Admin! Speak up!

[marshwiggle]

We seem to be having conversations past one another.  I see a recurring conflation of what is and what should be, without any discussion of how we might get there.  I also see myself being accused of things so far beyond my reality that I can't take any of it seriously.

Identifying problems (accurately) is not the same as solving problems.

What's the goal here?

The problem exists to the extent that each "side" sees the solution as totally in the hands of the  other "side". Administrators who split up full-time positions into part-time ones to save on benefits are contributing to the problem. Part-time faculty who will keep working for peanuts and complaining rather than leaving academia are also contributing.

The system will be "fixed" when and where there are enough qualified people to staff courses under conditions which work for them. That could be satisfied with all of the part-time people being retired profs or people with full-time jobs elsewhere. Even with things like pro-rated benefits, I think it is unlikely that any changes will work well with a significant portion of "part-time" people being people who are taking on multiple "part-time" positions to approximate a single "full-time" position.

[Wahoo Redux]

What's the goal here?

My idea was just that administrators could speak about their own professional experiences with the subject matter often broached on these boards since we so often hear generalized accusations and complaints.  I thought we could hear from admin without attack arguments.

Solutions would be great, but obviously the new Fora is not going to change the landscape, just provide discussion.

[Aster]

Effective Shared Governance is one of the keys to a healthy, vibrant university.

People need to have formal conduits for 2-way, transparent communications between faculty, between departments, and between all units of senior administration.

There is much to said for transparency. Without free and open dialogue, problems stay buried, mistakes are repeated, and feedback is stifled.

If you want a good university, you need to have that university operate like U.S. universities are designed to be operated. Collegially, and democratically.

[marshwiggle]

Granted, there are many things that academia needs to worry about.  No one will ever argue this.  But personnel should be a prime concern unless we just give up the ghost and go full corporate model with our universities----perhaps we should start outsourcing our online classes to China?  Bet'cha it would be a lot cheaper. 

And if those classes produced measurably better student learning outcomes, what would you argue makes that a bad thing? (Serious question)

The adjunct march is relatively big news; I suspect you could convince philanthropists to leave a legacy of endowed chairs or teaching professorships that bare their names----not as impressive as a building, certainly, but part of university history nevertheless.  And honestly, how many of us know anything about the surnames on our campus buildings?  I don't think I realized that was how our buildings got their goofy names until I was well into graduate school; certainly as an undergrad I could have cared less.

But however you cut it, this is the sort of innovation I always wonder about.  We all know resources and budgets are limited.  What I don't know is why this problem seems so intractable given the intellectual power and creativity of the people it affects.

The thing is, since salaries are an operating cost, and buildings are a capital cost, they have massively different "bang for buck". Suppose someone gives a million dollars. That could do something noticeable to a building, which would last for decades. However, if it's going to be used to help salaries, it needs to be invested, and the interest used. At current rates, let's say that million can produce 5% a year, so $50000. That's not even a single full-time position, especially with benefits. Spread among 100 part-timers, that's only $500 apiece, and the next year the only increase will be inflationary. If there are 1000 adjuncts, that's on $50 apiece, which is insignificant.

To bump a lot of wages significantly requires massive influxes of ongoing cash.

[FishProf]

What's the goal here?

My idea was just that administrators could speak about their own professional experiences with the subject matter often broached on these boards since we so often hear generalized accusations and complaints.  I thought we could hear from admin without attack arguments.

Solutions would be great, but obviously the new Fora is not going to change the landscape, just provide discussion.

OK.  Here is an example of what I (as a Department Chair) was faced with this semester.
We plan for X students in a major for which we provide support classes.  We provide 3 of the first 4 courses the students must take in the first year.  Physical space is limited.  Enrollment management (doing, apparently, only the first half of the job) enrolled 136% of X.  So I had to hire 6 additional faculty to cover the courses. 

Those aren't going to be FT/TT faculty on such short notice, nor is the University likely to give us additional lines (we were already short 7 FT faculty and they haven't done a thing about that previously).  So I had to find adjuncts.  On short notice.   One I hired the 2nd day of the semester.

For me, there was zero consideration of benefits, other teaching the person may have been doing (other than at the times we needed) or any of the other forms of malfeasance sometimes attributed on these boards.  I don't have time to be malevolent.

So, my % of courses taught by adjuncts (which by contract is not supposed to exceed 20%) is now 51%.  I have no recourse except to report this to my Union, and hope they have some levers of power to pull.

[ciao_yall]

To bump a lot of wages significantly requires massive influxes of ongoing cash.

As does a new building. Everyone wants their name on the building, but nobody wants to fund the ongoing maintenance for a fancy new building. Or a perfectly serviceable but boring old building with someone else's name on it that needs a new roof and plumbing.

[mahagonny]

See next --- having trouble with the quote function for some reason. The quotation is from marsh wiggle not caracal.

[mahagonny]

OK, so tell me how I'm being underpaid. Here's my situation:

• Each course pays about $8000.
• My course has a limit of 40 students.
• I've taught it several times.
• There are 30 hours of lectures in a term.
• Since we have universal healthcare, that doesn't depend on my employment at all.

I don't think you're underpaid, but I suspect that it would be reasonable to say that according to the economic theory you promote in these discussions, you are overpaid. Were it not for your union they could get you or somebody adequate to do your work for less. Or, were it not for your seniority, thanks to the union, they could let you go and find someone even more above average than you are for what they're giving you. And yet you promote gratitude to the employer, never to the union.

Effective Shared Governance is one of the keys to a healthy, vibrant university.

People need to have formal conduits for 2-way, transparent communications between faculty, between departments, and between all units of senior administration.

There is much to said for transparency. Without free and open dialogue, problems stay buried, mistakes are repeated, and feedback is stifled.

If you want a good university, you need to have that university operate like U.S. universities are designed to be operated. Collegially, and democratically.

First you need to feel that you can be safe expressing an opinion. Many of us don't, for good reason.

The system will be "fixed" when and where there are enough qualified people to staff courses under conditions which work for them. That could be satisfied with all of the part-time people being retired profs or people with full-time jobs elsewhere. Even with things like pro-rated benefits, I think it is unlikely that any changes will work well with a significant portion of "part-time" people being people who are taking on multiple "part-time" positions to approximate a single "full-time" position.

No evidence has been presented here that proves that retired profs or people with full-time jobs elsewhere  teach better than freeway fliers. A person with a full time job and 'teaching a course or two on the side for extra money' as it's called, can easily have the same issue, shortage of available time. As for motivation, again, I hear lots of anecdotes and general characterizations from individual workplaces, but I see nothing substantive to show a pattern of shortcomings among the maligned freeway flier. I do, however, see a potential motive, that being to immobilize adjunct activism and thereby preserve the option of cheap disposable stigmatized professional instructors.

[Caracal]

Part-time faculty who will keep working for peanuts and complaining rather than leaving academia are also contributing.

I just don't think this makes any sense. It would be like blaming farmers for growing crops and thereby contributing to low crop prices. What are the farmers supposed to do? Yes, things would be better if there were fewer adjuncts (in fact as someone pointed out earlier, they are often better in areas where there aren't so many humanities Phds hanging around. I think that's part of the reason my conditions of employment are so much better than that of other adjuncts.) but if I decide to quit tomorrow and go work as a goat herder, it will change nothing about the overall picture.

The whole point of a complex modern system is that individual actions aren't going to make much difference and it is odd to expect people to make them based on "the market." People make decisions based on their own desires and their ability to make ends meet. This is the entire point of collective, governmental or institutional action of some sort to fix larger economic issues of fairness or untenable conditions.

[polly_mer]

But however you cut it, this is the sort of innovation I always wonder about.  We all know resources and budgets are limited.  What I don't know is why this problem seems so intractable given the intellectual power and creativity of the people it affects.

I spent a couple hours just this morning listing issues that are a bigger concern than the narrow focus on the current adjunct situation as well as the connections between those problems.  I am happy to have a discussion on any combination of those issues in great detail.

Why don't people just fix the adjunct army problem?  Because on the list of the 5-10 biggest problems facing any given institutions, having an adjunct army tends to be a symptom of serious underlying problems in other areas, not the primary driver.  Yes, for the individuals involved, the problems are clear and it seems like people who just understood the issue could roll up their sleeves and get it fixed.

However, if we're allocating resources to fundraising (i.e., hiring administrators to do the work or pushing damn hard on alumni/friends to do the legwork for free and then only  paying the experts to get contracts signed) to solve our problems, adjunct faculty pay is not going to be on anyone's list as the highest priorities as long as classes can be held in some manner.

Even at CUNY where the adjunct working conditions are making national news and have for a good month now, the priorities for the leaders can't be adjunct pay when a quick search brings up:

The same week the news about the college admissions scandal broke, the ceiling fell in during a colleague's class [at CUNY]. While thankfully no one got hurt, the room has been closed. The pipes are so compromised there's no guarantee it won't happen again.

...

Nearly a quarter of a million undergraduates attend the City University of New York, and they are caught in a vicious bind. Tuition for CUNY — which was free until 1975 — has risen by 31% since 2011. It now stands at $6,730 for full-time students at CUNY's senior colleges on top of the high costs of housing, food, transportation, books and other personal expenditures in New York City, where the majority of students attending CUNY come from families with incomes of $30,000 or less.

...

Cuomo has repeatedly refused to sign a Maintenance of Effort bill, which would at least keep funding for CUNY and SUNY in line with inflation. An $86 million gap has grown between the state's Tuition Assistance Program for CUNY's neediest students and the actual tuition fees, requiring CUNY colleges to cannibalize their own budgets to cover the shortfall. The state budget agreed to on March 31 promises more of the same: insufficient funding to cover rising costs, deferred maintenance and a desperately needed raise for adjunct instructors.

The results of this underfunding for students have been disastrous. Class sizes swell and resources are increasingly scarce. Over 20% of students report being unable to register for a course needed for graduation. As Barbara Bowen, head of CUNY's faculty and staff union puts it, under these shortfalls, "The City University of New York is reaching a breaking point."

Reference: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-the-true-crime-in-higher-education-20190402-xqdv2v22irao7c7pvatutyelke-story.html


Even with the huge army of adjuncts making well below poverty wages, the need is for more instructors to serve the students currently enrolled while somehow not raising the price.

And yet that underpaid army of adjuncts are performing miracles in crumbling buildings:

At Brooklyn College where we teach, we have seen first-hand the devastating consequences of the state's disinvestment. An anonymous instagram account Brokelyn College chronicles the ceiling leaks, broken toilets, busted pipes and other manifestations of decline. Where we work, the administration had to institute a near hiring freeze this year because there's no money to even replace faculty and staff who have left and retired — which has been part of a pattern of little hiring for years. (One department has lost six tenured or tenure-track professors in the past six years without hiring a single replacement.) Class sizes have been pushed up and up because there isn't enough money even for adjuncts (though adjuncts teach most classes and are paid the horrifying low rate of on average $3,500 per class), let alone the full-time faculty that students deserve. CUNY's 30,000 faculty and staff have been laboring without a contract for 16 months.

But what makes this financial neglect positively criminal from an economic justice perspective is the immense promise and transformation that CUNY embodies. Researchers studying how college enhances intergenerational mobility found that nine of the top 20 colleges nationwide that are actually succeeding in providing social mobility to their students were part of the City University. Brooklyn College came in eighth best in the nation.

...

Our students also tend to be poor — in one of the world's most expensive cities. Many suffer hunger and homelessness as college students ( a recent study found 48% of CUNY students experiencing food insecurity within the month and 14% homeless within the previous year), yet press forward determined to get an education.

...
Three years ago, we received a small pilot grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that allowed us to create a program to enable research opportunities and mentoring for transfer students. (Sixty percent of Brooklyn College students are transfer students, most from community colleges.) And even more amazing things ensued.

emphasis added
Reference: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-the-true-crime-in-higher-education-20190402-xqdv2v22irao7c7pvatutyelke-story.html

So, again, if we're looking at allocating resources to fundraise for Brooklyn College, addressing deferred maintenance, social services support so that students can focus on their studies, and pulling more miracles in terms of offering enough seats so students can progress in their educational paths in a timely manner are higher priorities than paying people who are doing excellent work more to do the same work.

It's not fair to the adjuncts or the students.  It's not just in any sense of the word, especially for any claims to a well-functioning society.  It's heartbreaking every day to know that the success stories in that system are more the equivalent of the daisy poking through broken cement than a typical experience for everyone involved.

And yet, from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, as long as miracle workers are regularly showing up and do the job at the current rates, then the other problems have to take priority for finding the resources to address them.  Those buildings are not getting any newer or magically repairing themselves.  Those students aren't getting any more privileged or better served by the also-seriously-overburdened K-12 system. 

mahagonny is correct that the only solution to the low pay for the adjunct army in many cases is collective action by the individuals involved.  If the miracles weren't being pulled off regularly, then the underpaid/poor working conditions for the adjunct army would rise to the level of being a driver instead of a symptom.

[polly_mer]

I'm not scrolling back and sorting out the quote function.  However, upthread someone made the standard comment related to overproduction of PhDs contributing to the adjunct army problem.

A fabulous, pro-labor article I encountered recently is titled The Decline of Faculty Tenure: Less From an Oversupply of PhDs, and More from the Systematic De-Valuation of the PhD as a Credential for College Teaching

This article makes a compelling case that the explosion in master's degrees awarded and then hiring those folks with the master's degrees to teach is a huge contributor to the adjunctificiation of certain fields.

People with PhDs not only face fierce competition for tenure track positions in their fields, but must also compete with doctoral students and people with terminal Masters degrees for teaching positions off the tenure track. This has effectively undermined the bargaining position of many people who receive PhDs, and reduced college student access to instructors who have ever published original scholarship in the fields that they teach in.

...

What observers like Jones overlook when they complain about the "preferences" of people with PhDs to accept poorly-paid, temporary work is that the vast majority of non-tenure track faculty do not have PhDs. During the 2003-4 school year, the last year for which there is reliable data on the subject, only 23 percent of all contingent college faculty in the U.S. had doctoral degrees.

...

People without PhDs are playing an enormous role in the academic job market. With 66 percent of all college faculty off the tenure track, and perhaps 23 percent of non-tenure track faculty holding PhDs, it is likely that more than 50 percent of all college faculty in the U.S. do not have doctoral degrees. They are the majority. Yet observers keep blaming people with PhDs for the decline of tenure, rather than analyzing how the decline of tenure has made a PhD increasingly superfluous for getting a job as a college instructor in the U.S..

The Loss of Bargaining Power for People with PhDs

By de-valuing the PhD as a credential for college instruction, college administrators have massively expanded the supply of job candidates, thereby allowing them to reduce teaching salaries to poverty wages.

...

So it really doesn't matter whether doctoral students and people with terminal Masters degrees are better or worse teachers than tenure track instructors. Nor does it matter that one may not need a PhD to teach introductory courses in Math, English composition, History, foreign languages, and other subjects that tend to be taught by non-tenure track faculty.

Higher education administrators and department chairs do not, for the most part, hire non-tenure track instructors for pedagogical reasons. They hire instructors who are ineligible for tenure— including graduate students from their own departments— because these instructors have less bargaining power than tenure track faculty to negotiate a decent salary.

...

The declining value of the PhD is not the primary cause of the decline of tenure (growing costs of education and declining public support to meet those costs are more significant). But opening faculty searches to people without PhDs facilitates the decline of tenure, because hiring instructors without PhDs undermines the bargaining power of all faculty, and thereby increases schools' financial incentive to hire faculty off the tenure track.

Reference: http://www.lawcha.org/2017/01/09/decline-faculty-tenure-less-oversupply-phds-systematic-de-valuation-phd-credential-college-teaching/

Discussion in the comments on https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/when-you-can-hire-within also tend to reinforce the situation that someone with a master's degree and substantial teaching experience can be fabulous in the classroom, but aren't the optimal choice for the full-time faculty position that includes substantial other duties, even at a teaching-only institution with a 5/5 load.

[mahagonny]

And yet that underpaid army of adjuncts are performing miracles in crumbling buildings:

...And now you're saying they are performing miracles. But you're generally maligning them all sorts of ways until someone who's pushing back (me) starts to get a little support.

So, to out it plainly, I don't think you can be part of a good discussion. And yet here and there you do post some plain truth.

How the buildings got to be crumbling, all of the dynamics involved, all of the bureaucrats who contributed but are not culpable and are just now deciding what to watch next on Netflix in the middle of a cozy retirement, is another discussion that needs to be had. But it's clear now that the crumbling buildings are helping to keep faculty labor costs down. Someone probably wins when this happens.
At some point the observer has got to look at the mess and say 'let's get this clock cleaned. Start with the people who are making a nice living here and whose decisions and rhetoric enhance their own earnings. You can't tell me there are none of those. You can't blame it all on the state legislature.'

Even at CUNY where the adjunct working conditions are making national news and have for a good month now, the priorities for the leaders can't be adjunct pay when a quick search brings up

They can easily be thinking 'disrespect for adjunct faculty has helped us in the past, no reason it shouldn't this time.'

[polly_mer]

Please make a case for paying people more for the same job when so many other problems exist.


A case can be made for paying more to bring terrible results up to satisfactory (e.g., no one will teach the class, the student outcomes are unacceptable due to huge classes or unqualified warm bodies).

What's the case for paying people more who won't quit/strike and yet get up every day and do an excellent job when so many other needs exist that will help support the students in their academic endeavors, including hiring more faculty for smaller classes or a wider variety of classes?

Remember, the point of a teaching school is to support student success, not provide jobs for faculty.

Also, we have evidence that the faculty at Brooklyn College are performing miracles.  We do not have similar evidence for warm body, death-marching adjuncts in general.

[mahagonny]

j

[mahagonny]

Remember, the point of a teaching school is to support student success, not provide jobs for faculty.

not quite:

"Tenure is a means to certain ends; specifically: (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society."

Also, we have evidence that the faculty at Brooklyn College are performing miracles.  We do not have similar evidence for warm body, death-marching adjuncts in general.

What we have is evidence that some people like, for instance,  you, who have populated administration are disdainful of adjunct faculty, want to bring pejorative terms in reference to them into circulation and work assiduously to accomplish that, as well as stifling and threatening any organized effort at advocacy on their behalf, etc. Management that fosters disrespect for faculty are at cross purposes for those who want a successful student experience.

As other forumites have stated, the policies that you promote will run higher education into the ground.