

The Tall Task of Unifying Part-Time Professors - Futurebot
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/the-tall-task-of-unifying-part-time-professors/385507/?single_page=true

======
philwelch
It's amazing how many people don't understand as simple a concept as supply
and demand.

There are lots and lots of people not only qualified to be academics, but
actively trying to break into the field. There is relatively little demand for
academic work. While tenure track professors can earn a decently reliable
income, the fact that it's possible (however unlikely) for a given Ph.D to get
that level of job security fills thousands of grad students and Ph.D's with
false hope. So, just like people trying to break into Hollywood, they race to
the bottom to accept shittier and shittier adjunct jobs. This is the world's
way of telling them that maybe they should go find something else to do for a
living.

The only sustainable solutions will address the supply and demand issue:

1\. Create more demand for academic work. For the sciences, this is actually a
decent idea. I'm sure we could triple public spending on basic sciences and
get enough socially useful return on it to justify the expenditure. A little
harder to justify for the humanities.

2\. Reduce the supply of academics. Produce fewer Ph.D's. Then the remaining
Ph.D's will have the leverage to dictate better compensation, because they
will be harder to replace.

~~~
dalke
The article was clear that it isn't so simple. "“Ballooning administrative and
capital costs, seldom related to the core mission of higher ed, far outpace
instructional costs,” ... "High-profile spending has turned into a higher-
education arms race, with universities pouring money into buildings,
technology, academic star power, and administrative costs. Trevithick stressed
that he believes this is the most relevant point of all—that universities
aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t want to, not because
they can’t."

Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to
continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare =>
no improvement in the adjunct situation.

How do you even go about doing #2? Put a law in place capping the maximum
number of PhDs per school? Push for an increase in technical colleges, career
colleges, and other colleges without the liberal arts degree or graduate
courses? Does that mean a retired person interested in learning for the sake
of learning, who wants access to the research culture and resources, might be
denied entry to a PhD program for fear of taking an adjunct position in the
future?

So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage and
health care coverage? Collective bargaining is a perfectly reasonable free
market mechanism. If 75% of the teachers are adjuncts, and in the middle of a
term 95% of them strike over demonstrably poor treatment, then it will be hard
for the university to get the scab workers to finish off the term.

Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead.
[http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all)
(and others) point out that administrative costs have grown while academic
costs have decreased, as a percentage of the budget. As a simplistic solution,
require that there cannot be more administrative staff than teaching staff.
This is all too easily gamed to be a realistic solution.

~~~
philwelch
"Trevithick stressed that he believes this is the most relevant point of
all—that universities aren’t paying fair wages to adjuncts because they don’t
want to, not because they can’t."

They could pay adjuncts more money if they had to, but why would they if they
didn't have to? That's not how supply and demand works!

> Suppose we do #1. The easy university response for increased demand is to
> continue to hire adjuncts below the 30 hours per week limit for Obamacare =>
> no improvement in the adjunct situation.

#1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences.

> How do you even go about doing #2?

Reduce or eliminate federal student loans for graduate degrees in non-
essential subjects.

#2 already does itself, in a sense; I made the perfectly reasonable life
decision to become a software engineer instead of a philosopher because
philosophy isn't a very promising career. I know another philosopher who even
went to grad school before ending up making the same decision.

You might ask, well why don't all the adjuncts just learn to do something
useful for a living instead of being adjuncts? The reason is, if you major in
a purely academic major (I'm going to pick on philosophy because that was my
major but there are many others), you can easily get into a bubble where the
only people in your field are academics, and you start to think that your only
option is to become an academic yourself. Professors will actually encourage
you to go to grad school. You will go to grad school, get your Ph.D., and
still have this mistaken impression that becoming a philosopher is a
reasonable career decision because you've spent your entire adult life working
towards that goal. But the only work you can get in that career is as an
adjunct. You spend more and more years with the mistaken impression that you
can get a tenure track position, somehow, somewhere, until you're in your 30's
or 40's and have no useful professional skills. If you don't figure out in
undergrad that the world isn't especially willing to pay for more
philosophers, you get stuck in a career trap of trying to become a
philosopher. You end up being the academic equivalent of a minor league
baseball player or an aspiring actor who's scraping by with nothing or waiting
tables in Los Angeles--someone who thought they could make it big but it never
happened. The difference being, if you're a major league baseball player or a
Hollywood actor, you make millions of dollars. If you're a tenured professor
in philosophy, you make a middle-class income in whatever town happens to have
the state university that happened to hire you.

> So why not #3: unionize, with union contracts which require a working wage
> and health care coverage?

Unionization only works when the union has monopoly power over the source of
labor. Adjuncts are easily replaceable--that's why they already get paid shit.
Unions only work when there's a barrier to entry. If one doesn't naturally
exist, what happens is that the union _itself_ becomes the barrier to entry.

If you're going to erect barriers to entry then the best option is to just
limit the use of adjunct faculty in the first place and open more tenure-track
positions to replace them.

> Or #4: place a limit on how much can be spent on administrative overhead.

It's not like the money is just going to magically go to the faculty, and if
it did, it would go to the tenured faculty, not the adjuncts.

~~~
dalke
"#1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences"

I disagree. Why do people go to college? From what I've read, under the GI
bill, a lot of people went to college because it was a place to learn. College
was cheap - a minimum wage summer job was enough to pay for a year of college
even for those without the GI bill. (Colleges were also much more
discriminatory, including based on race, ethnicity, and class. But that's a
different story.)

Starting in the 1970s colleges were increasingly defunded by the states, often
explicitly as a way to stifle left-wing professors and students, who come more
often from humanities than science. There's been a push since then to say that
people should go to college for vocational reasons. "I'll get a better job
with a college" was the thought. As you point out, this then gets turned into
"I need to get a loan to get the degree, and the better job will pay off the
loan."

(The college deferment for the draft no doubt also played a role.)

The hard sciences exception (and you should add engineering) has the twin
advantages that 1) engineers and hard scientists tend to be less interested in
history, politics, and the other fields which focus more on the human
condition, and 2) the extra training actually is important for a job in those
fields, so companies can outsource training to the colleges, who then demand
money from the students for the privilege.

So, #1 could change if we (magically?) change our minds and insist that a
college education is for higher learning, and that companies pay for job
training, not students. It would also change if the government were to fund
all higher education directly.

I'm not holding my breath.

In any case, even if #1 changes, I don't think it would change the adjunct
situation.

FWIW, based on this article about U. Chicago
[http://chicagomaroon.com/2013/06/04/harboring-the-
humanities...](http://chicagomaroon.com/2013/06/04/harboring-the-humanities/)
, the percent of humanities undergrad degrees has actually increased over the
last 10 years. "In Spring 2012, 3.7 percent of all degrees in the College were
awarded in philosophy, up from 2.5 percent a decade ago" despite that "Forbes
Magazine ranks philosophy the fourth least lucrative major, with an
unemployment rate of 10.8 percent for recent graduates". And the number of
humanities graduate students is going down.

I don't know if that's typical or not. If it is typical, then it suggests that
#2 is not occurring.

As someone who was in the hard sciences, I was told there will always be jobs
for people trained in physics. Then near the end of my undergrad I started
reading articles about how perhaps there were too many people trained in
physics.

This graph - [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-
phd-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/the-phd-bust-
americas-awful-market-for-young-scientists-in-7-charts/273339/) \- shows
"employment at graduation" for different categories of PhD. The trend seems to
be that in the hard sciences there are fewer real jobs, and more post-doc (the
research equivalent to the adjunct professor) positions.

So it's not clear to me that there's significant safety in the hard sciences.
It looks like engineering is the best bet.

Regarding #3, what you said is of course true. Mine laborers are also easily
replaced, as are garment workers, teamsters, shoemakers, and . There's a well-
known solution; unionize and require it be a union shop. This of course won't
work in so-called "right-to-work" states, which I consider them to be anti-
free market laws.

You're right in proposing a #5, to "just limit the use of adjunct faculty in
the first place and open more tenure-track positions to replace them." I'm
pretty sure that those working as adjuncts now would be fine if there were
more openings for tenure-track positions and fewer adjunct positions, just
like post-docs would be happy if there were more tenure track positions and
fewer post-doc positions.

Being stuck in limbo is frustrating. My problem with your #5 is that many
politicians and members of the public already believe that the major increase
in university costs is due to professors' salaries, when all evidence says
this isn't the case. #5 does nothing to improve the dynamics. Neither does #3.

Any any case, #4/#5/passing a law seems only slightly more unlikely than
#3/unionization.

Yes, my #4 is not going to work. But I think your objection is equally
simplistic. The Washington Monthly article I linked to observes:

> While some administrative posts continue to be held by senior professors on
> a part-time basis, their ranks are gradually dwindling as their jobs are
> taken over by fulltime managers. College administrations frequently tout the
> fiscal advantages of using part-time, “adjunct” faculty to teach courses.
> They fail, however, to apply the same logic to their own ranks. Over the
> past thirty years, the percentage of faculty members who are hired on a
> part-time basis has increased so dramatically that today almost half of the
> nation’s professors work only part-time. And yet the percentage of
> administrators who are part-time employees has fallen during the same time
> period.

You said that "you can easily get into a bubble where ...". The same is true
of administrators. They can get into the same bubble regarding other
administrators. Senior professors help pierce the bubble.

You're right though that if 10% of the non-teaching staff could be cut then
there's no direct mechanism for "magic" transfer of funds. There's an indirect
one, in that tenure/tenure-track professors and adjunct staff are much more
likely to be co-workers, if not friends.

If those professors have a more direct role in the workings of the university
then the same birds-of-a-feather mentality which currently keeps "armies of
functionaries—vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice
presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts,
deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants"
with their funding suggests that a similar bubble kinship might improve the
life of adjunct staff.

That may just be wishful thinking.

~~~
philwelch
> "#1 is unsustainable outside of the hard sciences"

> I disagree. Why do people go to college? From what I've read, under the GI
> bill, a lot of people went to college because it was a place to learn.
> College was cheap - a minimum wage summer job was enough to pay for a year
> of college even for those without the GI bill. (Colleges were also much more
> discriminatory, including based on race, ethnicity, and class. But that's a
> different story.)

You're talking about teaching, which is one side of it. The other side is
research. The real ambition for anyone with a Ph.D is to land a tenure-track
position, or at least a researching position, and so the only way to increase
demand for these people is to increase the level of research being done. I
think you could triple the amount of research being done in the hard sciences
without even coming close to diminishing returns. Increasing research in the
humanities would not be nearly as useful for society; arguably we've already
reached and exceeded the point of diminishing returns there.

You could do something more fundamental that decouples research and teaching,
but that would be a disservice, particularly in the humanities. Some of my
best (undergraduate!) philosophy classes were the ones that tied into the
current state of the art in my professors' research. (In the sciences this is
less of a concern, probably because the foundations of the sciences are on
much firmer ground. Our understanding of graph theory is a lot more certain
than our understanding of free will.)

> ... And the number of humanities graduate students is going down. I don't
> know if that's typical or not. If it is typical, then it suggests that #2 is
> not occurring.

"The number of humanities graduate students going down" is exactly what I
meant by #2, at least in part.

> Regarding #3, what you said is of course true. Mine laborers are also easily
> replaced, as are garment workers, teamsters, shoemakers, and . There's a
> well-known solution; unionize and require it be a union shop. This of course
> won't work in so-called "right-to-work" states, which I consider them to be
> anti-free market laws.

They're anti-free-market laws in the exact same way antitrust laws are anti-
free-market. In any case, that doesn't really solve the basic problem, it just
weeds people out from academic careers earlier on, in a much more final way,
instead of letting them float around in a limbo between success and failure.

Besides, I'm skeptical that unions will help. There are unions for baseball
players and Hollywood actors, and that doesn't stop people from scraping by
trying to break into those fields.

Introducing a union also has the downside of adding another layer of
bureaucracy into the mix, and judging from the entire rest of your comment it
sounds like you're not fond of added bureaucracy. (Who is, really?) Besides,
it really is just that simple: lots and lots of people volunteer to be part-
time professors at shitty pay rates, and almost no one volunteers to be a
part-time bureaucrat at shitty pay rates.

~~~
dalke
"The real ambition for anyone with a Ph.D is to land a tenure-track position,
or at least a researching position"

I agree that those are important factors. But I also think of an English
teacher of mine in high school who worked on and got a PhD, and stayed as a
teacher. As for me, I am thinking (I'm in my 40s) to go grad school because
there is a specific research topic I want to work on, concerning to the
historical development of the field I've been working in for the last 15
years, and there are a couple of university departments which specialize in
the topic, which would give me better access to historical materials and
better networking.

For what it's worth, I develop software for pharmaceutical research, where
most of the jobs are in industry, and most of my users have a PhD in
chemistry. Which means that you're right that for most PhDs I know, the PhD is
a union card of sorts for a job in their field of interest. On the other hand,
that's not always the end goal. A number of pharmaceutical and biotech
companies are run by PhDs, who switched from research to management.

"Increasing research in the humanities would not be nearly as useful for
society"

This is only meaningful in the context where the government funds the
research, right? If someone funds their own PhD program then why should
society care?

"exactly what I meant by #2, at least in part"

Ahh, yes. I was thinking about how the increasing number of undergrads would
lead to more adjunct positions, but likely not significantly improve their
wages. Adjuncts don't tend to teach grad students. But you are right; wait
about 30 years for the current generation of PhDs to diminish, and there will
be a smaller supply.

"the exact same way antitrust laws are anti-free-market"

Exactly! That's why I don't think supply and demand is 'simple', as you called
it; there are a lot of ways to tweak the supply and demand, and the market
will respond to those new conditions.

For me, limbo is a worse state than success or failure, so I think an earlier
final decision is better. But I can't speak on that for all.

(Also, I would prefer national health care, which would also help the adjunct
situation.)

"I'm skeptical that unions will help"

Oh, I am as well. Unions have been pretty well defanged in the US, with few
exceptions. But it's at least as reasonable as your #1. :)

I don't think you should consider an adjunct position as "breaking into" the
field of teaching. It is teaching. Some of the adjuncts have more teaching
experience and are better teachers than the professors, and get paid far less.

You structure it as "volunteering", but that could be said of almost any
position. Mine workers, if paid less, are volunteering their time to the
company, no? Lilly Ledbetter, who was paid less than her male co-workers for
decades, was really just volunteering to work at a lower rate. That's a
stretch; she specifically didn't know what her co-workers were being paid, but
in other positions it used to be explicit that men were paid more than women
for the same job. So were the women volunteering their extra work to the
company?

As a member of several organizations, including the Python Software Foundation
(a multi-million dollar non-profit), I know quite a few people who are part-
time bureaucrats for no pay.

------
fsk
That's one reason I dropped out of a PhD program in Math. I realized that, if
I was lucky and did well, I would get a tenure-track job at the #250 ranked
school. If I was unlucky, I would be perma-adjunct with no other marketable
skills at age 40.

On the other hand, in software, I'm also feeling washed up at age 40, but at
least I earned a decent salary in the meantime, and probably will always be
able to find some sort of software-related job.

