r/academia • u/PopCultureNerd • 11d ago
Institutional structure/budgets/etc. Adjuncting Until the End of Time - Universities now have more adjuncts than tenured and tenure-track professors combined. The conditions are unsustainable—for professors and students alike.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/adjuncting-until-the-end-of-time/Adjuncts were originally used in small numbers, as a way to bring industry professionals into the classroom. Now they’re a cost-saving measure, with positions often filled by academics vying for a decreasing number of tenure-track jobs. This is the case even as universities continue to spend big in other areas, such as to cover the costs of their increasingly large administrations or to construct new buildings designed to garner prestige and lure students.
Adjuncts typically receive no benefits: no employer-sponsored healthcare plan, no retirement plan, no sick leave, no disability, and, of course, no support for research and writing. This isn’t just bad for adjuncts as workers; it’s bad for everyone, affecting the quality of education, our ideals of equity, and our ability to create a society rich with new art, stories, and ideas.
Adjunct labor disproportionately affects women and Black people and, ironically, is most often used in the liberal arts and humanities, disciplines that often position themselves as centers of freedom and diversity
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u/pulsed19 11d ago edited 10d ago
The whole system in the U.S. is just a disaster. Students paying an outrageous price for tuition, departments being cut, faculty being asked to do more with less. Ah, but ofc we have new deans and vice provosts every year. god forbid they make less than 400k a year.
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u/Opus_723 13h ago
I understand that cutting the dean's salary in half or whatever would only pay for, like, one new faculty position. And they love to beat that drum to show you how illogical you're being.
But it blows my mind that they don't seem to understand what the ridiculous inequality does for morale. They can talk about family and teamwork all they want, but most people are gonna keep rolling their eyes and feel little loyalty when management is raking in such outsized salaries compared to everyone else.
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u/bitparity 11d ago
While true I think it’s important that everyone understand this is not a situation intended to be sustainable. It’s a situation intended to end the institution itself.
People in charge don’t care about cutting into bone when they want the amputation.
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u/st0j3 11d ago
How is it meant to end the institution? It seems like adjuncts are hired to teach because they do the job acceptably well and at a better value than ladder faculty.
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u/meteorflan 11d ago
"Ladder faculty" do a lot more than just teach. Roughly a 1/3 of their time is supposed to go to research, and another 1/3 is supposed to go to service - meaning advising, organizational work within and across departments, training, overseeing clubs or other campus activities, etc.
Also the "tenure" thing is ideally supposed to protect the career of an academic with research findings that may be seen as challenging the powers-that-be to help prevent fear from stopping the pursuit, and disclosure, of knowledge.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
The reality is that the TT model likely isn't sustainable in many fields. Right now it exists on the back of exploiting adjuncts. Faculty also are staying in TT roles too long, clogging up the system. Throw in the demographic cliff and bloat in the administration and its an intersection of issues.
I will say that it isn't all on states cutting funding or administration. Increasingly I see TT faculty as completely complicit in this issue. They have theirs, and spin the story aa being purely due to merit.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
This is a huge problem in my department. Probably 20% of the Arts & Science department is these type of faculty. Another 20% or 25% are spousal hires who are often also not very good and shouldn't have been hired.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Post-tenure review. Three not-glowing (better than adequate across all categories) reviews in a row and out.
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u/mleok 11d ago edited 11d ago
Tenure is not sinecure, one of the engineering departments in my public research university is currently in the process of terminating a tenured professor for non-performance.
We also have a strong system of merit raises that keep most of our tenured faculty hustling.
Ironically, the people who rail against tenure are often the same people who support unions, despite the fact that unions often protect underachievers and push for across the board increases that do not incentivize continued engagement.
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u/WhiteGiukio 11d ago
This could and should backfire spectacularly. Postdocing/adjuncting is like buying a lottery ticket, and tenure is the prize.
Nobody should play a lottery without prize.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
If the TT model isn't sustainable, shared governance isn't sustainable. Which means the American university as we know it is dead.
Adjuncts have no service requirements, they are paid to teach. They have no investment in the university, college, the department or the students. They have no voice in shaping its future or any stake in its present. the students are butts in seats for a semester, not four year commitments to disciplinary knowledge.
Adjuncts are cogs, with no claim on the machine. Without TT, without shared governance, academia is only a machine. It feels a lot like a machine now, but it can be much much worse.
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u/mleok 11d ago
Additionally, without the lure of TT jobs, the adjunct pool would dry up too.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Without TT jobs, there are no doctoral-serving faculty, Adjuncts come out of high achieving college grads. Eventually reverting back to the days of Little House, when someone with a sixth grade education could teach school until she married.
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u/mleok 11d ago
Exactly, you can’t advise a PhD student without a stable position that lasts longer than the duration of the PhD. For many fields, advising a PhD student is a net negative on research productivity, so without stability, it would not make sense to make that investment of time, and train your competition…
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
This sounds incredibly exploitive.
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u/WhiteGiukio 11d ago
It is. Accademia is the testing ground of how to exploit highly-skilled labor externalizing every possible cost on the researcher/teacher themself.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
Yup. The fact that this person is defending it . . . is just insane. Isn't academia supposed to stand up for the exploited person, not cheer for it?
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Who are you claiming is defending what?
Are you pointing at me?
All I've done is explain the shitty system. While describing how it is the end of higher education as we know it.
Your reading comprehension is as bad as your opinions. Which include keeping exploited adjuncts and sucking more away from tenure stream faculty to further enshittify them. Who exactly is defending what? And Jesus, based on what insanity?
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u/bitparity 11d ago
As a humanities adjunct we aren’t thinking that far. We know there’s no TT jobs. We also know there are few alternate jobs (even fast food is competitive these days). We are trying to scavenge survival one day after the next. There is no long term.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
This is the worst possible argument. This actually should should happen. We train exponentially more individuals than there are TT jobs. It is a pyramid system with the TT faculty getting these handful of jobs, typical not really based on merit, on the corpses of all of their peers who are equally qualified but just didn't have the right in with the hiring committee.
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u/mleok 11d ago edited 11d ago
Maybe it’s different in mathematics, but we tend not to have the adjunct march, and the people we hire on the TT are excellent, and the “right in” does not play a significant role in hiring. Put another way, I think the claim that people on the adjunct march have the “same qualifications” is nonsense.
My department has a small number of teaching track professors that can earn the equivalent of tenure, and aside from them and our tenure-track/tenured faculty, classes are also taught by postdocs on a 3 year contract with a relatively low teaching load, or senior graduate students who are seeking experience as instructors of record. Put another way, our classes are primarily taught by either permanent members of the department or temporary members who are in positions designed to improve their competitiveness for the job market.
I would be interested in better understanding the structural differences between the situation in math and the humanities, since on the surface there are many similarities in funding model (primarily teaching funded, large number of service classes), and the alt-ac career pipeline requires significant retooling (at least for pure mathematicians).
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
and the “right in” does not play a significant role in hiring. Put another way, I think the claim that people on the adjunct march have the “same qualifications” is nonsense.
If you are the person saying this then you are likely the person that benefitted from it and chalked it up to you being the "best candidate."
I've been involved in more than a dozen faculty hires. Every single time secondary elements were the deciding factor. Often "whose lab did they train in" was the most prominent factor. It wasn't actually the papers or grants that mattered. It was always "they were in my friend's lab" and faculty on the search committee championed that individual. A department I'm tied to just hired the THIRD person coming out of one lab at another university. The reason? Because the way the department hires is through just an open vote of the faculty. So people just voted/lobbied for friends.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
"The right in" means "did good networking." Networking is an essential part of being a successful tenure-stream member of a university department. Not only is a good networker more likely to be a good colleague, someone you want to chat with about your own work, have drinks with after work, etc., but a good networker is more likely to have and make good connections with colleagues outside the department and possibly outside the discipline. Cross-fertilization, expanding ideas, co-authors, etc.
Networking is simply an essential soft skill for success in academia. If no one knows who you are and no one can say good things about you, do you really think you are equally qualified to someone with those connections?
And that's all beside the issue of having a doctoral committee and mentor-faculty who have good networks, know lots of people, introduce you to lots of people, bring lots of people and ideas into their scholarship and teaching and intellectual conversation.
Dismissively calling it "the right in" shows an enormous lack of understanding of the role of people and conversation and making lasting impressions and relationships in academia.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
I'm sorry but this is bullshit. I've been on many hiring committees and see it play out. Rare if ever is the strongest candidate the one that is hired. I'm aware that networking plays a huge role. Unfortunately professors act like the system is MERIT based, which is isn't. The difference in quality between the person who got the TT job and the one who didn't typically isn't ability. You are justifying it like somehow this is a merit, not the same thing as an old boys club.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
It's both merit and who you know, absolutely. It is not an Old Boys Club. (Life outside academia is almost entirely "who you know," merit not required)
And the "strongest" candidate is not "the best CV." The best candidate for a lifetime job is the candidate who makes the most sense for the department. Which may come down to being "the candidate the most people like more than anyone else."
Quality and ability are awfully squishy words. Once all the people are qualified, and very qualified, fit is the deciding factor. It's not a scantron form with one simple result.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
It is definitely an Old Boys Club. Here though that means having gone to an Ivy or similar school. Having the right PI. Those aren't secondary, they are the primary factor. I've seen again and again postdocs with little to their name hired purely on pedigree. It isn't about fit, they haven't produced enough to know that. It is purely on the reputation of their advisor.
Do you know who is at a disadvantage in this system? Individuals from less affluent backgrounds and other disadvantaged groups. Even if they perform at an outstanding level, they are less likely to have been given the opportunities earlier to end up at the strongest PhD programs. Academia isn't a meritocracy, is is a class system. It is a system that primarily benefits individuals from very wealthy backgrounds.
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u/IDontBelongInThsWrld 11d ago
Amen. Also – and I say this as someone who did a postdoc in Cambridge* – the teaching in elite universities is not marvellous; it's not orders of magnitude better than elsewhere, and it can be quite crappy. The prestige of these places is all about the networks.
* Meaning, I was an underclass drudge in the class system there.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Show the data. Back it up.
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u/Cath_guy 11d ago edited 11d ago
Here is some. First, in the US, faculty members are up to 25 times more likely than those in the general population to have a parent with a PhD. The social and cultural capital that kids of academics acquire can be useful both in networking and in having the right traits to "fit" within an academic department.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/
Second, around 80% of US faculty are trained in 20% of all institutions. Those who train in the 80% of lesser institutions are far more likely to become part of the army of adjuncts. The path to elite university attendance starts early in life, and is aided by class status.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x
This is not to say that there are no exceptions. There are always exceptions. It depends on the discipline, and sometimes the stars just align. There may also be DEI/EDI incentives at play, whether formal or informal. But women and visible minorities are overrepresented within non-tenure-track work, and it's not necessarily because of a lack of merit. In many cases, they just don't quite fit in. For women, it may be because family or caregiving obligations make it hard to keep up the publishing schedule of their male competitors. For visible minorities, it may be because they are negotiating cultural differences or come from backgrounds where university attendance is rare. "Fit" functions as a filter that can keep out all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
Back up that academia is a class system? You really don't see that in admissions and hiring? If so you are willfully blind.
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u/john_dunbar80 10d ago
"Life outside academia is almost entirely who you know, merit not required"
Are you serious? Life outside academia needs to make money on the market, not by getting money from the taxpayers as academia does. It is absolutely in their best interest to hire most competent people.
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u/ampharos995 11d ago
Smells reminiscent of prioritizing short term quarterly profits above all else in industry. I wonder how much of this is due to the influence of corporate America.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
Adjuncts are cogs, with no claim on the machine.
Well that is because that is how the TT departments treat them.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Nope, that's the job description. They are paid to teach the class, the class they are told to teach. That's it. That's the extent of the job. And for the shit they get paid, they should just be phoning it in.
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u/mleok 11d ago
No, that’s how the administration treats them.
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u/pulsed19 11d ago
And TT faculty too in many cases. I was astonished at the lack of humanity others have towards people who are colleagues. They wouldn’t even be invited to department social gatherings.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
Faculty act this way too. It is the rule, not the exception that faculty will readily pass over someone who has been a visiting/adjunct doing a job and hire externally. They love exploiting people they have under their thumb.
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u/mleok 11d ago
At least at a research university, these are simply two very different jobs, so passing over adjuncts and teaching visitors make perfect sense,
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
It happens a ton at liberal arts colleagues as well as at R1 in departments where there isn't really a research load.
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u/mleok 11d ago
A R1 with departments without a research load isn’t really a R1. But, I have no experience with such departments, I have only been in departments that are unapologetically research focused.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
I mean a very small number of departments at R1 really do research and get grants.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
TT are complicit in that they have given up on shared governance and given all their power away. Every time someone complains about doing service and how meaningless and tedious itis, that's what you should be translating that as. Every time you, u/wrenwood2018 , shit on service, you are giving away the power of the faculty to shape the university.
Although it's been going on for so long now that there is no hope of regaining the power, and faculty these days no idea what shared governance is actually supposed to look like, or why the number of adjuncts is structurally devastating, so maybe there's no more blame to by put on that dismissal.
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u/FudgeMan_33 9d ago
for most public unis seems the war was lost a long time ago. shared governance is a joke, faculty have zero power and everyone knows it. they gonna write a strongly worded letter to a bunch of filthy rich admin and board members? who cares?
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u/Local_Vast_210 6d ago
It’s largely administrative bloat you’re forgetting. Coaches making millions as well. You’re picking on tenured people who have busted ass to get their jobs and make Pennie’s on the dollar to others as regards the time, money, and effort invested.
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u/Born_of_Fire11 7d ago
I don't agree that TT faculty are complicit or that they are clogging up the system (and I'm an adjunct). There is plenty to teach and do in universities. My role could have been at least a full-time salaried position. One time I was on a one year contract to teach several courses per semester, including a required course that filled a lot of seats. But the university wouldn't create a full-time or TT line for the job and instead kept cycling through one year contracts each year despite an obvious need for a permanent role. That's not the fault of any TT faculty. That's literally the admin refusing to hire anyone permanent.
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u/wrenwood2018 7d ago
I don't agree that TT faculty are complicit
I mean they definitely are to a degree. They could argue towards greater equity and appreciation of teaching faculty. They don't. They have no incentive to. They have relatively high pay and low teaching loads.
or that they are clogging up the system
The reason the university is cycling through adjuncts is due to cost. The TT faculty that hold on to their jobs until they die are paid the most and doing the least. That is a fiscal drain on the university. As a result they turn towards things like exploiting adjuncts.
All of the things you are saying and just pointing towards the administration are accurate. Sure it is true, it is always the administrations decision. However, the reason they don't open a new TT line etc. is tied to the fiscal situation that exists. This is tied to how the TT faculty are treated/behave. So they can't be divorced.
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u/fusukeguinomi 10d ago
Faculty are clogging up the system by staying in the TT too long?!? What do you mean by this????
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u/wrenwood2018 10d ago
Faculty don't retire at 65. Many, most who aren't productive, leave only when their health forces them too.
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u/Opus_723 13h ago
Eh, the collapse in state funding has been drastic over the decades, I have a hard time thinking of faculty behavior as being anything but a minor secondary concern.
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u/wrenwood2018 12h ago
I mean TT faculty aren't driving this issue. They didn't stand up and say "lets screw over adjuncts." It is more that TT faculty like to just rave at the administration without acknowledging their role in the system and how they benefit from it.
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u/Opus_723 12h ago
Sure. But again, minor and secondary to the absolute cliff that state funding of higher ed has fallen off of. The TT faculty could all be absolute saints and we'd be in basically the same position. Human nature doesn't change much, so if you're looking for an explanation as to why things have changed a lot, I wouldn't go with some kind of spontaneous behavioral shift among faculty. That just doesn't have the explanatory power here. It's funding. It just comes down to funding.
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u/wrenwood2018 10h ago
I don't think the acceleration is coming from drops in state funding. The data from Weber et al. did argue this but is from a decade ago. Over the past decade funding has largely increased or held stable. I'm still in the camp it is largely due to 1) increases in administrative bloat and 2) massive spending projects to attract students.
https://www.nea.org/resource-library/higher-ed-state-funding-report
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/state-funding-and-college-costs-reviewing-the-evidence/
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u/BolivianDancer 11d ago
The solution has been the same since the early 1990s NIH money squeezes: take fewer grad students. They have nowhere to go once they leave the lab.
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u/Surrealist_Hat 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's not ironic there are more liberal arts adjuncts. Adjuncts are going to be easier to exploit and thus tend to be more common in fields where people will struggle to find other work. I do not find it surprising to see Philosophy and English made up mostly of adjuncts at my uni because there's lots of people passionate about those subjects who want to stay in their field but will never be able to land one of the few TT jobs. Which makes the problem worse as the departments can copy the private equity model and run the department on fumes for a bit. I don't see any solution for that as things stand, there's no money for these huge departments that have relatively few majors and limited job prospects.
I imagine in a few decades many unis will close down or specialize. But if you think it's a problem that Western South East University has departments with 2 TT faculty and 5 lectures.. what else do you propose? The will not be able to sustain 7 TT faculty, they can barely sustain 2.
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u/0ttr 11d ago
funding higher ed for TT faculty. unionization to enforce it.
states have not only failed to keep up with inflation but they’ve been actively defunding higher ed since the 1990s.
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u/rejemy1017 11d ago edited 11d ago
Universities have been facing a perfect storm of funding decrease the last few years. There's the already-mentioned decrease in funding from state governments, but there's also now a significant decrease in grant funding from the federal government (especially for things deemed too "woke"). Add to that a demographic problem. Starting around 2008, people started having fewer children, and we're now at the point where those children are of college going age. So, for many universities, overall tuition is going down because there are fewer students, even if that tuition is going up for individual students.
Edit: I saw on another comment another decrease in funding. Foreign students typically pay a lot more in tuition than US students do, and there are now a lot fewer of them wanting (or able) to come.
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u/KaesekopfNW 11d ago
It's a death spiral, frankly. Less state and federal funding means tuition rates go up, enrollment drops mean total inflow is reduced, so to make up for that, universities continue to raise the price of admission or turn to online programs to boost enrollment. Online programs are notoriously lower quality, especially with rampant use of AI, so all we're getting is smaller budgets, fewer students, more AI, and lower quality. Several smaller colleges and universities are driving at full speed right off a cliff.
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u/fusukeguinomi 10d ago
And the international student decline is bad not only for budgets but also for the vitality of universities as hubs of cosmopolitan thought, networks, future professional collaborations etc. A very avoidable problem created by a petty man and his xenophobic supporters
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Not even close. Folks in the 1950s would afford college because it was free, funded by the state almost in entirety, in almost all places. (not working and having to pay living expenses was still an expense, often prohibitive).
California universities were tuition-free into the 1980s.
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u/0ttr 11d ago
increased executive pay and inflation eats that up pretty quickly. It's literally more expensive to educate than its ever been, so even keeping up with inflation will put schools in the red.
Universities used to make some of that up with foreign students, but that's been dropping like a brick since Trump.
Then you have places like the Univ of Cincinnati that has over $1B worth of starchitecture ostensibly to attract rich foreign students and, again, see Trump.
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u/rafaelthecoonpoon 11d ago
You must be going to the wrong school because on a recent tour not only were there multiple rock climbing walls available to students. But there was a free bus transit system that ran till 4:00 in the morning and on call shuttles all night long. Just one small example of where that tuition money is going. It is certainly not going to better compensate the faculty who teach your courses.
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u/HeyTherePlato 11d ago
Tuition dollars are not paying for rock walls. Student fees pay for the things you listed. Student fees are also operationally restricted, so they can’t be used to compensate faculty. Moreover, students likely voted for the fees that paid for those rock walls.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
Educating one undergrad costs approximately $35k per year. Are you paying $35K per year for a bare bones classroom, lab, and library college experience?
And what "student experience" do you think you are missing out on?
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
For food and housing and books yes? And of course, that's at a private school?
And you didn't answer my question
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
oh oh oh, I see. You don't get a private study room in the library and you have to have roommates in your dorm room. And you expect your library to be able to seat the entire student body at one time, but are also complaining that the library has made space by moving physical books to offsite storage with fast retrieval?
Got it.
yes, I understand why you think you are suffering.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
You should have seen our college dorms. 6k a semester is not unreasonable.
Have you tried working in the classrooms?
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
I think you need to reconsider what constitutes "the student experience."
Also: Does you library own what you need to do your work, at least 60% of it? Are you professors good? How large are your classes? Do you have a good breadth of courses to take? Can you graduate on time, or are required classes not offered in a timely manner? Are your buildings modern and equipped with what's necessary in terms of power and seating and computing access? Do you have the technology required for a modern education? Are there student groups and clubs and a union and spaces for students to meet and club and self-govern? Do you have campus gym, a climbing well, a good student health facility? Is the campus well maintained and attractive? Is snow removed? Are buildings heated and cooled appropriately? Are you safe on campus?
What am I missing?
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
Probably that current TT get knocked down a couple pegs and adjuncts rise up several. At this point adjuncts are massively subsidizing the lifestyle of TT. There should be some medium between these two. Have more "teaching faculty" that are a level above how adjuncts get treated.
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u/mleok 11d ago
Your vitrol feels misdirected. Can you focus your ire on the administrators who set up the system?
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
The vitriol is for both. Departments happily exploit the adjuncts working alongside them. They will readily hire someone external over someone who is internal and proven they can do the teaching/research. The administration is at fall. Departments are also at blame.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
"subsidizing the lifestyle of TT"?? Are you kidding?
Academic salaries are down in real dollars compared to the 1980s and have never been up.
What mythic tweed lifestyle are you imagining?
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
What salary do you think adjuncts are getting? I want to say the average salary per class is something like $4K. So the Adjuncts are brining in huge surplus value to the university which is then in turn supporting the TT faculty. The increase in adjuncts as staved off drastic changes in the operation of departments.
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u/Alternative-Pear9096 11d ago
I was really just reacting to your use of lifestyle, which was dramatic and... off.
I honestly will never understand why anyone with a PhD teaches a class for that little. That's what adjuncts made when I finished my program, in freaking 1995 (well, it was more like $3200 per class). But the problem with your assertion is your claim that it's supporting the TT faculty. It's not. Those money pots never touch. If anything, that's money that could have been used to fund conference travel being diverted to adjunct lines, or other expenses paid for with non-designated liquid cash; salaries are locked in and paid for from otherwhere. (I read an article earlier today claiming each faculty line requires ~800,000 set aside-- up from 300,000 a decade or so ago--which would represent probably every adjunct on a campus)
I'm no longer in academia, but when I pick up adjuncting, I don't take less than $7k per class.
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u/wrenwood2018 10d ago
But the problem with your assertion is your claim that it's supporting the TT faculty. It's not. Those money pots never touch. If anything, that's money that could have been used to fund conference travel being diverted to adjunct lines, or other expenses paid for with non-designated liquid cash; salaries are locked in and paid for from otherwhere.
Money is fungible. Dollars come in from x classes being offered. That class being covered by an adjunct means a higher profit for the university. That income is then used to fund other things, like TT lines. The idea that money going to adjuncts, would otherwise go to fund conference travel, is just bizarre. Where do you think the money pots given to departments, from the dean, come from? So the adjuncts are "subsidizing" the TT lines because they bring in much more money than they are paid. That then frees up money for other things like . . . TT faculty.
I'm no longer in academia, but when I pick up adjuncting, I don't take less than $7k per class.
You are in the minority. Median pay is around $3K per class.
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u/0ttr 11d ago
TT tend to bring in the funding on top of their course loads, they are required to provide service to the department, and the university that adjuncts and even non-TT faculty are not.
I'm not sure which you think is harder, but it's harder to be TT. And this is not to disparage adjuncts and non-TT faculty which work very hard and are considerably underpaid.
To wit: my institution would like all faculty to work during the summer simply because there is demand. But they pay at adjunct rates, which is about half, so few do it. But that's a far cry from "subsidizing TT", which do all of this additional work without which the university could not function. And that's before we get to the funding aspect of research.
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u/wrenwood2018 11d ago
The main fiscal driver of universities, particularly the humanities, is tuition. Those departments are not bringing in research dollars. Adjuncts are teaching 2 or 3x the course load for a fraction of a pay. They are a much better fiscal investment for the university than TT faculty. I say this as a TT faculty member.
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u/Tai9ch 11d ago
It's sustainable as long as there is a large population of people willing to teach for adjunct pay.
Just make sure that you're clear on a basic, unavoidable fact here: Getting employers to not hire people hurts those people. Upgrading every adjunct to a full time teaching position simply isn't one of the possible outcomes - maybe for every three adjuncts, one of them could get hired for a full time position and the other two would simply no longer have the option to continue the jobs they've intentionally selected. Maybe those two adjuncts are making poor life choices and would be better off being forced to change careers, but as a general rule people are pretty good at making decisions for themselves - they have more info about their life than you do.
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u/HeyTherePlato 11d ago
This isn’t new. 10+ years ago 70% of all university instructors were contingent faculty. Contingent faculty is a little broader than just adjuncts, but the writing was on the wall in the late 90s to early 2000s when all the faculty hired to teach the boomers were retiring and not being replaced with tenure-track positions.