Alliance Between TT and Adjunct Faculty That Benefits Both

[tuxthepenguin]

True, but we know how many courses are considered full time at any given university.  If 5 courses is considered a full time job, it is pretty easy to break it down to see how your adjunct pay stacks up.  If you are paying $2000/course, teaching 5 courses per semester equals 20k, which is hardly a livable wage.  This also dosnt factor in the value of health care, benefits, job security, etc.

If I called the plumber and he sent a minimum wage contract worker out to my house, I wouldn't call that plumber a second time. Why are parents paying a truckload of tuition and then having someone making that little teach their classes? Someone with no investment in the school or the students. It doesn't sound to me like a good way to spend money.

[marshwiggle]

Just because someone will work for low wages does not justify the practice. 

If the government decided to have a program where stay-at-home-parents were given $100 per month for each kid at home, then you could consider that as "paying" them for childcare. The amount is obviously way less than the true "cost" of the childcare if it had to be procured any other way. Would such a program be worse than the status quo, because all of the people who continued to be stay-at-home parents would now be "working" for low wages?

That is not the same at all.  That is a subsidy to help someone out, not an employment contract. 

Adjuncts are not out there teaching courses for free, they are doing it for money as an employee. 

But they are also driven by much more than a simple calculation of hours worked versus wages received. How many complain about an effective wage which is below the official minimum wage, and yet they continue? They wouldn't do that to work at Walmart. Since there is a lot of variation in how much "unpaid" work someone may put into a course, it would be very hard to establish a "fair" wage since individuals would have vastly different ideas of how much time they ought to be paid for.

Saving people from themselves is much harder than saving them from unscrupulous employers.

True, but we know how many courses are considered full time at any given university.  If 5 courses is considered a full time job, it is pretty easy to break it down to see how your adjunct pay stacks up.  If you are paying $2000/course, teaching 5 courses per semester equals 20k, which is hardly a livable wage.  This also dosnt factor in the value of health care, benefits, job security, etc.

Remember that "full-time", as in "the teaching load of a full-time faculty member", is only part of the job. The typical breakdown given is 20% teaching, 20% research, and 10% service. So in the 20k example above, that would still translate to a full-time salary of $50k, not $20k. Calculations based on just the teaching component of the job are misleading.

[Aster]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses. It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do. I don't want to even bring up how our institution's grade inflation looks.

Needless to say, finding anyone to do any service is pretty difficult. The full-time faculty are "too busy teaching" to do any service, including important roles like hiring/managing/mentoring adjuncts. Oddly, most of our full-time faculty originally came themselves from the adjunct pool, so one might think that they would act more responsibly towards those that are still adjuncts.

[ciao_yall]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses. It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do. I don't want to even bring up how our institution's grade inflation looks.

Needless to say, finding anyone to do any service is pretty difficult. The full-time faculty are "too busy teaching" to do any service, including important roles like hiring/managing/mentoring adjuncts. Oddly, most of our full-time faculty originally came themselves from the adjunct pool, so one might think that they would act more responsibly towards those that are still adjuncts.

Don't they have a load cap? Ours is 1.4.

[marshwiggle]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses. It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do.

But does it really? Isn't the usual metric that matters the "% of courses taught by full-time faculty"? If so, it's not clear that "regular" or "overload" should make a difference. The courses are all being taught by full-time faculty. (And my understanding of the value of the metric is in the idea that full-time faculty are more qualified, more carefully chosen, etc. which don't depend on load.)

[Kron3007]

Just because someone will work for low wages does not justify the practice. 

If the government decided to have a program where stay-at-home-parents were given $100 per month for each kid at home, then you could consider that as "paying" them for childcare. The amount is obviously way less than the true "cost" of the childcare if it had to be procured any other way. Would such a program be worse than the status quo, because all of the people who continued to be stay-at-home parents would now be "working" for low wages?

That is not the same at all.  That is a subsidy to help someone out, not an employment contract. 

Adjuncts are not out there teaching courses for free, they are doing it for money as an employee. 

But they are also driven by much more than a simple calculation of hours worked versus wages received. How many complain about an effective wage which is below the official minimum wage, and yet they continue? They wouldn't do that to work at Walmart. Since there is a lot of variation in how much "unpaid" work someone may put into a course, it would be very hard to establish a "fair" wage since individuals would have vastly different ideas of how much time they ought to be paid for.

Saving people from themselves is much harder than saving them from unscrupulous employers.

True, but we know how many courses are considered full time at any given university.  If 5 courses is considered a full time job, it is pretty easy to break it down to see how your adjunct pay stacks up.  If you are paying $2000/course, teaching 5 courses per semester equals 20k, which is hardly a livable wage.  This also dosnt factor in the value of health care, benefits, job security, etc.

Remember that "full-time", as in "the teaching load of a full-time faculty member", is only part of the job. The typical breakdown given is 20% teaching, 20% research, and 10% service. So in the 20k example above, that would still translate to a full-time salary of $50k, not $20k. Calculations based on just the teaching component of the job are misleading.

I was factoring that in. 

Where I am my official teaching level is 40%, which translates to a 1/2 teaching load (although graduate student supervision is supposed to also count).  So, in my case a "full time" teaching load would be 2.5/5 (about 4/4) making $2000/course equal to 16k/year.  However, I think our going rate per course is 8k, so it would work out to approximately 64k (CAD)/year if it were full time, which is not amazing but it is reasonable.

Most places where the teaching load is 4/4 or 5/5 do not have 40% research expectations.

[Kron3007]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses. It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do. I don't want to even bring up how our institution's grade inflation looks.

Needless to say, finding anyone to do any service is pretty difficult. The full-time faculty are "too busy teaching" to do any service, including important roles like hiring/managing/mentoring adjuncts. Oddly, most of our full-time faculty originally came themselves from the adjunct pool, so one might think that they would act more responsibly towards those that are still adjuncts.

We also have a cop on the number of overload courses we can take as stated in our collective agreement.  I believe we can only do 1 per semester or something unless we get various approvals.  What you describe is a sign of a dysfunctional university IMO.

[mahagonny]

True, but we know how many courses are considered full time at any given university.  If 5 courses is considered a full time job, it is pretty easy to break it down to see how your adjunct pay stacks up.  If you are paying $2000/course, teaching 5 courses per semester equals 20k, which is hardly a livable wage.  This also dosnt factor in the value of health care, benefits, job security, etc.

If I called the plumber and he sent a minimum wage contract worker out to my house, I wouldn't call that plumber a second time. Why are parents paying a truckload of tuition and then having someone making that little teach their classes? Someone with no investment in the school or the students. It doesn't sound to me like a good way to spend money.

I agree with this. And if I found the contractor had some cute terms for his assistants, like 'warm  bodies' or some such, I'd probably tell him to go take a shit for himself. Then I'd pay the guys myself.

[polly_mer]

True, but we know how many courses are considered full time at any given university.  If 5 courses is considered a full time job, it is pretty easy to break it down to see how your adjunct pay stacks up.  If you are paying $2000/course, teaching 5 courses per semester equals 20k, which is hardly a livable wage.  This also dosnt factor in the value of health care, benefits, job security, etc.

If I called the plumber and he sent a minimum wage contract worker out to my house, I wouldn't call that plumber a second time. Why are parents paying a truckload of tuition and then having someone making that little teach their classes? Someone with no investment in the school or the students. It doesn't sound to me like a good way to spend money.

I agree with this. And if I found the contractor had some cute terms for his assistants, like 'warm  bodies' or some such, I'd probably tell him to go take a shit for himself. Then I'd pay the guys myself.

Written like someone who has a ton of free time or has spent almost no time doing any sort of research on the ethics and realities of supply chains for the goods and services that a modern American uses.  You're paid very, very well if you truly can pay everyone out of pocket at above fair market wages for literally every good and service you use.  That means you never use Amazon nor do you shop at Walmart or indeed most of the national large employers.

The people who pay a boatload in tuition are very seldom the people who are getting the significantly underpaid adjuncts based on the data of where adjuncts are used in large numbers and what the adjuncts at those institutions average as pay.

I can't find the article I want right this second; it was a pretty interesting first-person article about how someone adjuncting at an underresourced community college got a reality check after trying to get support for better adjunct working conditions.  The students who were also working hard at several underpaid, part-time jobs had minimal sympathy for someone with all that education who was still in that situation instead of using that education to get a better job. 

I have written multiple times about how many job openings my employer has for non-STEM folks (only 25% of the workforce is graduate-educated STEM folks) with good middle class pay and benefits.  Only a handful of forumites have contacted me for more information. 

This is America so people can decide they'd rather be overworked and underpaid, but the problem still remains that we need far fewer workers in some sectors than we used to need with pay reflecting that reality.  Wired has a pretty good article on the realities of autoworkers and how the union may not be able to save enough jobs nor necessarily make the jobs pay as well as they did decades ago because of changes in technology.

[marshwiggle]

True, but we know how many courses are considered full time at any given university.  If 5 courses is considered a full time job, it is pretty easy to break it down to see how your adjunct pay stacks up.  If you are paying $2000/course, teaching 5 courses per semester equals 20k, which is hardly a livable wage.  This also dosnt factor in the value of health care, benefits, job security, etc.

If I called the plumber and he sent a minimum wage contract worker out to my house, I wouldn't call that plumber a second time. Why are parents paying a truckload of tuition and then having someone making that little teach their classes? Someone with no investment in the school or the students. It doesn't sound to me like a good way to spend money.

I agree with this. And if I found the contractor had some cute terms for his assistants, like 'warm  bodies' or some such, I'd probably tell him to go take a shit for himself. Then I'd pay the guys myself.

Written like someone who has a ton of free time or has spent almost no time doing any sort of research on the ethics and realities of supply chains for the goods and services that a modern American uses.  You're paid very, very well if you truly can pay everyone out of pocket at above fair market wages for literally every good and service you use.  That means you never use Amazon nor do you shop at Walmart or indeed most of the national large employers.

You're probably also scandalized by the use of graduate student TAs, since that's basically a faculty member "subcontracting" important grading work to much less qualified workers. Professors should always do all of their own grading.

[ciao_yall]

I can't find the article I want right this second; it was a pretty interesting first-person article about how someone adjuncting at an underresourced community college got a reality check after trying to get support for better adjunct working conditions.  The students who were also working hard at several underpaid, part-time jobs had minimal sympathy for someone with all that education who was still in that situation instead of using that education to get a better job. 

Yeah, like the adjuncts with health insurance at our college sobbing to our local journalists who didn't have any such benefits.

[Aster]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses. It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do.

But does it really? Isn't the usual metric that matters the "% of courses taught by full-time faculty"? If so, it's not clear that "regular" or "overload" should make a difference. The courses are all being taught by full-time faculty. (And my understanding of the value of the metric is in the idea that full-time faculty are more qualified, more carefully chosen, etc. which don't depend on load.)

It matters because overloads for us are counted as adjunct courses (with lousy adjunct pay). Big Urban College (internally) classifies overloads as adjunct work. But *externally*, Big Urban College markets the opposite thing. Where you might have a department with 3 full-time professors and 9 adjunct professors, you now have 3 (double-overloaded) full-time professors and 3 adjunct professors. So the department has both dropped total number of faculty (12 to 6), and distorted the full time:part time  course ratios from 15:18 (assume the adjuncts each teach 2 courses) and turned it into 30:3 course ratios. That's a huge difference for marketing purposes and many college ranking metrics.

Grossly overloaded TT professors are no better than super-adjuncts. They don't have time to perform service or research that enhances their teaching. They don't have time for the more careful and innovative preps and assessments that are part of the work week design for TT faculty.

[marshwiggle]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses.It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do.

But does it really? Isn't the usual metric that matters the "% of courses taught by full-time faculty"? If so, it's not clear that "regular" or "overload" should make a difference. The courses are all being taught by full-time faculty. (And my understanding of the value of the metric is in the idea that full-time faculty are more qualified, more carefully chosen, etc. which don't depend on load.)

It matters because overloads for us are counted as adjunct courses (with lousy adjunct pay). Big Urban College (internally) classifies overloads as adjunct work. But *externally*, Big Urban College markets the opposite thing. Where you might have a department with 3 full-time professors and 9 adjunct professors, you now have 3 (double-overloaded) full-time professors and 3 adjunct professors. So the department has both dropped total number of faculty (12 to 6), and distorted the full time:part time  course ratios from 15:18 (assume the adjuncts each teach 2 courses) and turned it into 30:3 course ratios. That's a huge difference for marketing purposes and many college ranking metrics.

Grossly overloaded TT professors are no better than super-adjuncts. They don't have time to perform service or research that enhances their teaching. They don't have time for the more careful and innovative preps and assessments that are part of the work week design for TT faculty.

So why would any sane TT professor do all that extra work for "lousy adjunct pay"?

[polly_mer]

So why would any sane TT professor do all that extra work for "lousy adjunct pay"?

How much extra work is it really on a per hour basis?  That's a serious question because teaching another section of something that is already prepped and optimized for grading efficiency is very different in terms of time from doing a new prep from scratch or from adding an additional prep to the mental load for the term.  I've encountered first-person articles on the internet by part-time faculty who insist that others are doing it wrong if the employment situation is $2000 for a brand-new prep with a lot of human grading instead of something like $5000 for an already prepped class that either has only a few papers per term or draws heavily on auto-grading or student self-grading for weekly practice.

In addition, I can think of many times when picking up another section of something one is already teaching for a little extra pay is far more appealing than taking on certain assignments for no extra pay.  I can remember faculty members who used an overload to get out of a committee chair assignment on a contentious issue, to get a lower advising load, and/or to avoid some annoying service like being the department rep at the prospective student open houses on the first Saturday of the month.

How many students are we talking?  I remember one professor who kept trying to get out of teaching double overloads every term by combining 25-person sections of the same course into 50-person lectures, which would still be much smaller than comparable programs within a 200-mile drive.  The professor was teaching the same number of students, but delivering the lecture once per week for each prep would be easier on him.  The extra money really wasn't worth the time to this individual.

However, changing the official rules of the college that larger-than-25-student sections were split if at all feasible had to be put to a vote and the vote always failed.  One particular course stands out being nearly pure lecture with exactly 2 exams and one big paper due at the end, but 3-5 sections were taught every term by the same faculty member.  The extra money for giving the same lecture again that week was certainly worth that professor's effort.

Upon review of the general education program, we discovered the required ultra-super-special humanities gen ed sequence had evolved into one professor taking each specific course in the sequence, having as many sections as N students/25 dictated, and then having a teaching load of no more than 2 preps, even when a term ended up with double overloads (6 sections total).  Investigation indicated that only one professor was really doing substantial discussion in every section while most professors were indeed lecturing heavily from notes that were only very lightly revised after the substantial prep 8-10 years prior.

When we changed the general education program, the outcry was huge from people who had spent a good 10 years prepping on average zero new courses per year (one person was averaging about one new prep every three years) to prepping 2 or 3 per year to build up the repertoire that is more typical at a high-teaching-load school.  Mahagonny might appreciate that some of those folks tried to insist we should be hiring part-time faculty for additional variety of elective courses and let the full-time folks remain at 1-2 preps per term, even though that would often mean either running sections that don't make (6 students enrolled was the bar) or letting full-time folks have fewer than 4 sections per term.  When the administration pointed out that we could probably get different full-time faculty in the humanities who wouldn't blink at 4-6 preps per year because they already had good repertoires and that many individuals' tenure was awarded in a program that no longer exists, people grumbled more quietly about the additional preps.

Thus, why would sane TT professors take on double overloads for adjunct pay?  Sometimes, being paid a little more for a little more work is a much better deal than being paid nothing more for a wider variety of work, much of which is unappealing.  One way to free up time to do something interesting  like renovate a course or leave some time for personal research is to consolidate the number of preps and be able to turn down additional service by citing a reason that others accept.

[mahagonny]

At Large Urban College, most of our full-time faculty have chosen to view the "full time teaching load" as the *minimum* teaching load. So they'll stack 4-5 additional classes (per term) on top of that for extra pay. The administration thinks this is wonderful, because they don't have to mess with screening and supervising all of the additional adjunct professors that we'd normally need to fill all those extra courses. It also greatly distorts our full time:part time professor ratios to make us appear like we have far more full-time professors than we actually do.

But does it really? Isn't the usual metric that matters the "% of courses taught by full-time faculty"? If so, it's not clear that "regular" or "overload" should make a difference. The courses are all being taught by full-time faculty. (And my understanding of the value of the metric is in the idea that full-time faculty are more qualified, more carefully chosen, etc. which don't depend on load.)

Part time people are re-chosen every semester. That should add up to a lot of care and attention, if people are doing their jobs.

So why would any sane TT professor do all that extra work for "lousy adjunct pay"?

Because they have extra time.