Call to Arms for Adjuncts . . . From an Administrator

A nicely-done article about an important issue that was heavily discussed at CUPA-HR recently:

Why doesn’t the adjunct system work managerially? “We’ve created a two-tier instructional staff” without telling the students or the public, he said. “You know that if you have two people do the same jobs and one is paid three times the other, one is going to get ticked off,” he said.

But the ones who are suffering from “gross disparities in salaries and benefits,” he said, are the ones who are doing an increasing share of the teaching. Monaco acknowledged that at research universities, there is a genuine need for faculty members to have extended non-teaching time to perform their responsibilities to advance scholarship. But he said that, up to master’s institutions, adjuncts and tenure-track faculty members have become largely indistinguishable in quality or classroom duties, but one group has much better pay and benefits. At most institutions outside the research elites, he said, the professors teaching less to do research “aren’t curing cancer.”

He said that this is creating a disaster for higher education. Colleges justify the higher pay and tenure for some by saying that these professors are the very best. But if these are the best, Monaco said, why are colleges letting others do most of the teaching of undergraduates? Further, he said, it is more difficult to defend tenure or a permanent faculty when those with job security “teach Milton to 5 people,” while those off the tenure track who teach freshman comp must have packed classes of 28, and teach off of a syllabus they played no role in creating.