I am very close personally to a practicing engineer with a PhD and professional licensure, and the local college has been trying to get that person to teach a course or two as an adjunct. This would be an honorable use of adjunct status all around—it would create links between the local business community and the university, allow students to learn from and network with someone who’s actively involved in their field, and so on.
I also now a few people who are in the adjunct teaching pool for introductory composition classes there. In many cases, these are people with a masters (or even just baccalaureate!) degree in English who are looking to pick up a few dollars, but who aren’t necessarily using that sort of writing in their daily work lives. (There are some exceptions in the composition adjunct pool for the university, but they’re generally cases like technical writers who end up teaching courses in that subject rather than introductory comp.) In this case, it’s more the university using adjuncts as a way to staff introductory courses semester after semester without having to pay any benefits, and in addition giving them an excuse to cut down on the number of full-time faculty as they retire and are replaced not by tenure-stream faculty, but by contingent and terribly poorly-paid workers.
I find some uses of adjunct faculty honorable on the part of colleges, and other uses of adjunct dishonorable. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader which is which.
I don’t think the propensity to say outrageous or controversial things is associated with being an adjunct. There are lots and lots and lots of permanent, full-time (tenure-track or tenured) faculty who also say outrageous or controversial things and show up in the news for it. The difference is that they are difficult or impossible to fire because they are tenured, and for that reason sometimes the university PR machine begins to churn to mitigate the impact of what they said or stop the spread of info before it goes too far beyond the campus community. With adjuncts, you don’t have that problem - you can just fire them (or at least refuse to give them a new assignment in the coming semester).
I think academics in general are just more likely to say crazy stuff, because to be quite frank in grad school (and especially in the social sciences) we’re taught being subversive is authentic and intellectual. Many of the famous scholars in our field got famous in part by being crotchety contrarians. There is definitely a culture around being a crotchety contrarian. It’s one of the things I hated about academia and graduate school, and it doesn’t surprise me that all the cases they listed in the second paragraph were from social scientists (and a historian, which straddles the line between humanities and social sciences - although humanists are pretty good at the crotchety contrarian thing too).
Another difference is age and use of technology. A tenured professor in his or her 50’s is much less likely to say something stupid on Twitter than a 20 something adjunct simply because the older person is much less likely to be on that platform. Stupid stuff said in the classroom typically stays in the classroom.
Not to mention that stupid stuff said in the classroom might not actually be stupid when it’s placed in context. Stupid stuff stated in 140 characters with minimal if any context is just out there as stupid, even if context would have shown it to just be a clumsily-phrased but sensible thought.
I think back to some of the stupid stuff said back when I was in high school some 35 years ago, taking driver’s ed. Our instructor told our class - " There are 20 students in this class. Since 24 of 25 new driver’s get in an accident within the first 2 years of getting their license, that means every one of you in this room will get in an accident before you go off to college" Being a math-minded person, I immediately understood what he was trying to say, albeit poorly. I was just starting probablity and statistics, and like the stats teacher (he was dreamy - but that’s another story). So my friend and I mentioned the driver’s ed teacher’s story to him the next day, and he got upset. He even stopped by our driver’s ed class the following afternoon, to berate the driver’s ed teacher on the use of caveats and words like “Likely”
He told our completely Caucasian class - “A frequently cited statistic is that one out of every 4 kids born in the world is Chinese. And we all know that half So, if you are white female, and have 2 younger white brothers, and your mom is pregnant again, does that stat mean you’re going to have a Chinese sister?”
He went on to say that he understood the point that while it is statistically very likely most of us will be in a car accident after we get our licenses, it does NOT mean that everyone will get in an accident. It means we should seriously pay attention and prepare for what we’re going to have to do IF and when we get in one.
I wish Mr. Issacson had been taught by my HS stats teacher.
If adjuncts are less restrained than others in making outrageous comments it’s probably because their academic status (and pay) is so low that not much more can be taken away from them as punishment.
“When you ain’t got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose.”