Admin! Speak up!

[marshwiggle]

1. there's nothing wrong with using this type of employment since it's OK with the people who accept it, and
2. Anyhow we use fewer adjuncts than that college across town that is run by a bunch of unscrupulous fools; I could never stand to use so many temporary faculty.

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.

Say we split that $8k, roughly half for the prep/lecture part and half for student grading. That amounts to $4k/30 = $133/hour of lecture.

Is $133 per hour of lecture to prep and deliver too low? If so, by how much?

For grading, that amounts to $4k/40 = $100/student for grading.

Is $100 per student for grading too low? If so, by how much?

Before you ask, there are the same slogans, signs, lapel pins and so on here complaining how woefully underpaid part-time faculty are.

I would truly like to hear in what way(s) I am underpaid, and how that should be explained to people who don't work in academia in a way that makes it obvious.

[Caracal]

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.

[/quote]

Oh, wow, this explains a lot. I don't think you are being underpaid (just curious is that in US dollars or Canadian, regardless, that is quite good)

You have to understand how much more you are making than is common in the US. I'm getting paid the maximum possible for an adjunct at my institution, plus a bonus if I teach a maximum load, which is dependent on none of my classes getting cancelled for low enrollment, and it ends up being a bit more than 4k per course. I'm pretty sure this is actually very good. I know amounts of 2k and under aren't unheard of. The only place I've made more was at a fancy SLAC that rarely employed adjuncts.

The actual pay is only part of the issue, though. The overall security and ties to the institution are a bigger problem. Up to this point, I keep getting courses, but it could all go away at any moment, for any reason, or no reason at all. I can only manage this level of uncertainty because I'm married to someone who makes more money.

[marshwiggle]

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.

Oh, wow, this explains a lot. I don't think you are being underpaid (just curious is that in US dollars or Canadian, regardless, that is quite good)

It's Canadian, but that's pretty common here. I seem to recall Janewales , who I believe lives in an entirely different part of the country, indicating a similar wage there.

You have to understand how much more you are making than is common in the US. I'm getting paid the maximum possible for an adjunct at my institution, plus a bonus if I teach a maximum load, which is dependent on none of my classes getting cancelled for low enrollment, and it ends up being a bit more than 4k per course. I'm pretty sure this is actually very good. I know amounts of 2k and under aren't unheard of. The only place I've made more was at a fancy SLAC that rarely employed adjuncts.

Yes, I've heard that. My point was that there is exactly the same complaining here about how poorly part-time people are paid. I'm sure if the pay per course were doubled that wouldn't change.

The actual pay is only part of the issue, though. The overall security and ties to the institution are a bigger problem. Up to this point, I keep getting courses, but it could all go away at any moment, for any reason, or no reason at all. I can only manage this level of uncertainty because I'm married to someone who makes more money.

And while some of that is due to things like full-time positions being split into part-time to save money, some of that uncertainty is why the positions are part-time in the first place; to handle things like sabbaticals and enrollment fluctuations, which by definition will not be permanent.

[Caracal]

Administrators exist in the same systems the rest of us do. They can't snap their fingers and fix everything. In many cases, the Dean of a College is not going to have much of an ability to do much about the conditions of adjunct employment. They have a budget and then they have to parcel that out to departments, who then have to figure out how to cover their classes. Often when those budgets get slashed, they are slashing adjunct budgets themselves, so there's obviously not a bunch of spare cash lying around to give adjuncts permanent positions.

What does bug me though is the general lack of urgency and imagination. College get wealthy donors to pay for all kinds of buildings and institutes. Couldn't you pitch the idea of funding permanent teaching positions to some rich people? What if you put it within the context of the need for more focus on teaching in colleges and combined it with some fancy sounding "innovative" program in issues of civic knowledge and engagement, or a grounding in the great texts, or whatever. Emphasize the idea that none of this works without dedicated teachers and right now there just aren't enough full time faculty members and that instead of having adjuncts you're going to have people permanently employed. Tell the rich people that everyone else is always funding some building, but this is a different approach towards investing in people. Use all the business speak you can.

I'm not suggesting that this is easy, or even that it would really solve problems of underfunding, but you just don't see much in the way of attempts to deal with the problem, which suggests to me that many administrators just don't much care.

[polly_mer]

Let's try something structured differently with a list of the concerns related to academia.  This is in minimal order because I have to go to work soon so I'm also not going to do a ton of links.  If you want it, then google it because these are not secrets.

Demographic shifts such that fewer 18-22 year old exist and will exist for a good decade in large parts of the country.  Even in the parts of the country where that population is growing, the shift is for the students to be more likely first-generation, non-traditional in some sense (e.g., working full-time, having substantial care taking responsibilities, enrolling as a part-time student even at age 18), and underprepared by their K-12 system, even for the highly motivated students.    For those who don't know, the current enrollment has about the same number of single parents as 18-22 year olds who are enrolled full-time and live on campus.

Related issues:

• The support mechanisms needed for these students to succeed mean a very different mindset for the institution.  Support mechanisms beyond tutoring and bridge programs may include child/elder care, curriculum that caters to part-time students, emergency funding for personal emergencies, connections that help get people into the system for food, shelter, and medical needs that takes into account the student situation, mentoring/counseling in how to best balance the needs of the family/community with the needs of being a student.
  
  
• Opportunities exist to enroll more veterans and returning students (either dropouts or people who want specific courses), but they tend to want and need something very different than a general education or major that assumes full-time enrollment by people learning to be adults.
  
  


• Increasingly large fractions of students pick a college based on geography.  Most people go within 50 miles of home if they can and that's hugely true for people who are bound by current family obligations and jobs.  Thus, individual institutions even in places with growing bigger-scale numbers of potential students may lose out because they are one of N institutions within a 100-mile radius with essentially the same mission and majors.
  
  

The faculty problem is complicated because the variations of needs across the fields is huge.  Some fields are regularly having failed TT searches, even at elite institutions, because of the mismatch between the number of openings and people who want to be academics, while other fields have armies of underpaid adjuncts who could be consolidated into full-time teaching positions

The people who are at the top of a medium-to-large-sized university will hear both situations regularly and have to weigh some trade-offs.  One consideration that comes heavily into play is whether to shift the money in an effort to fill that TT position next time because students are being turned away due to lack of space (i.e., we're losing tuition money now and alumni donations later) or whether one shores up a general education program that isn't currently great, but isn't so bad that students are leaving in droves and citing general education as the reason.

Related issues:

• Service including shared governance obligations often need representatives from the whole breadth of the university.  Converting the adjunct armies to full-time faculty will not fix the field representation problems related to having specific diverse experiences.  That one woman in electrical engineering (a department of only 20 faculty) will still be tapped far more frequently than individual women in English (a department of 80 with more than half the professors being women).  Retention of faculty from underrepresented groups is a huge problem in some fields because of the disparity in service loads.
  
  
• Spending more money to get big-picture-similar results is always going to lose to spending money to get almost immediate improvement in tracked numbers.  Increasing the overall enrollment by bringing in new students will always win when budgets are tight and money is allocated.
  
  
• The pipeline problem in CS and certain engineering specialities gets huge attention in political circles at all levels.  Money exists to help with pipeline problems and people will get good political capital for using those funds.  The reliance on foreign nationals who increasingly take their excellent graduate educations back to their home countries instead of staying here as either academics fixing our faculty shortage problems or become US citizens to support our research needs in specific technical areas is cresting at an alarming rate.  In addition, foreign national enrollment is declining in part because other parts of the world also now have excellent programs. 
  
  Time was that any US degree was viewed as a benefit to an individual to get a job back home.  Now, with the global changes to higher ed including more welcoming policies in first-world, non-US countries as well as a rise in elite and next tier universities in China and India, many Chinese and Indian students coming to the US either are doing so for one of our elite educations or because they couldn't get into a good enough institution at home and they can get into a good enough institution here.
  
  

The diversity of US higher ed institutions means that the priorities of various issues will take on a very different ranking at individual institutions.  For example, the tiny (under 1000 students and a semester course roster that is under 20 total pages) institution in the Midwest or Northeast that is faced with a dying region with few employers is unlikely to be faced with the adjunct army problem.  Instead, they are much more likely to be faced with the problem of being unable to staff the majors that students want by being uncompetitive on the national scale, even for fields that nationally have favorable-to-the-institution ratios of qualified people wanting jobs and jobs available.  For example, Super Dinky almost had a failed English search one year, despite never having a problem getting professional fellows to cover the occasional course.

The isolated community college may be able to financially hire full-time faculty for nearly everything, but also find themselves unable to get faculty in certain fields willing to live close enough to do face-to-face courses or may fill out a lot of paperwork with the accreditor for people who have content knowledge, but not the expected graduate education.  Because of the geographic limitations, if the CC goes the distance ed route, local students who do a little research are much more likely to go with a good national distance education program that invested substantial resources into an administratively pleasant experience over the home-grown version.

The research-intensive institutions may encounter a conflict between their research mission (AKA we need the best faculty we can get and the graduate students/postdocs/technicians/assistants they will attract and support) and undergraduate teaching mission.  The adjunct army for general education is likely to be a concern here, but again the large-scale trade-off between doing what's necessary to get that star faculty member who will head a 20-person research group with a couple million dollars in funding every year versus converting a few people to have slightly better undergraduate general education tends to not go in favor of conversion of the army.

The seriously-underfunded urban community college that runs extensively on the revolving-door adjunct army may still be faced with several higher priorities than conversion to provide stability for faculty and students.  For example, deferred maintenance can hit a point such people with options will enroll at some other institution (usually readily available in an large urban area), which exacerbates the underfunded problem for all funding that comes on a per-head basis.  These are the institutions hit the hardest with needing to be holistic in supporting students who are food insecure, housing insecure, attending part-time, and needing emergency funds because of their complicated and precarious situations.  That's additional staff and overhead to ensure that students don't drop out or fail due to non-academic reasons. However, academic deficiencies cannot be ignored and also require hiring more people in tutoring centers and other student success areas to directly support individual students.  Even with the single mission of teaching students, the classroom instruction can't be the primary focus for optimization for folks who have data on the big picture.

The regional comprehensive may end up with several combinations of the problems.  The RCs often have the geographic problem of not pulling students from much farther than 100 mile radius, possibly in a dying region, and yet will lose geographically-bound students to good national online options.  The RCs may not be competitive on salary, resources, or quality of life for research-focused faculty in fields that have a national favorable-to-the-faculty-member mismatch between qualified people who want to be academics and numbers of TT jobs.  Even within the region, the RCs may not be competitive for faculty who have good non-academic options as well as desire to live in the region.  That's a huge problem for popular majors like nursing and business where students want to stay in the region and will go to a good enough local option and yet the RC has to turn people away due to staffing deficiencies.

Paradoxically, the RCs may have an adjunct army that includes a mix of convertible positions staffed with highly qualified individuals, stop-gap/last-minute positions staffed with slightly under-qualified-on-paper individuals who are working hard for low pay, and hard-to-fill positions that are only being staffed by generous volunteers who know the content, but had to have extensive paperwork filled to be deemed qualified.  Thus, knowing all the adjunct army problems and feeling general education pain in some cases that would be better solved by hiring full-time on a national market may still lead to different priorities because, if the RCs don't fix the enrollment problems by hiring TT (or at least full-time, permanent enough) faculty in certain fields, then the adjunct army will solve itself as the demand for general education drops precipitously.

Changes in what people expect from college education tend to lead to significant value conflicts on where to put resources.  The complaint from many faculty is that college is not a business and money shouldn't be the primary driver.  Well, that's true enough and I'm a big fan of Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

However, as one of my colleagues put it "Having a buffet of kale, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts as our main advertisement has a pretty limited market since students can vote with their feet.  We'd be much better off being a bigger buffet like Golden Corral and having free kale etc. with every plate purchased."

I harp on general education a lot because I've worked at various institutional types.  A true liberal arts eduction (1/3 credits in major, 1/3 credits in general education, 1/3 credits in fabulous, freely chosen electives) is indeed a fabulous thing for which the higher education community should fight hard.  However, that's not the only education worth having and is an increasingly small portion of the undergraduate degrees being earned.

The general education specifics (which fields?  what lofty goals?  What counts as meeting one of the N sectors?) to generate an acceptable pick-a-mix list are almost completely irrelevant for a curriculum that contains six or fewer actual choices for either general education requirements or genuinely free electives.  That's the case for many of the preprofessional programs (e.g., nursing, engineering, social work, education).  We need people educated in those areas and extending time to degree because those programs don't look like liberal arts education is shooting ourselves in the foot as a society. 


We also shoot ourselves in the foot when we spend a lot of resources on the adjunct army faculty side of the equation without asking questions like:

* What happens if we reduce the list from 27 choices for the sake of choice to the number of full sections we can staff with the full-time faculty we have?

* What happens if we do better scheduling so that the choices are more reflective of true choices by the students instead of whatever fits in the required schedule based on when faculty wanted to teach?

* What happens if we continue down the path of admitting substantial fractions of students who have already met most of their general education requirements using AP/dual credit/IB/CLEP so we might still want 27 choices overall, but we only need 8 sections of anything in a given term?

While it's certainly true that eliminating established programs in favor of standing up brand-new, flavor-of-the-month student attractors is a bad idea all around, it's also a bad idea to insist that, because a field is valuable in its own right, the local specific program must be propped up at all costs or else the barbarians have overrun the civilization and all is lost.  We must look at the trade-offs that include accounting for how people are voting with their feet away from certain programs and towards other programs.  At this particular institution, if a program has too few takers for the major and even people with choices are opting out of the general education requirements, then reallocating those resources including faculty lines is a better institutional long-term solution even though individuals lose their jobs and those individuals would much rather that other choices be made.

[polly_mer]

What does bug me though is the general lack of urgency and imagination. College get wealthy donors to pay for all kinds of buildings and institutes. Couldn't you pitch the idea of funding permanent teaching positions to some rich people? What if you put it within the context of the need for more focus on teaching in colleges and combined it with some fancy sounding "innovative" program in issues of civic knowledge and engagement, or a grounding in the great texts, or whatever. Emphasize the idea that none of this works without dedicated teachers and right now there just aren't enough full time faculty members and that instead of having adjuncts you're going to have people permanently employed. Tell the rich people that everyone else is always funding some building, but this is a different approach towards investing in people. Use all the business speak you can.

The folks who have rich people's ears are generally not the people in charge of the institutions that have the underpaid adjunct armies with students who are reliant on close-enough-to-free to be affordable.  The wealthy donors tend to give money to their alma maters and the places that have their colleagues, friends, and others in the social networks.

The community college that is staffing with almost exclusively adjuncts in crumbling buildings with students who are there hoping for a path to a better life tends to have much less philanthropic activity (may not even have a department for institutional advancement/giving/fundraising) of any kind.  They aren't getting wealthy donors who are choosing naming rights for a building over supporting quality teaching.

Also, having spent quality time with the fundraising literature and colleagues in the giving world, asking individual potential donors for operational funds is a bad idea that tends to backfire.  Operational funds come from grants or appropriations along with user fees (tuition etc. in this case); charitable giving is for something you can't otherwise do or an unexpected emergency like rebuilding from the natural disaster to augment insurance funds.  Most people will wonder what you're doing wrong if you can't meet basic operational budget through the standard funding means, whether that's scaling back to fit within the appropriation + tuition budget, being better at estimating cost/revenue to adjust streams over which you have control, or spending more quality time with the appropriators/grant foundations to make a better case for why you need more money.

[Caracal]

And while some of that is due to things like full-time positions being split into part-time to save money, some of that uncertainty is why the positions are part-time in the first place; to handle things like sabbaticals and enrollment fluctuations, which by definition will not be permanent.

Sure, but that isn't the reality most of the time. I've been teaching at the same place for 5 years and I've taught 3-4 courses every semester. That's good for me, but it sure seems like there is a continuing need for someone to teach these courses. The institution is employing me as an adjunct rather than full time, so that they can avoid giving me benefits and so that they can ditch me at any moment if circumstances require it. That might be fine if I was an engineer drilling for natural gas in Oklahoma, but I'd argue that for a non profit institution that is supposed to exist to educate students it all produces some less than desirable outcomes.

[marshwiggle]

And while some of that is due to things like full-time positions being split into part-time to save money, some of that uncertainty is why the positions are part-time in the first place; to handle things like sabbaticals and enrollment fluctuations, which by definition will not be permanent.

Sure, but that isn't the reality most of the time. I've been teaching at the same place for 5 years and I've taught 3-4 courses every semester. That's good for me, but it sure seems like there is a continuing need for someone to teach these courses. The institution is employing me as an adjunct rather than full time, so that they can avoid giving me benefits and so that they can ditch me at any moment if circumstances require it. That might be fine if I was an engineer drilling for natural gas in Oklahoma, but I'd argue that for a non profit institution that is supposed to exist to educate students it all produces some less than desirable outcomes.

But that's the problem; as long as there are competent, dedicated people like you that they can hire right now, is it likely the outcomes would improve significantly if they increased the pay substantially? Anyone who gets hired who is a disaster won't be rehired, but anyone who has a decent job is likely to be. Unless there is evidence that someone significantly better would be available for a higher price, then there are probably other budget areas that the money can be put into for a visible improvement.

At the risk of sounding like a cold hard capitalist, as long as there is an oversupply of decent candidates at low prices, there is no incentive to pay more. However, if the supply of decent, available candidates dried up, then the price would have to rise in order to fill the positions. So producing fewer PhDs and getting more people to find jobs outside academia is necessary to improve conditions for those that are left.

[mahagonny]

And while some of that is due to things like full-time positions being split into part-time to save money, some of that uncertainty is why the positions are part-time in the first place; to handle things like sabbaticals and enrollment fluctuations, which by definition will not be permanent.

Sure, but that isn't the reality most of the time. I've been teaching at the same place for 5 years and I've taught 3-4 courses every semester. That's good for me, but it sure seems like there is a continuing need for someone to teach these courses. The institution is employing me as an adjunct rather than full time, so that they can avoid giving me benefits and so that they can ditch me at any moment if circumstances require it. That might be fine if I was an engineer drilling for natural gas in Oklahoma, but I'd argue that for a non profit institution that is supposed to exist to educate students it all produces some less than desirable outcomes.

But that's the problem; as long as there are competent, dedicated people like you that they can hire right now, is it likely the outcomes would improve significantly if they increased the pay substantially? Anyone who gets hired who is a disaster won't be rehired, but anyone who has a decent job is likely to be. Unless there is evidence that someone significantly better would be available for a higher price, then there are probably other budget areas that the money can be put into for a visible improvement.

At the risk of sounding like a cold hard capitalist, as long as there is an oversupply of decent candidates at low prices, there is no incentive to pay more. However, if the supply of decent, available candidates dried up, then the price would have to rise in order to fill the positions. So producing fewer PhDs and getting more people to find jobs outside academia is necessary to improve conditions for those that are left.

And at the risk of sounding like an anarchist and a philistine, taking tenure out the picture means improved solidarity and real addressing of pay equity concerns.

[Caracal]

The folks who have rich people's ears are generally not the people in charge of the institutions that have the underpaid adjunct armies with students who are reliant on close-enough-to-free to be affordable.  The wealthy donors tend to give money to their alma maters and the places that have their colleagues, friends, and others in the social networks.

The community college that is staffing with almost exclusively adjuncts in crumbling buildings with students who are there hoping for a path to a better life tends to have much less philanthropic activity (may not even have a department for institutional advancement/giving/fundraising) of any kind.  They aren't getting wealthy donors who are choosing naming rights for a building over supporting quality teaching.

Also, having spent quality time with the fundraising literature and colleagues in the giving world, asking individual potential donors for operational funds is a bad idea that tends to backfire.  Operational funds come from grants or appropriations along with user fees (tuition etc. in this case); charitable giving is for something you can't otherwise do or an unexpected emergency like rebuilding from the natural disaster to augment insurance funds.  Most people will wonder what you're doing wrong if you can't meet basic operational budget through the standard funding means, whether that's scaling back to fit within the appropriation + tuition budget, being better at estimating cost/revenue to adjust streams over which you have control, or spending more quality time with the appropriators/grant foundations to make a better case for why you need more money.

You have a lot more expertise in fundraising than I do, and these are valid points. That said, people endow professorships all the time. The Mellon foundation endows them all over the country. We have massive inequality in this country right now and a ton of really rich people. The point about a lot of this philanthropy going to places that don't need the money is well taken, but there are also a lot of big regional schools in wealthy regions with growing populations. Again, couldn't you pitch someone on the idea that they are going to do something radically different? Look, relying on wealthy donors brings its own problems, and is not going to fix this problem by itself. The point though is that I don't see people even trying. Instead, everyone seems content to just throw up their hands and decide that it doesn't really matter if students get a decent comprehensive education anywhere but at fancy elite schools.

[mahagonny]

The folks who have rich people's ears are generally not the people in charge of the institutions that have the underpaid adjunct armies with students who are reliant on close-enough-to-free to be affordable.  The wealthy donors tend to give money to their alma maters and the places that have their colleagues, friends, and others in the social networks.

The community college that is staffing with almost exclusively adjuncts in crumbling buildings with students who are there hoping for a path to a better life tends to have much less philanthropic activity (may not even have a department for institutional advancement/giving/fundraising) of any kind.  They aren't getting wealthy donors who are choosing naming rights for a building over supporting quality teaching.

Also, having spent quality time with the fundraising literature and colleagues in the giving world, asking individual potential donors for operational funds is a bad idea that tends to backfire.  Operational funds come from grants or appropriations along with user fees (tuition etc. in this case); charitable giving is for something you can't otherwise do or an unexpected emergency like rebuilding from the natural disaster to augment insurance funds.  Most people will wonder what you're doing wrong if you can't meet basic operational budget through the standard funding means, whether that's scaling back to fit within the appropriation + tuition budget, being better at estimating cost/revenue to adjust streams over which you have control, or spending more quality time with the appropriators/grant foundations to make a better case for why you need more money.

You have a lot more expertise in fundraising than I do, and these are valid points. That said, people endow professorships all the time. The Mellon foundation endows them all over the country. We have massive inequality in this country right now and a ton of really rich people. The point about a lot of this philanthropy going to places that don't need the money is well taken, but there are also a lot of big regional schools in wealthy regions with growing populations. Again, couldn't you pitch someone on the idea that they are going to do something radically different? Look, relying on wealthy donors brings its own problems, and is not going to fix this problem by itself. The point though is that I don't see people even trying. Instead, everyone seems content to just throw up their hands and decide that it doesn't really matter if students get a decent comprehensive education anywhere but at fancy elite schools.

As Marshwiggle pointed out, your school and your students are already getting decent service from you. And, I'll add,  if anyone wonders about that, they can look at your student  evaluations of faculty performance.
The way things are set up, if there's any new money on the horizon, the tenure track will be getting there first and will give the donor the best opportunity for having his donation recognized.
Adjunct advocacy is in a Catch-22 situation. If the teaching is considered not good enough, it doesn't warrant better pay. If it's excellent, then the system is working great at keeping costs down.

[tuxthepenguin]

as long as there is an oversupply of decent candidates at low prices

That's true of some fields and some locations. The problem is that the "let's hire the cheapest warm body we can get to fill out the semester's schedule" mentality can be found in metropolitan areas with fewer than 2 million people and outside the humanities. I don't doubt that you can put together a decent set of offerings in philosophy in NYC based solely on low-paid adjunct labor. That's not what's causing the problem.

The term "physics envy" has been around for a long time. I'd suggest deans have "big city humanities envy" when it comes to staffing decisions.

[FishProf]

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?

[Wahoo Redux]

The folks who have rich people's ears are generally not the people in charge of the institutions that have the underpaid adjunct armies with students who are reliant on close-enough-to-free to be affordable.  The wealthy donors tend to give money to their alma maters and the places that have their colleagues, friends, and others in the social networks.

The community college that is staffing with almost exclusively adjuncts in crumbling buildings with students who are there hoping for a path to a better life tends to have much less philanthropic activity (may not even have a department for institutional advancement/giving/fundraising) of any kind.  They aren't getting wealthy donors who are choosing naming rights for a building over supporting quality teaching.

Also, having spent quality time with the fundraising literature and colleagues in the giving world, asking individual potential donors for operational funds is a bad idea that tends to backfire.  Operational funds come from grants or appropriations along with user fees (tuition etc. in this case); charitable giving is for something you can't otherwise do or an unexpected emergency like rebuilding from the natural disaster to augment insurance funds.  Most people will wonder what you're doing wrong if you can't meet basic operational budget through the standard funding means, whether that's scaling back to fit within the appropriation + tuition budget, being better at estimating cost/revenue to adjust streams over which you have control, or spending more quality time with the appropriators/grant foundations to make a better case for why you need more money.

You have a lot more expertise in fundraising than I do, and these are valid points. That said, people endow professorships all the time. The Mellon foundation endows them all over the country. We have massive inequality in this country right now and a ton of really rich people. The point about a lot of this philanthropy going to places that don't need the money is well taken, but there are also a lot of big regional schools in wealthy regions with growing populations. Again, couldn't you pitch someone on the idea that they are going to do something radically different? Look, relying on wealthy donors brings its own problems, and is not going to fix this problem by itself. The point though is that I don't see people even trying. Instead, everyone seems content to just throw up their hands and decide that it doesn't really matter if students get a decent comprehensive education anywhere but at fancy elite schools.

Polly, I appreciate it when you make sane remarks.  Thank you.  However, what you are arguing is this is how it has been done, therefore it is how it is done.

The suggestion, which seems like a good one, is to figure out how to do it in the future.

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. 

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.

[hazelshade]

That said, people endow professorships all the time. The Mellon foundation endows them all over the country.

This is...a little strong. By my count, Mellon has endowed three professorships in the past ten years (at Morehouse, Rutgers-Newark, and Rutgers-New Brunswick). Also, based on my understanding of endowment payout rates and likely salaries for the positions that were funded, I'm guessing that the Mellon grants did not cover the full cost of endowing the position; grantee institutions probably had to put up a similar amount of money. (I wouldn't be surprised if they had to match the endowment 1:1, which is pretty common for Mellon endowment grants.) There's been a pretty significant shift away from endowments (and capital grants) among a lot of major foundations over the past twenty years, and a lot of the funders that *do* still endow positions (like Mellon) work only with a selected list of schools and won't accept unsolicited applications. Individual donors for endowed professorships don't grow on trees either (and are more likely to be available to wealthy, well-resourced institutions with a substantial base of rich alumni). I'm not saying that endowing chairs isn't a possibility, but it's very difficult; it's not for lack of trying that more institutions aren't getting lots of endowments to support faculty lines.