Is your professor homeless? The dirty little secret of American universities.
On April 8, 2013, the New York Times reported that 76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors - an all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top $160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and receive no health care or other benefits.
Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the poverty line. Some are on welfare or homeless. Others depend on charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.
No one forces a scholar to work as an adjunct. So why do some of America's brightest PhDs - many of whom are authors of books and articles on labour, power, or injustice - accept such terrible conditions?
"Path dependence and sunk costs must be powerful forces," speculates political scientist Steve Saidemen in a post titled " The Adjunct Mystery". In other words, job candidates have invested so much time and money into their professional training that they cannot fathom abandoning their goal - even if this means living, as Saidemen says, like "second-class citizens". (He later downgraded this to "third-class citizens".)Alternet
Academia's Indentured Servants
Sarah Kendzior | Al Jazeera
This may also have some to do with the coming digitalization of education that does away for the need for human contact with teachers. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing in all cases, and there are ways that students can supplement their education in other ways. I am not a fan of classroom education, and welcome experiment. The existing system has outlived its time.
5 comments:
So we have a vast underclass which exists to serve the interests of a small elite. Why does this seem so familiar? It's like this paradigm had been replicated throughout our society, but what could possibly be the common factor?
but what could possibly be the common factor?
When bankers rule, they rule with a banker's mentality? With respect to the outdatedness of university model of education, take a look at the average business school curriculum. I'd rather be ruled by pie-in-the-sky classical scholars than such sub-human non-entities as "business education" breeds.
@ Ben Johannson
Power.
Michael Perelman, The Power of Economics vs. The Economics of Power
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)
Where are the balances then going?
Because tuition is high.... administration?
rsp,
Where are the balances then going?
Overhead. Education is about that happens between teachers and students. The rest is overhead.
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