, economically. She appears to be young enough to start another career. She should get started now.
The real cruelty is the maintaining of these PhD programs. They're grift for the upper classes. They exist for the benefit of the few scholars at the top of the food chain.
...and for those other good samaritans, the fatcat administrators.
There are no jobs.

[mahagonny]

correction
'this woman has way more education than I have...'

[downer]

Plainly, there are many aspects of adjunct work that suck.

There is the long standing question of why someone who hates the job keeps on doing it. But people have their reasons.

Some of those reasons are that most other jobs suck too, and people who do adjunct work may not want to do those jobs.

Putting aside the question whether Bradner makes a convincing argument, I wonder who might be moved by her description of the plight of adjunct faculty. Is the rhetoric effective? It feels like an attempt to count adjunct faculty among the ranks of the downtrodden and oppressed, who deserve special consideration.

Maybe we could compare it to the efforts of animal rights activists to draw attention to the cruelty of factory farming. Academic activists should post pictures of the unhappy adjunct faculty grading piles of student papers, or videos of them skulking past the FT faculty offices in their shame of lower status. See the cruelty they endure! Watch them write emails asking dept chairs for more work. The indignity.

I guess I find the cruelty rhetoric overblown.

[mahagonny]

Putting aside the question whether Bradner makes a convincing argument, I wonder who might be moved by her description of the plight of adjunct faculty. Is the rhetoric effective? It feels like an attempt to count adjunct faculty among the ranks of the downtrodden and oppressed, who deserve special consideration.

the academic world, that is, the people with the real jobs, are comfortable in the belief that no one will be moved, because they can always point out (1) it's not forced labor, and (2) adjuncts have white privilege. That goes a long way in the worldview they are promoting.

Maybe we could compare it to the efforts of animal rights activists to draw attention to the cruelty of factory farming. Academic activists should post pictures of the unhappy adjunct faculty grading piles of student papers, or videos of them skulking past the FT faculty offices in their shame of lower status. See the cruelty they endure! Watch them write emails asking dept chairs for more work. The indignity.

I guess I find the cruelty rhetoric overblown.

Try reading the article all the way through then. Her analysis has more detail than you recognized.

If you substitute 'selfishness' for 'cruelty (which might imply, like, sadism)' then it's easy to see where the PhD programs in fields with almost no jobs outside of the academy are selfish: they are for the benefit of the people who run them and not for the benefit of the students they ostensibly service. Anything not for the student's benefit is considered a crime in the academic world except in an instance where there is so much incentive to deny it.

[ciao_yall]

Plainly, there are many aspects of adjunct work that suck.

There is the long standing question of why someone who hates the job keeps on doing it. But people have their reasons.

The expectation is that they have a full-time job elsewhere, or are retired, and adjuncting is just something they do on the side.

Unfortunately it has warped into this bizarre freeway-flying schtick.

Putting aside the question whether Bradner makes a convincing argument, I wonder who might be moved by her description of the plight of adjunct faculty. Is the rhetoric effective? It feels like an attempt to count adjunct faculty among the ranks of the downtrodden and oppressed, who deserve special consideration.

I guess I find the cruelty rhetoric overblown.

Agreed. Let's face it, these are pretty clean, respectable white-collar jobs. They aren't the 3'Ds - dirty, dangerous, dull..

Still, everyone keeps trying to solve the wrong problem and make a bad problem slighlty better. More pay, even if they just work a few hours, the extra dollars are mouse nuts! Health insurance, even though now we have Obamacare! Invitations to meetings, even though they don't have a career path!

The solution is to create more full-time jobs. Some part-timers might end up having to find new careers. The unemployement rate for people with Master's degrees and above is 1%, so I'm not too worried about them.

[marshwiggle]

Plainly, there are many aspects of adjunct work that suck.

There is the long standing question of why someone who hates the job keeps on doing it. But people have their reasons.

The expectation is that they have a full-time job elsewhere, or are retired, and adjuncting is just something they do on the side.

Unfortunately it has warped into this bizarre freeway-flying schtick.

The problem is that "they" refers to several different categories of people; many "adjuncts" do have full-time jobs elsewhere. Her article included people with full-time NTT jobs as part of "they"; i.e. "adjuncts".

Any analysis (including this one) that plays fast and loose with the data to include all of these groups to bump up the numbers but describing the problems associated with mainly one subset, i.e. "freeway fliers", fails because what people actually observe confirms that the freeway flier situation is atypical, or at least much less common than the analysis suggests.

Putting aside the question whether Bradner makes a convincing argument, I wonder who might be moved by her description of the plight of adjunct faculty. Is the rhetoric effective? It feels like an attempt to count adjunct faculty among the ranks of the downtrodden and oppressed, who deserve special consideration.

I guess I find the cruelty rhetoric overblown.

Agreed. Let's face it, these are pretty clean, respectable white-collar jobs. They aren't the 3'Ds - dirty, dangerous, dull..

Still, everyone keeps trying to solve the wrong problem and make a bad problem slighlty better. More pay, even if they just work a few hours, the extra dollars are mouse nuts! Health insurance, even though now we have Obamacare! Invitations to meetings, even though they don't have a career path!

The solution is to create more full-time jobs. Some part-timers might end up having to find new careers. The unemployement rate for people with Master's degrees and above is 1%, so I'm not too worried about them.

The solution here is easy. Push for legislation requiring pro-rated benefits. The notion of "full-time" vs. "part-time" labour is outdated; if pension and benefits are required to be a certain percentage of salary, then that removes the incentive to break up "full-time" jobs into several "part-time" jobs just to avoid paying benefits.

This is a labour force problem; it's not limited to academia. That one change would affect the entire landscape.

[mahagonny]

Plainly, there are many aspects of adjunct work that suck.

There is the long standing question of why someone who hates the job keeps on doing it. But people have their reasons.

The expectation is that they have a full-time job elsewhere, or are retired, and adjuncting is just something they do on the side.

Unfortunately it has warped into this bizarre freeway-flying schtick.

The problem is that "they" refers to several different categories of people; many "adjuncts" do have full-time jobs elsewhere. Her article included people with full-time NTT jobs as part of "they"; i.e. "adjuncts".

Any analysis (including this one) that plays fast and loose with the data to include all of these groups to bump up the numbers but describing the problems associated with mainly one subset, i.e. "freeway fliers", fails because what people actually observe confirms that the freeway flier situation is atypical, or at least much less common than the analysis suggests.

Putting aside the question whether Bradner makes a convincing argument, I wonder who might be moved by her description of the plight of adjunct faculty. Is the rhetoric effective? It feels like an attempt to count adjunct faculty among the ranks of the downtrodden and oppressed, who deserve special consideration.

I guess I find the cruelty rhetoric overblown.

Agreed. Let's face it, these are pretty clean, respectable white-collar jobs. They aren't the 3'Ds - dirty, dangerous, dull..

Still, everyone keeps trying to solve the wrong problem and make a bad problem slighlty better. More pay, even if they just work a few hours, the extra dollars are mouse nuts! Health insurance, even though now we have Obamacare! Invitations to meetings, even though they don't have a career path!

The solution is to create more full-time jobs. Some part-timers might end up having to find new careers. The unemployement rate for people with Master's degrees and above is 1%, so I'm not too worried about them.

The solution here is easy. Push for legislation requiring pro-rated benefits. The notion of "full-time" vs. "part-time" labour is outdated; if pension and benefits are required to be a certain percentage of salary, then that removes the incentive to break up "full-time" jobs into several "part-time" jobs just to avoid paying benefits.

This is a labour force problem; it's not limited to academia. That one change would affect the entire landscape.

Of course. But academia does not want your 'solution.' Academia wants the availability of temp workers with no rights and marginal cost, so keep them the hell away from health insurance, because that's one that runs into money. That's why ciao is advocating for more full time jobs. Because they know it won't happen. That's what we call the 'status quo.' Maintaining the way things are by pretending to advocate for change, following the thirty-year-old script. If people  were calling for 'more full time jobs in the professoriate' thirty years ago and it didn't happen there can't be any risk in saying it now. What you're proposing could happen. That's why you won't hear about it from the academic establishment. The tenure track has their solution. It's called adjunctification.  And keep them out of sight as much as possible.

ETA: In fact, as far as the field I work in the comment  'the expectation is that they have a full-time job elsewhere, or are retired,' would be a flat out lie, when taking into account the age of the faculty and the hours one is required to be available.
This is all been common knowledge for some forty years, but liars will continue to do their thing.

[apl68]

There are full-time adjuncts out there who make $24,000 in salary a year.  I have staff members making state minimum wage (and we're a red state) who make nearly that.

[Hibush]

And you think that is extent of the dysfunction in the family?

Not at all, just enough of a nugget to get you going...

To me the story is people staying a college way too long and then forming a self-identity built entirely around their scholarship. It becomes a kind of addiction.

This phenomenon has to play a big role. It is the most parsimonious explanation for a lot of otherwise irrational situations. An addict of this sort is ripe for having their addiction exploited, and there are plenty of people eager to do so.