A Manifesto
of the 21st-Century Academic Proletariat in North America
Heidi Nelson
Hochenedel
and
Doug
Mann
In an era in which women and minorities are finally achieving
representation in academia, when being Aequal opportunity@ is the most visible objective of the hiring process,
when women and men of all races across all disciplines are publishing work
about Ahegemonic@ social structures, it is striking that a new form of
class distinction has emerged within the politically correct walls of higher
education. The emergence of the adjunct or sessional instructor - that academic
prole of the 21st century, who licks up the left-overs of over-enrolled
classes, who accepts classes offered during the dinner hour or on weekends
(i.e. classes that the Areal@ faculty refuse to teach), or who fills
in for sick or troubled full-timers requiring a term leave - has made her
presence felt throughout North America. She is greeted with suspicion by students,
the core faculty, and by the academic community in general. Interestingly,
an ideology about her status as both educator and human being has congealed
over the last 20 years. We shall argue that sessionals or adjuncts have evolved
into what amounts to a separate caste of educator in the US and Canada. Although
they often share the same accomplishments and qualifications as their full-time
tenured counterparts, there is a powerful (and largely unjustified) ideology
which sharply distinguishes full-time tenured faculty from part-time sessional/adjuncts.
The
term Aadjunct@, used in the US to describe sessional
lecturers, is most revealing. It means
Aa thing added to something else, but
secondary or not essential to it,@ or Aa person connected with another as
a helper or subordinate.@ The term itself is insulting to such
instructors, who often teach (independently and without reliance on Aessential@ faculty) part-time for a living and who consider themselves neither secondary
nor inessential. In recent years,
some institutions in the US have moved to what is poetically termed Athe adjunct model,@ in which most if not all of the faculty
in an institution are secondary and inessential, which is to say that they
are allowed to teach only a few classes and are not paid benefits. Sessional or adjunct instructors have been
formed by various forces into a lower caste in academia, without the privileges,
security, or benefits of teachers in the highest castes, but who often do
the same work, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as their upper caste
masters. However, before we focus on the political and economic status of
adjunct teachers in greater detail, let=s lay our ethical cards on the table and define some quite
moderate moral principles to guide our inquiry into this subject, followed
by a quick analysis of problems associated with hiring and promotion of the
core of any university or college department, the tenured faculty.
1.
The Golden Rule and Justice as Fairness
There is no reason for which academic hiring, promotion,
and pay rates should not be subject to the same moral strictures that ethicists
preach and teach in their classes à propos of the world outside the
ivory tower. If anything, quite the reverse is true: humanities departments
should be especially cognizant of the need to implement principles
of fairness and justice in their dealings with those who work for them. Without
holding these to be foundational moral truths, we believe that a combination
of Kant=s idea of universalizability
and Rawls=
notion of justice as fairness provide a suitable ethical road map to guide
us through our reflections on the plight of adjunct faculty.
A. Universalizability: Kant=s categorical imperative states that
one should act so that all rational beings could adopt the maxim of that act
as a universal moral rule. Further, Kant believes that people should never
be treated merely as means to an end. In other words, he advocated the Golden
Rule: do unto others as you would have done unto you.
Although we won=t belabour
this point, what Kant is saying is simple enough: given a situation where
the potential for unfair treatment exists, one would hope that those with
power would treat subordinates as human beings, and refrain from taking advantage
of their power, regardless of what Autility@ might result from the exploitation
of this or that group. Many university departments and administrators deal
with adjunct faculty in a way that they would be quite dismayed to have done
unto them, if they were in the adjuncts=
position. This happens because departments
and administrators theorize significant differences between themselves, tenured
(or tenure-track) faculty, and adjunct faculty in order to justify the shabby
treatment that adjuncts receive.
B. Justice as Fairness: Kant=s basic moral claim that we treat each
other fairly leads to a distinct conception of justice, as outlined by John
Rawls in his A Theory of Justice. The two aspects of Rawls= notion of justice as fairness of relevance
here are:
1. His Equality Principle. This states that Asocial
and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to
the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and
positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.@
2. His notion of the veil of ignorance or Aoriginal position@. According to
this idea, we should make our fundamental
moral judgements from a hypothetical Aoriginal position@, a position from which we would be ignorant of our own
and others= gender, race, social position, age,
religious beliefs, and any other quality doled out by the Anatural lottery@ (i.e. intelligence, beauty etc.),
guaranteeing an initial equality among moral agents. Behind this veil of ignorance,
we could arrive at two principles to which each person would agree to be responsible
for reasons of self-interest. The first principle calls for a maximum of liberty
for the individual that is consistent with the liberty of others. The second
holds that social and economic inequalities could be considered just and tolerable
only if such inequalities benefited everyone, particularly the least advantaged.
The suffering of some is never justified by the greater good, but the
few may earn greater benefits provided that their doing so improves the state
of the least fortunate. Rawls reasons that from this initial position
of ignorance, most people would reject any form of utilitarianism whereby some might be made to
suffer for the greater good, because from the original position, one would
never know if one might be among the sacrificial lambs to be slaughtered on
the altar of utility. Rawls= idea of the original position can
be applied to the situation of sessional or adjunct instructors and to the
hiring of tenure-track faculty. It would suggest that one=s personal situation (i.e. sex, race,
economic status, personal relationships etc.), should not be considered in
assigning permanent employment because from the original position, these qualities
are irrelevant to carrying out the essential tasks of academe, whereas teaching
and publishing are not.
The Equality Principle is easy enough to apply to academic
life. If political, social, or economic hierarchies are to be established
in academic life, they must benefit the least well off (who, one imagines,
are probably the students, or perhaps adjunct faculty, depending on one=s point of view). Further, the hiring
and promotion of university professors should be based on the general principle
of a fair equality of opportunity. The latter principle is all too often ignored
in the hiring of tenure-track faculty, while the former part of the Equality
Principle, that the establishment of hierarchies must be justified by the
well being of the whole system, including the least well off, is clearly violated
in the case of the treatment of adjunct faculty. This is most clearly seen
when adjunct faculty turn out to be excellent teachers, are well liked by
the majority of their students, receive good teaching evaluations, yet are
given no job security and paid a mere fraction of what tenured faculty earn. Their exploitation represents a degree of utility
for administrations and students, but as we shall show, results in harm and
injustice for the sessional/adjuncts and a general deterioration of academic
life for students.
The
notion of the original position and its associated Aveil of ignorance@ is intimately linked to his general notion of justice as fairness,
and to the Equality Principle. Indeed, one could meaningfully claim that being
blind to one=s concrete economic and political interests
in acts of judgment is at the core of what it means to be Aimpartial@ or Afair@ in such acts. So what sort of criteria of judgement would blindness allow,
and what criteria would it disallow? A candidate=s being a certain sex, belonging to
a certain social class, being of a certain ethnicity, being a personal friend,
etc. could not be considered relevant information when making decisions about
hiring and promotion. From the Aoriginal position,@ one does not have this sort of information,
so one could not universalize moral principles such as Ahire only candidates of this sex@, or Adon=t hire people of this ethnicity or over this age@. On the other hand, teaching excellence
and a strong publication record should be considered by someone in
the original position as criteria for such decisions, since they are relevant
to being a professor (regardless of the biographical details of the decision
maker).
Using the definitions of justice given by Kant and Rawls,
hiring practices for tenure-track jobs can often be classified as unfair or
unjust. Strong candidates are consistently overlooked for a host of reasons.
People often get tenure-track jobs based on their gender, ideology, personal
relationships, and so forth, while those who question the legitimacy of the
system will probably be Aoverlooked@ by hiring committees. Even worse, however, is the treatment of adjunct
faculty, who may be well accomplished, excellent teachers, and receive good
evaluations, yet are offered no job security and are paid about a quarter
of what their full-time tenured counterparts earn to do almost identical work.
3.
A Caste System
The hierarchy in academic life can be compared to a caste
system where the well-paid administration and tenured professors profit from
the blood, sweat, and tears of sessional/adjunct teachers and graduate students,
who are doing much of the real work (i.e. the teaching for which students
are paying).
Combined with this inequitable caste system, the hiring and advancement of
these very tenured professors is often unfair, thereby undermining any deep
moral foundation that the system might claim to have.
The Hindu caste system was brought into ancient India
circa 1500 BC by the Aryan invaders who came from the north to conquer most
of the sub-continent. They established this system to justify their rule over
the darker-skinned Dravidian peoples they had conquered, and to prevent inter-marriage
(which wasn=t
entirely successful). They called the classes they set up Avarnas@, the Sanskrit word for Acolour@,
an obviously racist foundation for the system. But later, Indian thinkers
justified it as a rational way of dividing up power and labour in a society
according to the individual=s tendencies and dispositions - in other words,
according to the social function one is best suited to perform. Thus,
like the class system outlined in Plato=s Republic, the Indian caste system aimed at social
harmony and a sense of self-fulfilment for all, even the lowliest, at the
cost of the oppression of the many in the interests of the few. Here are the four varnas, or classes, and their
corresponding classes in the academic caste system:
$ The priests, or Brahmins, guardians
of morality, culture, and religious rituals. In academe they parallel the
administrators, the sole social body with the power to give the Aword@ to the rest
of the system.
$ The warriors, or Kshatriyas, who
roughly correspond to the tenured professors. The warrior caste is usually represented by a powerful union, who
fights tooth and nail for privileges and perks on behalf of its own caste.
$ The Vaishyas, (in India, the
merchants and farmers) are the non-tenured junior and contract professors,
along with the permanent lecturers, who may play a small role in the larger
universities, but are more important in smaller ones, where they may even
dominate the department in terms of teaching and student consultation. They
are clearly better off economically than the other two lower castes, but are
still at the beck and call of the school=s Brahmin and
warrior castes.
$ The Shudras, in India the manual
labourers, do society=s dirty work. These are the
sessional/adjunct lecturers, hired from term to term to fill in the ever-expanding
gaps in university teaching curriculums, who must bow ceremoniously to the
Brahmins and keep their mouths shut about their plight to retain their meagre
wages.
$ Below the caste system in India were
the Untouchables. These are the graduate students, who can be replaced,
kicked around, overworked, etc. at the whim of the Brahmins and warriors (although
the middle castes have to be more circumspect in their treatment of this caste).
The Indian caste system is a good metaphor for class
divisions within academe, even though academic hierarchies are neither permanent
or hereditary. We have chosen this metaphor because of the obvious injustice
by which people find themselves accorded a place in the caste/class system. High or low birth as a criteria for caste in
the Indian system is echoed in academic life by an admittedly less blatant,
but still stinging, injustice whereby some effective teachers and scholars
find themselves allocated to the adjunct caste, through no obvious fault of
their own. In both the US and Canada, there is a huge discrepancy between
the financial and political status of the warrior (tenured faculty) and worker
(adjunct faculty) castes, in spite of the fact that in academia, the two castes
do almost identical work. In the US adjuncts may be paid as little as a quarter
of what their average full-time counterparts are compensated to do the same
work. For
example, adjuncts who teach four classes a term over nine months in Oregon
community colleges (the equivalent of a full time instructor=s teaching load) can only expect to
earn about a thousand dollars more than the average full-time instructor=s benefits package, which is
about $15,420 US. Moreover, they enjoy no job security, and are
denied dental and health benefits. Many
work at multiple institutions just to make ends meet, often working more than
the equivalent of a full-time professor and earning around $15,000 a year.
The situation in Canada is more humane, but still unfair.
Pay rates for teaching a single one-term course for a sessional lecturer
range from a low of about $3,400 (Canadian) to a high of about $4,600, with
most larger universities coughing up around $4,200-4,300 (obviously, this
depends a lot on whether part-time teachers are unionized, and whether the
union fights for their interests). So the average sessional, at least in Ontario,
makes about $4,100 per course, or $20,500 per year (assuming they can snag
a full teaching load of 5 one-term courses). Comparatively, a new tenure-track professor will earn anywhere from
$45,000 to $60,000 a year, with this salary steadily increasing over their
career.
According to Statistics Canada, the average salary of all full-time professors
in Canada in 1998/1999 was $76,284. Many full professors earn over $100,000.
So let=s
compare these Kshatriyas with their Shudra underlings. Full-time Canadian
professors earn $76,284 on average, while the sessional instructors can earn
(in theory, that is) about $20,500. So in Canada, the sessional=s labour is worth, according to these
figures, only 27% of the full-timer=s, a pay ratio of 3.7 to 1 for each course they teach.
Needless to say, the full-timers must sometimes do extra work - committee
meetings, student supervision, etc. But they can usually take the summer off,
and have infinitely more job security than the sessional/adjunct workers,
who have to thrash about every term or two at their computers preparing yet
another batch of job applications. In addition, full-timers usually receive
generous allowances for conference expenses, grants for buying books and computers,
not to mention the obligatory drug and dental plans.
Part-timers have made little headway towards more equitable
work conditions because of a powerful ideology which holds that full-timers
and part-timers are fundamentally different and therefore should not be accorded
the same set of rights. As a result, the rights of the part-timers are considerably
limited. In the US they are denied rights to subsidized health and dental
care, job security, and basic respect. In Canada, all citizens have at least
a formal right to health care, but Canadian sessional instructors are just
as disposable as their American counterparts. This discrimination is almost certainly
justified in the minds of the Brahminic administrations by a pervasive ideology
which is summed up brilliantly by the US National Education Association in
Volume 1 of their June, 1995 Update:
Part-time faculty members are different
than full-time faculty members in two important ways. First, they do not have
as much education. Second, they use more limited class-room methods. Part-time
faculty members in community colleges teach a smaller range of classes and
do not have the same access to institutional resources and developmental opportunities.
They should not be considered to be equivalent replacements for full-time
faculty.
The dominant ideology with regard to
adjunct faculty is that they are essentially different from full-time faculty,
that they are secondary and inessential, and thus Aadjunct.@ Given the large numbers of highly
qualified instructors in the North American adjunct pool, this notion is absurd. Further, it eerily parallels the racial
justifications used by the ancient Aryans to justify their caste-based domination
of their Dravidian underlings. We recognize the metaphysical fog under which
the Aryans cloaked their naked grasping for power in the later case, but ignore
the same sort of fog in the former (academic) case.
In
the minds of those in the upper levels of the caste system, the adjunct or
sessional instructor is inferior to the full-timer. She is the twenty-first
century proletarian. And since she=s only an Aadjunct@, she can=t be very qualified or good at what
she does - hence there is no need to pay her more than a quarter or a third
of what a full-timer earns for doing the same work. Some adjuncts even believe
this, just as some factory workers in 19th century sweatshops accepted
capitalists= claims that starvation wages and 12-hour
workdays were necessary evils. The adjunct instructor is marginalized and
excluded by those who find her presence at once profitable and threatening.
This
attitude is reinforced by a system that systematically segregates adjunct
and full-time (or semi-full-time) faculty. We have different bargaining units,
we are not invited to the same meetings, our mail boxes are set aside - usually
under the full-time mail boxes or in a different room. At Warner Pacific College in Portland, Oregon,
all the adjuncts share a single mail box! Either we have no office space,
or if we do, we have to share it with sundry other academic slaves. We are
not reimbursed for attending conferences at the same level as tenured faculty,
if at all. In the US we are certainly not paid health or retirement benefits,
yet many of us are working more than the equivalent of full-time at two or
three colleges or universities. Our unions can=t or won=t fight for us. We=re so hungry and desperate for work,
we can=t afford to risk losing our jobs by
agitating or making demands. Because our bargaining units are separate from
those of the full-timers (for those of us lucky enough to have them), part-time
instructors lack the political clout of the full-time instructors, who have
the power to resist exploitation. Moreover, we are kept so busy that we have
no time to form communities, no time to make friends, no time to exchange
ideas because we=re working for $15,000 a year at two
or more institutions.
It is to the university administrations' benefit to create
and maintain this caste system. By keeping most of its workers (i.e. those
that do most of the real work) in a position of subordination to the higher
castes rather than encouraging them to join forces, they are easier to exploit.
In the US one reason for which adjuncts are allowed to teach only one or two
classes per term at a given institution is to avoid the cost of paying health
and retirement benefits. But there is an even more insidious motivation for
promoting the hiring of more and more adjunct or sessional instructors: they
are disposable. If a class doesn=t
fill, the sessional/adjunct need not be paid, while tenured faculty get their
salary regardless of student enrollment in their classes.
4.
Adjuncts as a Reserve Army of the Underemployed
Marx reasoned that under capitalism, it was in the best
interest of the employers to retain a Areserve army of the unemployed@ to draw on when production needs to be increased, or
when uppity workers go on strike and scabs are needed to fill the ranks. This
reserve army is absolutely essential to keeping wages down. If desperate Joe lined up at the employment
office is ready to do your job for half the pay, you will be less likely to
ask for a raise from your boss (unless you have a union, that is). In academic
life we find, instead of Marx=s
reserve army of the unemployed, a reserve army of the underemployed and underappreciated.
As
the result of our high profitability, it should come as no surprise that the
army of underpaid adjunct professors is ever increasing. In the US over the
last 20 years, part-time faculty have increased by 100%, while full-time faculty
have increased by only 25%. In the US, part-timers far outnumber
tenured staff in all departments except anthropology, history, and philosophy,
where tenured faculty comprise more than half of the faculty. In
Canada, the number of full-time professors have dropped 9.7% between 1992-1993
and 1998-1999. Colleges are hiring adjunct faculty
in record numbers for one reason: profit. Young, desperate Ph.D.=s ripe for exploitation are paying
the price of Acost savings@ by universities and colleges. Obviously
the system cannot target the full-time faculty, who are well-organized and
have so much at stake that they will fight back... and win.
It is the powerless who are the victims of institutional greed (or
Afinancial necessity@), and it is the powerful and well organized, who understandably hang on
to their pork-barrel perks and benefits with great tenacity.
While sessional/adjuncts are paid much less than full-timers
to teach classes, tuition expenses keep rising at a pace that far exceeds
that of inflation. Students suffer as the result. They pay more for education,
but get less, while the administration and tenured faculty get fat on the
poor quality of life offered to sessional/adjunct instructors and graduate
students. These instructors, who have increasingly become more responsible
for teaching (especially in the larger introductory courses), are spread so
thin and are able to spend so little time with students that intellectual
communities cannot be created or sustained outside of class hours. Intellectual
communities can only exist if a group of core people spend enough time together
to form these communities, and if the members of these communities treat each
other, in a rough and ready fashion, as political equals. Adjuncts and their
students are systematically excluded from these communities, which contribute
to the vitality of a program. As sessional/adjuncts increasingly replace full-time
faculty, healthy intellectual communities will slowly cease to exist.
Another result of the caste system is that sessional/adjuncts
don=t
have the free time to work on projects outside of teaching. Since they=re paid a fraction of what full-timers earn, they have
to work more to make ends meet, resulting in less time for writing and publishing.
While tenured professors are offered sabbaticals, light teaching loads,
and summer vacations so that they can write articles and books, sessional/adjuncts
are denied this luxury. The more time full-timers have to dedicate
to writing, the more successful they are; the less time sessional/adjuncts
have, the more behind they get. In the academic system, as in all caste systems,
the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
5.
Bloated Graduate Programs
Graduate programs keep growing in spite of the fact that
there are no good jobs for most graduates. This is permitted because universities
profit (metaphorically speaking) from the cheap labour of graduate students
and the prestige and funding that is conferred upon institutions with viable
graduate programs. The Gordian knot here is simple enough to identify: bloated
graduate programs, created by selfish university departments seeking to enhance
their funding and/or reputation. Outside of sought-after graduates of disciplines
like engineering and computer science, there is a general over-supply of PhD=s in the academic
job market. Everybody knows this. Yet nothing is done to reduce the supply
to reasonable levels by cutting weak graduate programs. Of course, this isn=t done because it=s clearly not in the self-interest
of either the departments with weak programs, or of the university administrators
who run the schools where these programs are located. After all, the description
of even a Aboutique@ graduate program in the university=s brochures, along with photos of smiling
graduate students of the right sexual and ethnic mixture, looks awfully good.
And a department=s
funding is geared to the number of students they can pump out of their programs,
with graduate students counting for more.
So the system is run along the lines of slip-shod 19th
century factory production: let=s
keep churning out the product, no matter how mediocre, to keep the workers
employed and the bosses happy.
A solution to this problem is for university administrations
or state and provincial governments to take some responsibility for what they
are doing to people=s
lives and force graduate programs to account for themselves by cutting fat
from these programs, and shutting down the weaker ones. And graduate students
should be clearly informed of their chances for meaningful future employment
before they are admitted into a program. This may seem heavy handed, but it=s no worse than churning out 100 graduates
in discipline X each year, knowing that 75 of them have no real chance
of ever gaining full-time employment in the field they dedicated up to ten
years of their lives studying.
Unlike academia, other professions have prevented the
degradation of their fields by carefully monitoring the market to prevent
too many graduates from forcing wages down. In the US, for example, the medical
profession strictly monitors the number of students it admits to programs.
If it didn=t, the profession would become so poorly
paid that it wouldn=t
be worth the time and effort to become a physician. While medical costs are
too high in the US, at least physicians continue to be paid an excellent living
wage, which would not be possible if the American Medical Association=s Council on Medical Education did
not study and evaluate all aspects of medical education, and suggest the development
and limitation of the programs necessary to provide the proper supply of physicians
to meet the public=s need. What is needed for the academic world is a similar
Council of Graduate Education which would study the market and make recommendations
to administrators as to the proper number of programs and students needed
to meet the needs of the public while at the same time ensuring a decent living
wage for graduates of doctoral programs.
6.
The Untouchables: The Catch 22 of Graduate Work
Graduate students are caught in a Catch 22: either they
play the traditional game of working hard under a well-intentioned mentor,
taking lots of classes, writing a brilliant thesis, and in general getting
a good education, OR they do what they have to do to prepare them for the
job market: teach courses and publish articles while working on their degrees.
Of course, if they do the latter, the former suffers. In fact, if you attend
a graduate program that really DOES educate you - i.e. does not exploit you
for your cheap labour - then all of a sudden you lack the very "experience"
you need to get a good job. The system discriminates against those who want
to get a good education. In order to be considered for a job, you must have
previous experience of having been exploited.
Ironically, it is the graduate student labour pool that
has contributed to the plight of sessional/adjuncts. The system is ingenious.
Grad students think somebody's doing them a big favour by letting them teach
and paying them a mere fraction of what a tenured professor earns for doing
the same work. This atmosphere encourages students to go to graduate schools,
work for a pittance, only to graduate into a sessional/adjunct pool from which
they may never escape.
So graduate student teaching contributes to bloated programs
and a burgeoning sessional/adjunct pool. More importantly, due to a real lack
of experience, graduate student teachers cannot be as competent as their full-time
mentors and should NOT be relied upon to teach entire classes unsupervised
early in their graduate-school careers. It is not fair to charge students
full tuition to be taught by somebody who does not have the experience to
know what they are doing and who is unsupervised by a veteran teacher. Learning
to teach at the college level should be a LEARNING experience, not a work
experience.
To reform this system, senior graduate students should
be limited to teaching once or twice per year, but guaranteed sessional/adjunct
positions for a couple of years after graduation, provided they=re competent teachers, and are actively
applying for post-docs and full-time jobs. Moreover, since they do the same
work as their full-time mentors, they should be paid a comparable wage.
7.
Conclusion
The basic moral principles we defended earlier in this
paper - treating others as you yourself would want to be treated, and basing
the justice of any need for a hierarchy in universities and colleges on a
notion of fairness promulgated from behind a veil of ignorance - throws into
question the whole academic caste system.
Using these definitions of justice, we conclude that compensation and
hiring practices for adjunct and tenure-track jobs are unjust. One of the
grossest forms of injustice in academia is the practice of compensating fully
qualified and competent sessional/adjuncts a fraction of what full-time tenured
or tenure track faculty receive for doing the same work. Such practices are
discriminatory and exploitative. While students pay no less to be taught by
sessional/adjunct instructors, adjuncts are compensated between 25%-33% of
what the average full-time professor earns to teach the same class for the
simple reason that they are lowly adjuncts.
By paying the adjunct a quarter of what she is actually
worth to students, the institution reaps what Marx calls Asurplus value.@ Surplus
value, the objective of capitalism, is attainable only by the exploitation
of wage labour and can be achieved by either lengthening the work day or devaluing
the labour-power of workers. While
most higher education institutions claim not to be for-profit institutions,
as more and more adjunct/ sessionals do more and more teaching, they begin
to resemble schools like University of Phoenix, a hugely successful, for-profit,
stock holding business, which is staffed entirely by adjuncts. The University
of Phoenix has become highly successful and profitable by refusing to hire
more than one full-time faculty member per department and requiring their
faculty to work at night, which is convenient for their working students.
Administrations in BOTH for-profit and not-for-profit university and
college systems have radically devalued the labour power of the sessional/adjunct
caste of workers for one reason, the profitability provided the surplus value
their labour power gives them. While
the money saved by not-for-profit institutions may be passed on to students
(or to the salaries of administrators and tenured faculty) and not to stock
holders, the problem for adjuncts remains the same.
Regardless of who the beneficiaries are -- stock holders, students,
or administrators -- adjuncts are still being exploited. Administrators should
be made to feel a moral obligation to pay instructors with similar qualifications
and experience a similar wage for doing identical work.
Tenured faculty and administrators should have the simple
understanding of justice outlined above. Educators of all castes need to stop
pandering to the financial interests of administrations. It is time to tear
down the walls of the academic caste system. Unfortunately, for justice to
be achieved in academic institutions, sessional/adjuncts will need to take
things into their own hands (or join forces with tenured and tenure-track
faculty), since waiting for administrations to do the right thing will probably
be futile. As Richard Moser, a national field representative of the American
Association of University Professors, said about the release of the CAW surveys:
This
report is going to reveal a shameful truth... Administrations have abandoned
the notion that the university should set an example of good citizenship,
that they have turned away from the pursuit of justice and instead set up
sweat shops of the future for the greedy to imitate.
Our
message is simple. Let=s
close up these sweatshops, and treat part-time instructors fairly. Let=s also cast away the ideology that
justifies the caste system in academia. This melts into air when we closely
examine the realities of the current work force and the myth that advancement
in academe is purely the result of a meritocratic process. If academics can=t understand and implement principles
of justice in their own backyard, what does this say about the quality and
sincerity of their ethical understanding of the wider world?
Victoria
Neufeld, ed., Webster=s
New World Dictionary of American English, 3rd
ed., (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1988).
Marylhurst
University, near Portland, Oregon, and the University of Phoenix are two
institutions that rely almost entirely on Aadjunct@
teachers.
Technically
speaking, Confucius was the first to clearly state the principle of the
Golden Rule, in his concept of Shu, which was simply not doing things
to other people that you would not want done to you. Jesus echoed Confucius= sentiments, adding a positive side to this principle.
John
Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Harvard: Belknap Press, 1971), p. 83.
It could be argued, as hinted above, that the original position cannot be
used as an everyday moral compass to guide one through difficult dilemmas.
However, even if we dispensed with it, Rawls=
Equality Principle can by itself give us sufficient theoretical energy with
which to propel our attack on academic hierarchies.
This
should be obvious to anyone who has had the opportunity to review and rank
candidates= dossiers for a given teaching position
from the Aoutside,@ and then is shocked to discover that
the department in question winds up hiring a candidate who one would not
have ranked in the top twenty. It becomes even more obvious when a candidate
almost entirely bereft of publications, teaching experience, or both is
hired to a position over dozens of others with superior qualifications,
an all too common and, at least on the surface, baffling occurence.
According
to a recent a recent survey done by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce
(CAW), a group of 25 academic societies including the APA and the MLA, permanent
full-time faculty members are now the minority in most departments. In other
words, in the US, most college instructors are adjunct/sessionals. The press
release of the study entitled AWho
is teaching in US College Classrooms?: A Collaborative Study of Undergraduate
Faculty, Fall 1999" is available at
http://www.theaha.org/caw/pressrelease.htm
A Summary
of data released by the surveys by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce
is available at http://theaha.org/caw/cawreport.htm
The
average salary of an instructor at a community college in Oregon on a nine
month contract is $45,381 and the average benefits package is $14,188 (see
http://www.nea.org/cgi‑bin/he/salaries.cgi)
This means that the average community college is paying $59,569 for instructors
to teach 12 three hour classes a year. The average instructor is therefore
paid approximately $4,964 per three hour class, compared to the average
adjunct instructor, who earns between $1,242 and $1,482 per three hour class.
(These figures are based on the minimum and maximum salaries for adjuncts
at Mt. Hood Community College, as given in The Oregon Education Association
Almanac of Community Colleges 1999-2000.) Statistics for the average
salary of adjuncts per class are not available. For statistics on faculty
salaries and benefits in public institutions state by state in the US, see
the National Education Association website on-line: http://www.nea.org/he/salaries/index.html. The statistics
cited above can be found at http://www.nea.org/cgi‑bin/he/salaries.cgi.
For
more information on part-time compensation per class in the US, see the
Coalition of Academic Workforce summary of data on conditions and pay for
part-timers in academia. www.theaha.org/caw/cawreport.htm.
On page 4 of 6 of this report it says: AIn addition to receiving few if any benefits, most receive
less than $3, 000 per course. Nearly
one third of them earn $2000 or less per course. In large fields like English and history nearly
half of the part-timers are in this category. At this rate of pay, part-time teachers, almost all of whom have
masters degrees and many of whom have the PhD - would have to teach more
than four courses per term to earn over $15,000 a year. Most could earn comparable salaries as fast food workers, baggage
porters, or theatre lobby attendants.@
National
statistics on sessional pay rates in Canada are difficult to track down.
But as an example, the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, the
fourth-largest university in the province, pays (in 2000-2001) sessional
lecturers in the Arts $4,250 per one-term course; the Universities of Guelph
and Western Ontario, two other large universities in Southern Ontario, pay
their sessional teachers in the $4,300-$4,500 range. Smaller universities,
such as Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, mighty pay a sessional
teacher as little as $3,500 per term, per course.
Referring
once again to the University of Waterloo, its Faculty Association Collective
Agreement lays out the minimum and maximum salaries for Assistant Professors
as $45,000 and $115,000.
See
The Daily, August 8, 2000, at: http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/000808/d000808a.htm
The
University of Waterloo=s
News Bureau Release No. 42, dated March 30, 2000, informs us that 150 professors
and administrators at UW earned over $100,000 per year in 1999.
Insidious
forces on the Right in Canada, such as those represented by the Canadian
Alliance, sporadically challenge this basic right. But the general populace
seems to recognize it, for the most part.
This
issue is on line at: http://www.nea.org/he/heupdate/upv1no1.pdf in the conclusion,
p.4.
The realities of the academic workforce at the turn of the century falsify
this ideology. Large numbers of experienced, even published, academics are
teaching part-time, a fact born out by the recent Coalition on the Academic
Workforce report cited above. Reflecting on the report, which shows that
even big, prestigious universities rely on large pools of underpaid graduate
students and adjunct instructors, Cary Nelson, an English professor at the
University of Illinois at Urbana‑Champagne, noted that "I have
made the argument before that you can go to Yale and basically get the same
instruction you'd get at Long Island Community College because higher education
is relying on the same labor pool. So you have the institutions with the
highest self‑image and the greatest amount of pride and the greatest
amount of cult prestige aligned, in terms of their labor policies, with
institutions at the bottom end of the ladder. The survey made that stark."
When large institutions make hiring decisions based on the ill-founded prestige
of universities like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, then the danger is that
this prestige becomes even more mythical, feeding back on itself like Jimi
Hendrix=s guitar.
To
forestall an obvious critique of our use of Marx=s notion of the reserve army of the unemployed in relation
to academe, we realize that universities are not (for the most part) profit-orientated
private corporations. However, they do compete for labour, and it is clearly
in their interests to hire that labour on the cheap if they can do so and
get away with it. As Marx so clearly pointed out, if the size of the labour
pool outstrips the number of workers required by employers, and these workers
are not organized, employers can keep wages down by pitting them against
each other in a competition for scarce jobs. So even though universities
are not private corporations, they are interested in keeping
costs down, and are likely to do so in whatever area has the least political
fallout.
Update,
September 1998. This issue of the NEA=s
UPDATE is on-line at: http://www.nea.org/he/heupdate/vol4no4.pdf p. 5 of 6.
Page
2 of 5 from the Summary of Data from Surveys by the Coalition on the
Academic Workforce. Available
at http://www.theaha.org/caw/cawreport.htm
This report states that: AEnglish and foreign language programs
reported just over a third of the instructional staffs in their departments
were full-time tenure track. Only
in anthropology, history, and philosophy programs did full-time tenure track
faculty comprise more than half of the instructional staff.@
See
Statistics Canada, The Daily, August 8, 2000:
http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/000808/d000808a.htm
The
obvious critique at this point is, AWell,
let=s suppose you=re right. But where will the money
come from to pay adjuncts fairly?@
The answer is simple: in an era of budget surpluses throughout North America,
instead of giving tax cuts to the wealthy, or (in the case of the US) pouring
billions into the military, which is, in the post-Cold War era, grossly
over-funded for the missions required of it, the state should ante up more
money not only for education, but for health care too. However, this is
an argument for another day.
Cited
by Ana Marie Cox in Chronicle of Higher Education, AStudy Show=s College=s
Dependence on Their Part-Time Instructors: Report documents the low pay
and lack of benefits for those off the tenure track@ Dec. 1, 2000. Available
at: http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i14/14a01201.htm,
page 1 of 6.
