(In the United States, that is.)
This is a reminder that, statistically, half of your professors are adjuncts, which means that they work part time, at an average of $2500 per course (not per credit hour, per COURSE, for an ENTIRE SEMESTER), which in some areas amounts to less than minimum wage. In order to make ends meet, many adjuncts work at multiple campuses, teaching up to seven classes at a time. They have to be re-hired every semester. They have to wait until the registration period is over before finding out if they will get any classes to teach. They make up substantially more than half of the instructional workforce at some institutions, but they have no role in governance, no voice with the administration. In many cases, they have no library or computer privileges, no professional support, and no office in which to meet with you.
Adjunct faculty are disproportionately women and people of color.
If you think this likely has an impact on the quality of the education for which you are paying increasingly exorbitant tuition, then you are correct. You and your parents owe it to yourselves to find out what your university’s adjunct hiring practices are. If you are a high school student considering higher education, ask administrators for this information and let them know that it matters to you. Support the efforts of adjuncts to unionize. Universities in the US increasingly operate on the retail model of education. They see students and parents as the customer, and the best way to get them to change is to let them know that the customer is not happy.
from what i was told by contract professors, my university took student course evaluations very seriously and they had an impact on whether professors’ contracts would be renewed or whether they had a chance of moving into a tenure track position. i don’t know if this is the case at every institution. but by my third year of university, i established a personal policy of giving glowing course evals to any adjunct/contract professor who wasn’t a complete dick or completely incompetent (and in so doing discovered that the complete dicks/completely incompentent profs that i encountered were, without exception, tenured and on the sunshine list).
even if the contract prof who taught my class was only so-so, the question i always asked myself was always how did this professor perform relative to their below poverty-line wages? and the answer was literally always 15 out of 10, how the fuck did they manage to pull this off with this much grace and humour?
what i wish i’d learned much, much earlier in my university career: if you have an adjunct professor that you love, ask them if there are ways you can best support them professionally, whether it be filling out course evals or signing petitions or making sure to email them 72 hours before you need an answer or putting pressure on the university or showing up at the picket lines when their union is on strike! you might be surprised by the small low-effort practical steps you can take to make their lives a little easier.
Holy shit. My current fave teacher is an adjunct i believe and they were giving him a hard time getting copies of things for the class during summer. I heard this word on monday and look what we have here…
THANK YOU
This is so, sooooo important. Seriously.
This. And also if you go to a public college, freak out at your state legislators. The reason colleges have moved toward this awful wage-slave model is because they’re trying to find ways to make up for the enormous budget shortfalls left by states cutting their higher education funding by 60% in the last 25 years.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1Okbjgi