Higher education rests on the backs of ill-paid adjunct professors, who spent years getting a Ph.D., then learned that full-time positions were nearly impossible to find.
This article describes a revolt by the adjuncts in Florida.
“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”
We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.
As Barrientos chatted with another adjunct in the empty classroom, the conversation turned to horror stories: the adjuncts forced to sleep in their cars; the adjunct who was sleeping in classrooms at night; the adjunct who had a full mental breakdown from the stress of not being able to earn a living after all of the time he had put in getting his PhD. Such stories are common, from campus to campus, whispered by adjuncts who know deep down that they themselves are living constantly on the edge of personal, professional, and financial disaster. Other than academic credentials, most adjunct professors don’t have much. But recently, Ximena Barrientos, and her 2,800 colleagues at Miami Dade College, and thousands of others just like them throughout the state of Florida, have acquired, at shocking speed and on a grand scale, something of great value—a union. And they want nothing less than dignity….
University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.
What can the adjuncts do? They are doing what they must, the only thing they can do to get decent working conditions and a living wage: they are unionizing.
The way the lawless free market charter industry operates invites corruption and exploitation in a deregulated environment. It creates revenue streams for the already wealthy. If they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, they cross the line between entrepreneur and grifter. It is a very fine line. When they cross that line, it is the only time the public hears anything about it.
Our political climate encourages this type of abuse of public money. Our people need to wake up the way the people of Puerto Rico have. People need to stand up and defend their public schools. Hedge funds and Silicon Valley are eager to transfer public assets into their pockets. An outraged public needs to stop them and toss out the political enablers.
This was intended as a response to the Packard post.
Un -Koch the college campuses!!! High bets are that they NEVER cut corners with the coaches/staff in the athletic departments or at the administrative level. The kids get screwed again when they go off to college and the teachers still take all the blame for the “stupid/lazy” kids entering the workforce. It just keeps getting worse.
I watched this happen for years in the Los Angeles area. Even if you were very consciousness about wanting to rehire an adjunct, some higher-level administrators would rework the budget and there would be cuts. I wrote schedules for 23 years. The last three years were heartbreaking as I watched dedicated teachers lose classes or get bad schedules due to some fiat from above. I finally left. I retired because I often stood alone in trying to do the right thing….and this was a college with a union.
An adjunct position I once filled for a local community college pays the same now as it did thirty years ago when I filled it. This is a problem not just for the individuals described above, but also for the society. I believe that it was the Mexican Revolution of 1910 that I recall reading about in relation to educated professors. The impetus for the revolution was college professors who were educated and underpaid, paving the way for a decade of civil war. It was the educated middle class of French Salon goers who stirred the desires of the Parisian populace with their opposition to an unpopular regime.
It is a very bad idea to create a class of very bright people who are not in power.
I think you are missing the point. The reason we have starving Adjuncts is precisely because of the threat full time Professors, Academia in the 60s presented to the “enterprise system”. Nothing controls a worker more than hungry belly.
I hope the adjuncts succeed in getting some benefit from organizing in unions. I am afraid that state legislators will just increase the number of online courses and up the teaching loads for the online courses. I am reflecting the experience of someone I know.
If a Senate bill pending bill in Congress passes, adjuncts in particular programs of study will be under even greater threat of not having work. S.800, is designed to position the economic value of a degree or credential as the primary criterion for public funding of postsecondary education extending even to graduate degrees.
As of July 27, 2019, S 800 bill has 12 Democrats and 11 Republicans from 20 states as co-sponsors, including Elizabeth Warren as an original co-sponsor and recently Amy Klobuchar.
S 800 will produce incentives for state universities, community colleges to cut programs that fail to offer above average economic payoffs for program graduates. The payoffs will be determined immediately following graduation, at a five-year mark after graduating, and possibly at other intervals. This is just one feature of this bill.
The bill can be rationalized as a response to the student debt problem. Unfortunately it does nothing to address that problem. Instead it invites state legislators and higher education administrators to cut programs or morph entire programs into 100% on-line formats.
The data dashboard for postsecondary programs now available to students will be upgraded with much more information. I think that the amount and kind of information on the dashboard will encourage students and parents will shun programs in the ars and humanities, and teaching because these do have an obvious and high “economic return on investment.”
The language in S. 800 postures about the privacy of student information. I say “postures” because the proposed law would REPEAL a federal prohibition against the creation of a “student unit record” with personally identifiable information (think SS #) currently in Section 134 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1015c).
The proposed law also gives new powers to the Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, James Lynn Woodworth, a Trump appointee whose term began in January and runs for six years. If S.800 passes, Woodworth would be in charge of appointing and then consulting with a new “Postsecondary Student Data System Advisory Committee.”
Here is the rub. Woodworth and Woodworth’s boss, Mark Schneider, also a Trump appointee, are known to think of higher education only in terms of economic payoff. Moreover, Mark Schneider has already been enlisted as a member of Bill Gates’ ”Postsecondary Value Commission” whose charge is “to define the value of postsecondary education in the US.”
This 30-member Gates selected commission knows perfectly well that it will be tweaking recommendations and data points already in use or easy to get. The Commission’s work will be completed in June 2020. The efforts of the Commission will produce rankings of best economic value degrees and credentials. It is not rocket science to guess whom Gates, with a new lobby shop, will promote as members of the Commission required in S.800. https://www.postsecondaryvalue.org/members/
Consider the scope of personal information that can be collected under this section of S.800.
“ PERIODIC MATCHING WITH OTHER FEDERAL DATA SYSTEMS.—
“(A) DATA SHARING AGREEMENTS.—“(i) The Commissioner shall ensure secure, periodic data matches by entering into data sharing agreements with each of the following Federal agencies and offices:
“(I) The Secretary of the Treasury and the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, in order to calculate aggregate program- and institution-level earnings of postsecondary students.
“(II) The Secretary of Defense, in order to assess the use of postsecondary educational benefits and the outcomes of service members.
“(III) The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, in order to assess the use of postsecondary educational benefits and outcomes of veterans.
“(IV) The Director of the Census Bureau, in order to assess the occupational and earnings outcomes of former postsecondary education students.
“(V) The Chief Operating Officer of the Office of Federal Student Aid, in order to analyze the use of postsecondary educational benefits provided under this Act.
“(ii) The heads of Federal agencies and offices described under clause (i) shall enter into data sharing agreements with the Commissioner to ensure secure, periodic data matches as described in this paragraph.
“(B) CATEGORIES OF DATA.—The Commissioner shall, at a minimum, seek to ensure that the secure periodic data system matches described in subparagraph (A) permit consistent reporting of the following categories of data for all postsecondary students:
“(i) Enrollment, retention, transfer, and completion outcomes for all postsecondary students. “(ii) Financial indicators for postsecondary students receiving Federal grants and loans, including grant and loan aid by source, cumulative student debt, loan repayment status, and repayment plan. “(iii) Post-completion outcomes for all postsecondary students, including earnings, employment, and further education, by program of study and credential level and as measured—
“(I) immediately after leaving postsecondary education; and
“(II) at time intervals appropriate to the credential sought and earned.
The full text available at https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/800/text
About Mark Schneider http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/director-of-the-institute-of-education-sciences-who-is-mark-schneider-171206?news=860381
About James Woodworth https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/band-director-chief-data-cruncher-trump-s-choice-lead-us-education-statistics-agency
Florida is also seeking to collect and bundle lots of personal data on students including requiring a mental health registration form. They want to do some predictive analytics in order to stop school shooters. In the wrong hands this type of information could negatively impact students for life. It sounds like “Minority Report.” Florida should just focus on common sense gun laws, but we know they won’t do that. They’d rather invade students’ privacy. http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/07/fl-next-surveillance-state-deadline.html
That certainly colors my support for Warren and Klobuchar. Is it really so difficult to predict the consequences of this foolish bill?
Sometime good people support programs without thoroughly thinking through how or why they were implemented. The paradigm is wrong. And like the use of adjuncts instead of a full time professorship. It has been changed by design.
” If we remove the Government support that made college affordable for a large percentage of the people. Those students and parents will then view a university education as vocational training for post University employment. There is no amount of debt or money that is then too much to shell out for a secure future for Jr. In reality they are not purchasing a future career, but a lottery ticket to that career.”
As stated at least 5 years ago by a blogger whose screen name was ” The Starving Adjunct”.
And it goes without saying that elementary education gets tailored to the same goals.
The reality is that we do not have a shortage of trained candidates for employment, but an excess. Therefore wages for those with the skills we say they need are stagnant. Those with those skills as they move up the income ladder often find themselves replaced by a cheaper young recent graduate. An example being the IBM purge of older workers in 16-18. Of course IBM would say that those workers could not keep up with change. Are they asserting that dementia sets in at 40?
The question has to be asked how we as a society view higher education.
If it is a vocational program, it is failing and no amount of lipstick will change that. For the problem does not lie in the University. When it was viewed as a tool to create an enlightened populace; it was a threat to the enterprise system”.
” I am afraid that state legislators will just increase the number of online courses and up the teaching loads for the online courses.”
This is exactly the strategy: lower the quality of higher ed by increasing the number of adjunct faculty who don’t have time to meet students, have no offices, make a total of $20K in 5 jobs and increase class sizes to 500. Then online courses seem like a good idea.
Unfortunately, most tenured profs don’t realize that fighting for better conditions for edjuncts and other non-tenured faculty is fighting for tenure and hence fighting for higher ed.
Unlike in K12, where there is clearly a battle going on as we see these teacher strikes, there no noticeable battle going on in higher ed. There are only reports of extensive casualties.
The war on truth continues. Education, seeking answers by people who intellectually seek truth, the real educators? Who needs them? We have a president who can tell us what is true.
Why try to keep up with the rest of the world in seeking ever increasing parameters of perspective. Why value the people who truly educate? Once the whole world sent their best students t o our universities to study. We were t he beacon of intellectualism. Education was seen as a priority. But why is ever increasing knowledge important enough to fund now? We already have the necessary answers. Our president provides them.
Now training is important, supplants education, train people to fill the jobs the chosen few provide for us. We used to understand, we train animals and educate people. Somewhere we have lost that perspective.
Our chosen priorities now? Money now is the bottom line, not intellectual curiosity, money for the select few, those who amass huge monetary fortunes who will indeed “ take care of us”.
Go to Wallmark. Things are cheap there. Cheaper than they should be—and this is exactly how the Waltons make their billions. Since business people lead universities, no wonder universities operate like businessess: use as cheap labor as you can squeeze out of the system, and if the system doesn’t let you go below a certain level, bribe politicians to change the system: demand high graduation rates, offer ridiculous majors, increase class sizes to insane levels (if I claim anything over 50 is crazy, people look at me as if I had dementia), mandate online courses even for regular students, pay student workers way under minimum wage, argue that even tenured faculty don’t need individual offices.
Unfortunately, more and more tenured profs sign up for the notion that universities should operate as businesses; “This is the 21st century way”, they say as if they claimed such truism as snow is white or that crap stinks. And they are right, higher ed stinks more and more.
Unfortunately winning an organizing drive as a Public Sector worker in a Right to Work State like Florida is pretty meaningless. Their employer is under no obligation to ever negotiate a first contract.
As a Public entity States and Cities are not bound by the NLRA. So unless these workers are able to force the hand of the State with Job actions; actions that could cost their employment, it is only symbolic. If they are willing to take action they have to bring support of the Students and Public with them.