Alliance Between TT and Adjunct Faculty That Benefits Both

[Aster]

Yes. One of the easiest and most reliable ways for professors to boost their income is to teach overloads.

In the online college era, overload teaching can (and does) take the abuses of teaching overloads (and online education) to a whole new low. Nowadays, with the right tech savvy, you can slap literally everything into a can and leave it alone. Orientations. Lesson Plans. Actual Instruction. Assessment. Discussion Boards. Even "office hours" can now be automated to a large extent.

Even with a low adjunct pay rate (e.g. $800 per credit hour), tacking on a few extra fully automated online courses can add up. You might pull in an extra $8-12k per term this way.

So many professors do this, and many universities allow it to happen. It's cheaper and a whole lot less fuss than having adjuncts. The TT faculty have allowed themselves to devolve into scabs.

[marshwiggle]

Yes. One of the easiest and most reliable ways for professors to boost their income is to teach overloads.

In the online college era, overload teaching can (and does) take the abuses of teaching overloads (and online education) to a whole new low. Nowadays, with the right tech savvy, you can slap literally everything into a can and leave it alone. Orientations. Lesson Plans. Actual Instruction. Assessment. Discussion Boards. Even "office hours" can now be automated to a large extent.

This raises a fascinating question: How much should someone be paid for a course which is "highly" (or even more so, "fully") automated?

I have no idea how to determine this.

[apl68]

Yes. One of the easiest and most reliable ways for professors to boost their income is to teach overloads.

In the online college era, overload teaching can (and does) take the abuses of teaching overloads (and online education) to a whole new low. Nowadays, with the right tech savvy, you can slap literally everything into a can and leave it alone. Orientations. Lesson Plans. Actual Instruction. Assessment. Discussion Boards. Even "office hours" can now be automated to a large extent.

This raises a fascinating question: How much should someone be paid for a course which is "highly" (or even more so, "fully") automated?

I have no idea how to determine this.

I'll say this much--when I took a course in library school that turned out to be largely "canned," I did not feel I had gotten my money's worth.  Fortunately this was an abuse by that particular instructor, not the norm for the program or the university.  It's saddening to think about how many students are probably taking such courses, without knowing enough about higher education to realize they're being had.

[polly_mer]

The more I think about it, the more I think it has to be said that teaching 4 courses per term is not a full-time job as most full-time faculty experience it.  That's a harsh reality that perhaps not enough people know.

At a teaching-mostly institution where full-time faculty teach 4/4 or 5/5, that course load is often only 40-60% of the time a faculty member spends working during a given week.  The official weighting for performance review may list teaching as 70%, but allowing teaching to be 70% of the time over the year doesn't work out well for the faculty member.

One reason that people who have taught a lot, but not been full-time faculty, aren't hired is what the full-time faculty do with the rest of their time.  Someone who says with a straight face that they have the equivalent of a full-time faculty job by teaching a total of 4/5 courses at multiple institutions or states that one cannot hold down a full-time job while teaching a course a term does not impress those who are reading the applications and are/have been doing substantially more work.

Someone making $40k/year teaching a 4/4 load is being paid at most $40k/8*0.60 = $3k/course without benefits and may be being paid $2k/course. That $2k is still more than we had to pay one-time fill-in adjuncts in the humanities; we never got a STEM person for less than $5k for a course. The situation at Super Dinky was such that we had full-time TT humanities faculty making under $40k, teaching a 4/4, and mentoring multiple student groups, being members of committees that met once per week tasked with getting something done on a deadline, being at recruiting open houses at least once per month, and in general having about half their time after the first year be service/professional development and about half be teaching.

Why aren't full-time faculty really banding together with their part-time colleagues?  In some cases, a very strong reason is the part-time colleagues are essentially taking away the good parts of the job and leaving the less desirable ones for the increasingly small number of full-time folks.  The part-time people who aren't fully fractional faculty, but instead only teach -- minimal student mentoring, no recruiting, no committees, paperwork only related to teaching the specific classes -- are undermining the endeavor by focusing on what a course pays and keeping that pay low by being willing to teach for far less than a full-time faculty member.

For departments where most of their course load is general education for the whole institution, not teaching majors, the hollowing out of the full-time faculty creates a lot of bitterness.  For the departments that teach mostly their own and related majors at research institutions, the trend is more to having full-time people who focus on teaching intro classes and a different set of full-time people doing research, mentoring graduate students, and teaching at most a 2/2 and possibly a 1/0.

[polly_mer]

Yes. One of the easiest and most reliable ways for professors to boost their income is to teach overloads.

In the online college era, overload teaching can (and does) take the abuses of teaching overloads (and online education) to a whole new low. Nowadays, with the right tech savvy, you can slap literally everything into a can and leave it alone. Orientations. Lesson Plans. Actual Instruction. Assessment. Discussion Boards. Even "office hours" can now be automated to a large extent.

This raises a fascinating question: How much should someone be paid for a course which is "highly" (or even more so, "fully") automated?

I have no idea how to determine this.

Well, the regional accreditors would state that such a course is a correspondence course and is thus not eligible for Title IV federal financial aid.  We had a discussion on a recent thread that this is exactly why online education is being scrutinized for quality by regional accreditors.  Regional accreditors don't think students should be paying tuition money for essentially a fancy textbook.

As for the actual pay, institutions that pay for course designers usually pay $10k-15k upfront for a new course-in-a-box.  Phoenix was notorious for paying instructors a couple thousand per section during a term and requiring faculty to meet rigid guidelines on responding to posts and interacting with students multiple times per week to meet the "regular and substantive interactions" that differentiate a distance-education course (eligible for federal financial aid) and a correspondence course (not eligible for the same federal financial aid).

Western Governors University is on the forefront of this model: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2019/04/24/instructional-teams-challenge-tradition-dividing-teaching-roles

[downer]

Phoenix was notorious for paying instructors a couple thousand per section during a term and requiring faculty to meet rigid guidelines on responding to posts and interacting with students multiple times per week to meet the "regular and substantive interactions" that differentiate a distance-education course (eligible for federal financial aid) and a correspondence course (not eligible for the same federal financial aid).

Why the past tense? Has something changed?

I remember the person in IT at one college who was quite open about teaching at Phoenix and other similar places. He would be doing the responses while at work, so apparently it does not need to be very onerous.

[Kron3007]

The more I think about it, the more I think it has to be said that teaching 4 courses per term is not a full-time job as most full-time faculty experience it.  That's a harsh reality that perhaps not enough people know.

At a teaching-mostly institution where full-time faculty teach 4/4 or 5/5, that course load is often only 40-60% of the time a faculty member spends working during a given week.  The official weighting for performance review may list teaching as 70%, but allowing teaching to be 70% of the time over the year doesn't work out well for the faculty member.

One reason that people who have taught a lot, but not been full-time faculty, aren't hired is what the full-time faculty do with the rest of their time.  Someone who says with a straight face that they have the equivalent of a full-time faculty job by teaching a total of 4/5 courses at multiple institutions or states that one cannot hold down a full-time job while teaching a course a term does not impress those who are reading the applications and are/have been doing substantially more work.

Someone making $40k/year teaching a 4/4 load is being paid at most $40k/8*0.60 = $3k/course without benefits and may be being paid $2k/course. That $2k is still more than we had to pay one-time fill-in adjuncts in the humanities; we never got a STEM person for less than $5k for a course. The situation at Super Dinky was such that we had full-time TT humanities faculty making under $40k, teaching a 4/4, and mentoring multiple student groups, being members of committees that met once per week tasked with getting something done on a deadline, being at recruiting open houses at least once per month, and in general having about half their time after the first year be service/professional development and about half be teaching.

Why aren't full-time faculty really banding together with their part-time colleagues?  In some cases, a very strong reason is the part-time colleagues are essentially taking away the good parts of the job and leaving the less desirable ones for the increasingly small number of full-time folks.  The part-time people who aren't fully fractional faculty, but instead only teach -- minimal student mentoring, no recruiting, no committees, paperwork only related to teaching the specific classes -- are undermining the endeavor by focusing on what a course pays and keeping that pay low by being willing to teach for far less than a full-time faculty member.

For departments where most of their course load is general education for the whole institution, not teaching majors, the hollowing out of the full-time faculty creates a lot of bitterness.  For the departments that teach mostly their own and related majors at research institutions, the trend is more to having full-time people who focus on teaching intro classes and a different set of full-time people doing research, mentoring graduate students, and teaching at most a 2/2 and possibly a 1/0.

Teaching 4-5 courses per semester well is a full time job IMO.  My brother recently got a job at a CC and teaches about 4/4, but that includes multiple sections of the same course, so it seems that what you describe is extreme.  Perhaps your description is more common than I know, but it seems like the exception rather than the rule.    I think that is further highlighted by your use of 40K, which is far below any average faculty salary I have seen for the US...

[downer]

I'm teaching 5 courses this semester at 3 places, with 4 preps, none new. 3 of the courses are online. I guess I'm spending about 20 hours a week on it. Maybe 25 hours some weeks, 15 others.

[Kron3007]

I'm teaching 5 courses this semester at 3 places, with 4 preps, none new. 3 of the courses are online. I guess I'm spending about 20 hours a week on it. Maybe 25 hours some weeks, 15 others.

Obviously there is a lot of variation in courses, but I am assuming traditional (in person) courses with 3 contact hours/course for these discussions.  In this case, 5 courses is 15 hours of actual lecturing, plus prep work, grading, etc.  When you add in updating material (perhaps this is more important in many STEM fields than some humanities) and grading, it eats up much more time.

I had an online course, and it was definitely much less of a time sink but I hated it and managed to trade it out for something better (from my perspective).         

[mahagonny]

Phoenix was notorious for paying instructors a couple thousand per section during a term and requiring faculty to meet rigid guidelines on responding to posts and interacting with students multiple times per week to meet the "regular and substantive interactions" that differentiate a distance-education course (eligible for federal financial aid) and a correspondence course (not eligible for the same federal financial aid).

Why the past tense? Has something changed?

I remember the person in IT at one college who was quite open about teaching at Phoenix and other similar places. He would be doing the responses while at work, so apparently it does not need to be very onerous.

I think you may be not playing along as you should. For-profit colleges are there to make non-profit higher ed appear reputable.

[eigen]

The more I think about it, the more I think it has to be said that teaching 4 courses per term is not a full-time job as most full-time faculty experience it.  That's a harsh reality that perhaps not enough people know.

At a teaching-mostly institution where full-time faculty teach 4/4 or 5/5, that course load is often only 40-60% of the time a faculty member spends working during a given week.  The official weighting for performance review may list teaching as 70%, but allowing teaching to be 70% of the time over the year doesn't work out well for the faculty member.

One reason that people who have taught a lot, but not been full-time faculty, aren't hired is what the full-time faculty do with the rest of their time.  Someone who says with a straight face that they have the equivalent of a full-time faculty job by teaching a total of 4/5 courses at multiple institutions or states that one cannot hold down a full-time job while teaching a course a term does not impress those who are reading the applications and are/have been doing substantially more work.

Someone making $40k/year teaching a 4/4 load is being paid at most $40k/8*0.60 = $3k/course without benefits and may be being paid $2k/course. That $2k is still more than we had to pay one-time fill-in adjuncts in the humanities; we never got a STEM person for less than $5k for a course. The situation at Super Dinky was such that we had full-time TT humanities faculty making under $40k, teaching a 4/4, and mentoring multiple student groups, being members of committees that met once per week tasked with getting something done on a deadline, being at recruiting open houses at least once per month, and in general having about half their time after the first year be service/professional development and about half be teaching.

Why aren't full-time faculty really banding together with their part-time colleagues?  In some cases, a very strong reason is the part-time colleagues are essentially taking away the good parts of the job and leaving the less desirable ones for the increasingly small number of full-time folks.  The part-time people who aren't fully fractional faculty, but instead only teach -- minimal student mentoring, no recruiting, no committees, paperwork only related to teaching the specific classes -- are undermining the endeavor by focusing on what a course pays and keeping that pay low by being willing to teach for far less than a full-time faculty member.

For departments where most of their course load is general education for the whole institution, not teaching majors, the hollowing out of the full-time faculty creates a lot of bitterness.  For the departments that teach mostly their own and related majors at research institutions, the trend is more to having full-time people who focus on teaching intro classes and a different set of full-time people doing research, mentoring graduate students, and teaching at most a 2/2 and possibly a 1/0.

Teaching 4-5 courses per semester well is a full time job IMO.  My brother recently got a job at a CC and teaches about 4/4, but that includes multiple sections of the same course, so it seems that what you describe is extreme.  Perhaps your description is more common than I know, but it seems like the exception rather than the rule.    I think that is further highlighted by your use of 40K, which is far below any average faculty salary I have seen for the US...

4/4 or 4/5 course-loads isn't uncommon at many regional state college campuses in the sciences, but some of that depends on how you define lab course loads.

I'm on a 5 course per year schedule, which is considered relatively cushy for a PUI- I'm at a research active SLAC. But that usually is 4-5 "courses" per semester, since I only get half a teaching credit for a lab, even one with regular weekly writing assignments I need to grade.

[polly_mer]

https://www.insidehighered.com/aaup-compensation-survey?institution-name=&professor-category=1606&order=field_avg_salary&sort=asc&page=36

Inside Higher Ed has data from the AAUP salary survey.  The link above shows instructor salary averages by institution.  One can also look at other ranks. Unfortunately, these data don't break down by field, but there are many small, rural places that have a 4/4 load and average salaries not much more than $40k.

[pedanticromantic]

Sorry, but teaching 4 courses a semester is not a full-time job compared to a full-time TT faculty gig.
I teach  2 courses a semester, and my teaching is considered 40% of my job. However, my teaching is not just classroom teaching, but all the committees related to teaching (e.g. plagiarism cases and student grade appeals, curriculum development) as well as graduate supervision, PhD exams and comprehensive exams. supervising capstone projects, student training in the lab, etc. so 2 courses in the classroom is actually about 20 to 25% of my job. 4 courses a semester therefore is about 50% of my job. So  I don't consider 4 adjunct courses a full time job. It's about the equivalent to half my job.
Most TT faculty--much like myself--would love more TT faculty and to get rid of adjuncts. Having to manage, hire, and supervise the adjunct pool is just one more job for us, and as has been mentioned in this thread means that the pool of TT faculty is so small now that large amounts of service work that used to be spread amongst large groups of TT faculty is now downloaded onto an ever shrinking pool.

So, of course TT faculty have a stake in wanting fewer adjuncts and more TT faculty. We would love it. Can we do anything about it? No more than adjuncts can do.

I say this as an ex-adjunct who held down a full-time unrelated job while teaching 2 courses per semester in evenings, and still managed to write a book that led to my landing my TT job.

[mahagonny]

Sorry, but teaching 4 courses a semester is not a full-time job compared to a full-time TT faculty gig.
I teach  2 courses a semester, and my teaching is considered 40% of my job. However, my teaching is not just classroom teaching, but all the committees related to teaching (e.g. plagiarism cases and student grade appeals, curriculum development) as well as graduate supervision, PhD exams and comprehensive exams. supervising capstone projects, student training in the lab, etc. so 2 courses in the classroom is actually about 20 to 25% of my job. 4 courses a semester therefore is about 50% of my job. So  I don't consider 4 adjunct courses a full time job. It's about the equivalent to half my job.
Most TT faculty--much like myself--would love more TT faculty and to get rid of adjuncts. Having to manage, hire, and supervise the adjunct pool is just one more job for us, and as has been mentioned in this thread means that the pool of TT faculty is so small now that large amounts of service work that used to be spread amongst large groups of TT faculty is now downloaded onto an ever shrinking pool.

So, of course TT faculty have a stake in wanting fewer adjuncts and more TT faculty. We would love it. Can we do anything about it? No more than adjuncts can do.

I say this as an ex-adjunct who held down a full-time unrelated job while teaching 2 courses per semester in evenings, and still managed to write a book that led to my landing my TT job.

Agreed. But wanting fewer adjuncts because it would lighten your load or be better for the department is not the same as wanting the end of the regular use of non-benefitted, temporary, dead end college teaching jobs because it isn't ethical, which is what tenure track professors sound like they think they believe. So adjunctification is here for good. Not solely because of government defunding. Not because administrators are nuts. Because it works for the plutocracy. That's my point. It's not directed at you, cause I don't know you. But, explaining further...
Staffing with only TT  would mean everyone gets your benefits and salary, or is on a path to, and no one loses any employment, salary or benefits already allotted to him because of fluctuating enrollments. Not gonna work for most departments, not in an era where tuition is such a big part of the revenue and everyone's wanting to build bigger, better student centers and sports facilities to chase their share of a limited number of prospective students.

[Kron3007]

https://www.insidehighered.com/aaup-compensation-survey?institution-name=&professor-category=1606&order=field_avg_salary&sort=asc&page=36

Inside Higher Ed has data from the AAUP salary survey.  The link above shows instructor salary averages by institution.  One can also look at other ranks. Unfortunately, these data don't break down by field, but there are many small, rural places that have a 4/4 load and average salaries not much more than $40k.

Yes there are some, but they are the minority.  Most are well above 40k.