<p>I’m an adjunct and I work full-time in another job. I absolutely love doing both and I have always received (well)above-average rankings on student evaluations.
What I have learned from those evaluations is that if you are consistently available to your students and demonstrate an interest in their learning, they will think you walk on water.
Most of my students are adult learners - perhaps that is part of the equation.
PS I certainly get paid more than $2K per course!</p>
<p>@Hugcheck – If they didn’t use adjuncts, they would be charging you more than 50k per year. Colleges are not necessarily earning fat profits off the sweat of underpaid adjuncts, they’re using adjuncts as a way of keeping costs down in a difficult economic time. Another option is that they could get rid of the tenure system, research sabbaticals, and other benefits to tenured professors, but I don’t think you’re advocating that either. You just can’t have everything unfortunately. They can either raise the cost of tuition, cut spending (lower professor pay, cut tenured positions, cut campus improvements), or they can hire adjuncts.</p>
<p>^I wish someone would tell my husband (tenured professor) about research sabbaticals, he’s been working over 20 years and never had one.</p>
<p>Even rich schools like Yale make heavy use of adjuncts. Way back in 1999 they wrote this:
But the University responded quickly with its own numbers, which Yale College dean Richard Brodhead noted in a letter to the Times were “virtually the reverse of the numbers cited” in GESO’s report. Brodhead’s letter said that ladder faculty taught 67 percent of undergraduate courses, while adjunct instructors taught 26 percent and graduate students only 7 percent.</p>
<p>I’d bet a few bucks that that number (26%) is larger today.</p>
<p>the use of adjuncts is not new. I misspoke. The new normal is retiring faculty being replaced by adjuncts as indicated by poster #17 above. Also included are “hybrid” positions that are not tenure track positions but annually renewable contracts with a much more modest retirement and benefit package. The other “new normal” is the closing or scaling back of departments in the humanities because of the notion that they are not needed since they can’t prepare students for jobs.</p>
<p>It does seem to me that transitioning from full time professors who have salaries, benefits, offices, professional home bases … to adjuncts who have no benefits and much much lower salaries is tantamount to unfair labor practices. Our institutions of higher education are supposed to represent the highest and most ethical places in our society. I think taking advantage of the most important people our young adults are there to learn from is at odds with the ethics we expect of these institutions. I am glad to hear on this thread there are folks who have full time jobs and teach adjunct classes in addition. However I do not for a moment believe these are the majority of the adjunct population.</p>
<p>There are good reasons and bad reasons for colleges to use adjuncts. Some good reasons: The adjunct may have specialized expertise to teach a course no one on the faculty is qualified to teach. The adjunct may be a practicing professional in a field like medicine, law, business, or accounting whose value as a teacher is in part her ability to bring a “real-world” perspective to the classroom. The adjunct may be a gifted teacher who is not interested in or capable of doing the scholarly work required for a tenure-track position, but whose contributions in the classroom enhance the overall strength of the academic program. The academic program may wish to add a specialized course to supplement its existing program but does not have money to hire a full-time faculty member. The academic program may need someone to teach one or more courses on a short-term “podium-filling” basis while a regular faculty member is on sabbatical or some other form of leave.</p>
<p>Some bad reasons to hire adjuncts: Faced with financial difficulties, the college is shrinking the size of its tenured and tenure-track faculty through attrition and early retirement offers, and effectively replacing them with lower-cost adjuncts The college is trying to create or maintain the fiction that it has a real academic program in a particular field, when in fact it only has a few adjunct-taught courses. The college is trying to “pad” the curriculum in a certain field with adjunct-taught courses to make it appear it has a larger and more robust program than it actually has. The college is trying to manipulate its US News ranking by artificially inflating the number of small classes it offers; for example, by breaking up large, professor-taught lecture classes (with discussion sections led by TAs) into separate, adjunct-taught discussion sections each listed as a separate “class” of less than 20 students. The college is trying to make it appear its grad students do little or no teaching by erasing their TA designations then rehiring them as “adjuncts” or some similar designation. </p>
<p>Whatever the reasons, though, there are trade-offs. As others have said, some adjuncts are terrific teachers; others aren’t. Some are very well qualified in their respective subject matter; others less so. Use of adjuncts may allow the college to offer more and/or smaller classes, but potentially at the cost of less student interaction with regular faculty. But even the best adjuncts are less likely to have the kind of long-term relationship with the school that regular full-time faculty have. They’re often harder to reach outside the classroom, teaching (or teaching THIS class if they have a heavy teaching load spread across multiple institutions) may be a lesser priority for them, their recommendations may carry less weight with graduate school admissions committees, they may not be as fully versed in the latest scholarly developments and trends in the field, and they may not be as valuable as advisers and mentors simply because their day-to-day and ongoing involvement with the institution is less substantial.</p>
<p>For those reasons, I’d be wary of any school that has too large a fraction of its classes taught by adjuncts. It’s probably true that every school uses adjuncts, but just how dependent they are on adjuncts varies widely. Among top LACs, for example, Williams says 96% of its faculty are full-time, while at Barnard it’s 81.6%. That’s a huge difference. Now it may be that Barnard, in Manhattan, is geographically better situated to draw on all sorts of part-time teaching talent not available in Williamstown, MA. But the fact that Columbia, across the street from Barnard, has 92.6% full-time faculty sort of suggests it’s at least in part a financial issue at Barnard, which has the smallest endowment among top 25-ish LACs.</p>
<p>mathmom, my dad just took his first “research sabbatical.” He’s been a professor since 1965!</p>
<p>I had two adjuncts back in the early 80s. One was really good, and one was horrible. I will ask Dad if the number of adjuncts has increased.</p>
<p>Treetopleaf thanks for the book reference - that looks like it would be a good one to read to get more insight into this topic. Bclintonk that is a very nice write up of the issue; thank you! </p>
<p>I do think parents should ask about adjuncts when they do school tours. Let’s be proactive with the schools to let them know we care about the ethics of using or misusing adjuncts!!!</p>
<p>Really wonder how much further this trend can continue. With costs of a good private university reaching 50 - 55K, what will it be in 10 years? 70K per year? It is a bubble, unsustainable.</p>
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One point I have not seen made is do adjuncts count when the school says how many of the faculty have PhD’s? I think probably not. So a school could theoretically claim that 100% of the “faculty” have PhD’s, and not actually HAVE any “faculty” just adjuncts WITHOUT PhD’s. </p>
<p>I have worked as an adjunct, and IMHO it is basically exploitation in many cases.</p>
<p>My daughter who received her MFA a year ago and has taught as an adjunct this past year did have to keep office hours and frequently dealt with emails from students all the time. She was always available to respond, not just when she was teaching her actual class. That is part of being professional. Many years ago I was an adjunct in a class related to my profession. While I was not on campus for office hours, I did return phone calls from students from my home phone.</p>
<p>“But the fact that Columbia, across the street from Barnard, has 92.6% full-time faculty sort of suggests it’s at least in part a financial issue at Barnard, which has the smallest endowment among top 25-ish LACs.”</p>
<p>Maybe, maybe not. For example, Columbia sends its undergraduate theater students over to Barnard, where they are likely to be taught by actors, theater tech people, and directors who are adjuncts. This is also likely true for Barnard’s highly acclaimed creative writing department. There are certain areas where Barnard is clearly superior to Columbia, and I expect that if we did some digging, we’d find out that many of those areas are those where there are extraordinary talents to be found among adjuncts.</p>
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I’m wondering what this massive difference is between the adjuncts with day jobs and the adjuncts living on multiple adjunct positions? Availability? Quality?</p>
<p>Clarification?</p>
<p>The adjunct with a day job has a salary with benefits and is contributing his/her expertise to the local U. and picking up some experience and $$. The adjunct cobbling together small paychecks is usually hoping to land a professional position as a Professor and is working part time with low pay and no benefits at multiple jobs as an interim strategy until they find a permanent post. If colleges are deciding to delete permanent professional positions to save $$ and use adjuncts instead, they are potentially exploiting labor (and I would say, our $$ and youngsters).</p>
<p>I absolutely agree, Hugcheck. The third possibility is that the adjunct only wants to work part time, as was my case because I had small children at home. Nonetheless, it can be exploitative because there are absolutely NO benefits and the pay can be demoralizing.</p>
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<p>No doubt that’s true, and it probably explains some of Barnard’s unusually high rate of adjunct usage. What makes me think it’s also partly financial is that Barnard has by far the smallest endowment among top-30 LACs, whether measured in absolute terms or in endowment-per-student. Yet it’s located in an exceptionally high-cost market. Not an auspicious formula, though perhaps one that might force you to be creative and stretch your dollars farther.</p>
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<p>You mean Professor Charles Xavier? I’ve read them all, but never heard of that one. Are you sure it was Professor X?</p>