The Adjunct Near You

Parents Forum
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<p>I’ve been an adjunct; now I’m a full time tenured professor. My field is Communication, so perhaps we rely more on professionals than other fields. </p>

<p>Of the 10 adjuncts in our department,two have been there for over 20 years, five for over ten years, two for 2-3 years, and there’s the new guy I haven’t met yet. We’ve got corporate vice presidents, business owners, working professionals (a photographer, a newspaper editor, a radio station manager), academics (a couple of people finishing their doctorates and teaching on the side).</p>

<p>Each one of them was hired because of their expertise, their love of teaching, and they are retained because they turned out to be very good teachers (in a couple of cases, better than the full time tenured faculty). They share an office that we had to fight to get for them, and they use their personal phones and their own computers to communicate with the students.</p>

<p>Some of them voluntarily serve on committees.
Some of them are on campus almost as much as the full time faculty.
Some of them are active in campus activities.
Some of them aren’t…and none of them are expected to be.</p>

<p>They are terribly underpaid.</p>

<p>But they’re not underperforming, and it’s not fair to assume that an adjunct teaching your child is doing a worse job or cares less than someone who has been given an office and a bucketload more cash.</p>

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<p>I sent the article to my sister - an adjunct who lives pretty close to the poverty line.</p>

<p>My SIL heads the business department of a large community college and she is the only full time prof in her department. The rest are adjuncts.</p>

23

<p>My d. attended an elite college and commented to me at one point that she had found that her favorite profs were adjuncts – and when she made that remark, I thought back to my college - and law school - days and realized, that I, too, had found the courses taught by adjuncts to be the most useful and memorable. I think that was because the adjuncts brought a somewhat different perspective to their teaching. </p>

<p>I wouldn’t go so far as to say that that adjuncts are better than tenured faculty – I’m sure that there was some self-selection that went on with our positive experiences. That is, we signed up for courses that looked particularly intriguing, and the course descriptions were enticing precisely because they were taught by outsiders who could offer something slightly different than the normal course offerings. But I do feel that the presence of adjuncts was something that enhanced our educations, particularly because of the practical, real-world experience and perspective the adjuncts often brought to the classroom. </p>

<p>We’ve never had any difficulty contacting or communicating with adjuncts outside of the classroom. My d. had their emails and maybe even could connect via Facebook or LinkedIn – back in ancient times when I went to school, there was a thing called a “telephone” – if I needed to talk to the adjunct about something, I dialed their phone number. (“Dialed” would be too complicated to explain here)</p>

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<p>As I may have mentioned, I’ve been taking some classes.</p>

<p>Re: dialing, no worries there, they often do not give out phone numbers, since they have no office at the college, so it would have to be their home or (actual) work phone. Full-timers give their office phone# at the college, some have secretaries there too.</p>

<p>The adjuncts give out the email address they were given at that (or another) college when possible, instead of their personal or (real) work email. and during the semester they are teaching they do check that periodically (or at least my wife does), though likely not at same frequency as their “real” emails. One didn’t even do that, she just said to contact her leave a message at the department office. I needed to, some time after the semester, she didn’t get back to me at all, eventually I had to call the department office again to have them track her down for me.</p>

<p>And forget just strolling in to see them while you are on campus, because they are not there except while they are teaching a course. They have no office hours, which makes sense since they have no office there. If the course is at a remote site they will essentially never set foot on the campus.</p>

<p>So yes, communications capability is constrained by comparison with the full time faculty there, quite a bit actually.</p>

<p>I find the biggest issue is the lack of office hours . You can’t just walk in with a question if something comes up, whereas this is my most common communication method with the full-timers.</p>

<p>The other thing I find, at this predominantly teaching institution, the full-time staff are more uniformly excellent teachers. That part might be quite different at a research institution though, possibly the reverse in many cases.</p>

<p>Another thing, I can see in situations like my wife’s case a practitioner can add expertise in a highly advanced sub-area of a field. But this place uses them to teach intro classes, and in that case someone’s long distance from the broad field as a whole, or in other cases marginal background, can at times be exposed. I can read pre-packaged power points, with no real insight, just as well as they can.</p>

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<p>The adjunct system is overused by the colleges. It’s one thing to bring in an experienced professional and have him or her teach a class. That probably works most of the time. But when you’re talking English 101 or 102 and there are 40 sections, 35 taught by adjuncts who are not retired writers or newspaper editors but just way underpaid itinerant teachers there’s a problem. These folks aren’t going anywhere and are trying to raise a family on 15K per year - no benefits. They are treated like migrant undocumented workers. I once had the audacity to complain about some outrageous behavior by a tenured prof. The administrator looked at me as if I was mad, and pointed to a 3 foot high stack of applications from wanna be adjuncts. That’s the reality at many colleges especially cc’s. Then there’s the contract thing. The colleges contract out to provide educational services at various companies, agencies etc. You get a pittance, maybe 2500 for a twice a week class and then you find out that the college is getting 25K for providing that service. If you’re a business person, an engineer or a professional looking for a little meaning teaching then do the adjunct thing, otherwise don’t ever start.</p>

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<p>This is absolutely true, but Monydad’s comments are also true. It’s hard to criticize a system without looking like you are criticizing the individuals within the system. Adjuncts aren’t to blame for the way that administrative decisions about their deployment have damaged undergraduate education. However, parents and students need to be aware that adjunct professors cannot be asked to play the same role in a student’s education that a full-time professor can. Most students don’t know, to use Monydad’s example, that an adjunct professor’s recommendation is likely to carry no weight (obviously this is field-dependent), or that an adjunct can’t supervise student theses. And the cost savings yielded through overreliance on adjunct labor are most certainly not passed on to the students through reduced tuition.</p>

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Yes, I’ve got no opinion one way or the other on adjuncts, but I do know that at the large research universities I attended there were some professors who didn’t consider teaching their “real work” either.</p>

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<p>Many of our students don’t seem to make the differentiation between full time and adjunct until quite late in their college careers. For many of them, I think the person standing in front of the classroom functions basically as the teacher character in the old Charlie Brown programs - a faceless voice going “blah blah blah.”</p>

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<p>My H is an adjunct at a top university. He has a PhD and has been, in the past, a tenure-track professor at another university. However, right now, he works full time in his “industry” doing high level research and part-time teaching. He loves teaching, but was sick of the bs of academia (advancement based upon bringing in the most research grants). He has the best of both worlds right now (including a state of the art laboratory on campus which provides intern and research opportunities for students). Yes, adjunct are poorly paid, but many have chosen that route. In our experience, the better the university, the better the faculty - tenured or adjunct. (And he is still writing recommendations for students from former university).</p>

30

<p>The use of adjuncts is in no way a reflection of the quality of teaching because most adjuncts (and I’ve been both adjunct and tenure track) are as highly educated and competent teachers (often more so) than the tenure-track faculty. However, the question is a good one to ask, because an institution that has a very high percentage of adjunct faculty is not making the same long-term commitment to quality education as one who has a lower percentage. </p>

<p>Tenured/tenure-track faculty receive many more perks (although these are being slashed due to budget shortfalls) than adjuncts which allow them to pursue research and professional development activities that are (in theory, at least) supposed to improve teaching. Adjuncts teach more classes for less money, often don’t receive full benefits (sometimes not any), sometimes aren’t hired until the last minute each semester, don’t receive any kind of support for attending conferences or other professional development activities, and are frequently treated as second-class citizens by administration and other faculty. </p>

<p>An equally important question to ask is what percentage of the institutional budget goes to instruction or instructional salaries. Many institutions are top heavy with administrators and bloated budgets for salary are not being directed to classroom interaction but toward administrative salaries.</p>

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I suspect this is one of those instances where it varies a great deal from field to field. Departments in my field tend to be fairly small (6-10 faculty is normal, 20 is fairly large), so the impact of adjuncts can be massive.</p>

<p>In my area of interest, adjuncts are being used quite a lot. Even the wealthiest universities often can’t afford to replace professors in ancient studies who died or moved elsewhere, so they get replaced with adjuncts. To point fingers, this has happened in departments at Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley, Hopkins, and probably more that I’m missing. In a particularly drastic example, I was surprised to find adjuncts teaching over half of the graduate (:eek:) courses in that department at Penn. These were not people with lots of experience; they were newly minted PhDs from Brandeis, Chicago, and Penn itself who were willing to teach a half dozen courses a semester for a pittance while frantically racking up as much research as they could to try to get a tenure-track job somewhere else. Typically they last for a year or two before being replaced, and most vanish into the ether. Granted, there’s not much else the department can do with such limited funds (that department at Yale has had to trim 33% of its incoming students), but most people don’t pretend the quality of the program hasn’t gone down the tube either.</p>

<p>Now, that’s not to say that all tenured faculty are great teachers, because goodness knows they’re not, and some recent PhDs (and even ABDs) are perfectly wonderful lecturers. When it is all said and done, though, I think there is a great deal to be said for the stability of a strong core of tenured faculty.</p>

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<p>Ditto what many others have said. New faculty are being used as nearly slave labor. My sister is one of the happy adjuncts - retired from teaching AP in her subject and now teaching 2 nights a week at the local CC, first year in the same subject. She sees many young co-workers driving from one campus to the next to the next through the day to make less than they did as PhD candidates on fellowship.
warblers, how can the wealthiest schools claim that they “can’t afford” to replace retired faculty? Students are paying more tuition than ever, and new PhDs are willing to work for nearly nothing.</p>

33

<p>I have been adjunct faculty and am now tenured track faculty at another university.</p>

<p>Someone mentioned above that adjuncts do not have office hours. In my experience this is not the case. All faculty are required to hold office hours. An adjunct may share an office space, and most likely will not be in their office much outside of office hours, but they are generally accessible to students outside of class at specific times. </p>

<p>It was also mentioned that adjuncts are not around to drop in on when you need help. Many full-time faculty would not be available to help if a student dropped in outside of published office hours or without an appointment either. </p>

<p>When I was adjunct I enjoyed the flexibility of working full-time (almost) at the university one semester (teaching three classes and directing a production), and freelancing in my field the other semester. The negative was the low pay and the lack of benefits. A plus was the lack of committee work and professional flexibility. </p>

<p>Most of the adjuncts I know are combining their university teaching with professional work in the field, and want it this way. Some, like my dad, are retired or work part-time at a job in their field and teach part-time. Others are younger and looking for a way to balance their continued professional development with teaching. However, there are probably many as well who would prefer a full-time position, but cannot find one in the current market. When I was offered my current position a few years out of graduate school my advisor from grad school said it was a bit like “winning the lottery” to obtain a full-time position in my field. So, many qualified applicants, not a lot of movement, or new hiring. </p>

<p>I agree that in the current economy universities may be relying too much on adjuncts, rather than adding full-time, benefited, faculty positions. I do not know whether this is good or bad for students, but it is probably not great for young PHds and MFAs coming out of graduate school looking for full-time teaching work. </p>

<p>While it can be a good question to ask of a college, the answer may not indicate a better or worse level of teaching for the students in the classroom. Full-time professor is not synonymous with “good teaching” any more than adjunct is synonymous with “bad teaching.”</p>

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<p>“In my experience this is not the case.”</p>

<p>Well in my experience it is the case. My wife has no office hours, and the several adjunct instructors I’ve had myself also had no office hours.</p>

<p>Evidently experiences vary.</p>

35

<p>Way back when during my college days, my adjunct professors were all business professionals who taught on the side (I was a business major). I was surprised to read that graduate students were adjunct professors - the graduate students I knew who taught were TAs. I don’t know if times change or if it depends on your major.</p>

<p>However, I don’t think the adjunct professors are the only ones complaining. My BIL is a full time tenure track professor at a Tier 1 USNWR college and he makes less than the lower paid teachers at my kids’ public high school (albeit a high school that pays its teachers pretty well). He and my sister, a SAHM, live in a city with a high cost of living and they struggle to make ends meet. He makes little enough that they qualified for a lottery to purchase subsidized housing (didn’t win the lottery, though). I guess you don’t get a PhD and become a college professor for the money.</p>

36

<p>Teaching, at any level, is not a particularly high paying field. H received PhD and went into industry (high tech field), but later felt the call to teaching. He had to take a 30% pay cut to “chase his dream.” But after 5 years of scrambling for research grants and writing academic papers (which caused him to neglect the teaching aspect), he left full-time academia. Now he works full-time in the industry (making only slightly more than he did at university) and teaches part-time as adjunct. He loves being able to just “teach” which is his passion.</p>