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Believing in Free Markets and Exploitation of Labor: A Conundrum
I am an adjunct history professor. I love my job. I love teaching. I love students. I love engaging with the material I try to help students understand. I have never minded the paltry sums I am paid because I also believe strongly in free markets and understand the invisible hand passes out checks to labor.
However, I’m starting to reconsider this position.
Yesterday I did a very unhealthy thing. I looked up the salaries of full-time faculty who teach many of the exact same classes that I teach at one of the colleges where I work and who have essentially the same course load that I do. I bothered to find out what some of the administrators make as well, and I noticed the delightful administrative assistant who works for the head of my department makes twice as much money as I do.
Now, I did not start teaching until after I had raised my family. The truth is that I do not have to make a lot of money because I am married, and my husband has carried that load for decades. The reality is that I could–and probably would–teach for free because I am that passionate about education. But I am in a unique position, and I am realizing more and more that all is not right in the ivory tower.
This bastion of progressive babble that houses professors who write screeds about the evils of corporations exploiting employees effectively exploits a large number of workers every semester by requiring them to have advanced degrees while paying them wages equivalent to those made by fast food workers.
For those of you who are not aware, adjunct faculty is contingent faculty. They are “part time” workers who exist on a semester-to-semester contract with absolutely no benefits or job security. They are sometimes uncertain about how many classes they will be able to teach in a term, which is directly tied to their compensation, until a week before that term starts. They also currently make up the majority of the teachers in higher education.
What does this mean?
For one, my free market self acknowledges that there are too many people in the United States with masters degrees and doctorates who saw Dead Poets Society in the eighties and thus want to mold young minds. I accept this, and I understand that I chose to toil away in graduate school so I could teach in college. No one forced me to read monographs or start using words like historiography and intersectionality in day-to-day conversations. If you asked my husband, he’d pay money to remove those words from my vocabulary.
I also understand that I choose to teach for less money now than I made when I was a wee lass in my twenties and working in the private sector because I am willing to accept the terms of my semester-to-semester contracts. But I also wonder about other things the invisible hand is doing in this particular marketplace in which I work.
One reason labor costs are kept low, it seems to me, is that the price of a product is kept low. But students have paid higher and higher tuition rates which have outpaced inflation for decades while adjunct pay has remained largely stagnant.
So what are students buying for this higher price-tag? A better education? How can this be true when they are taught more and more by adjuncts and/or graduate teaching assistants who are eating ramen and struggling to survive rather than giving students detailed feedback on their work? What exactly are students getting for their increased debt if it’s not more attentive instruction in the classroom?
I understand that state governments have subsidized many universities less and less. That could explain the rising costs, right?
Understanding this, I was okay with taking a hit in pay. I accepted that I would not earn much at the end of the day despite the fact that the “product” with which I am engaged keeps costing consumers more and more because of cut-backs. Sure I put in long hours for which I am not compensated, but I once felt that I was in the same boat as all of my colleagues working in the humanities.
After all, I have gone to faculty meetings and looked around at the people in Costco jeans who often seem to have shown up purely for the free sub sandwiches and professional development credit. (A certain bit of the second is required to get our contracts renewed each new term.)
Again, the majority of everyone teaching where I work is adjunct faculty, so it’s not hard to find folks who look a bit haggard. These are people who may not be married like I am, which means they are flying down the highway to jobs on multiple campuses so that colleges can say they are “part time” and still avoid paying for their healthcare or contributing to retirement. Perhaps they are waiting tables at night.
But this is the thing. This feeling I had was not true. Professors are not all in the same boat, and there are vast disparities in pay that are not based on workload, education level, experience, or quality of output.
I was shocked, in fact, when I found out that many of my colleagues who make up the minority of teachers on my main campus have benefits, retirement plans, and make as much as six times more than the rest of us who are doing very similar work. They often teach the exact same classes that adjuncts do, though they have offices and stay on one campus, whereas I keep files in the back of my jeep and travel between three. (This group of full-timers, by the way, does not seem to grow but shrinks when someone dies as they are then replaced by adjuncts.)
If one then turns away from the salaries of various faculty and starts looking at those people called “staff” or “administration,” the resentment really starts to build.
While I have never once thought that the argument about wage gaps between unskilled factory workers and CEOs has been very compelling because I am fully aware of the differences between these jobs, I don’t mind saying that when I look at the average pay of adjuncts and compare this to the average pay of college presidents, I find myself getting a little queasy. The disparities in higher education strike me as much starker than those found between unskilled labor and management as well because of the credentials that are required for any adjunct to have despite the fact that he/she will earn less than the custodians who work at the same institutions. These disparities are also weirdly uniform across academia.
Do people really believe competent educators are so easily found? Can this system really be sustained?
While I believe I am a good teacher, and I often work sixty hour+ weeks grading papers and changing my courses to make them better for a good deal less than thirty thousand dollars a year in a city where the average rent for a one bedroom apartment is $1245, I do not have to worry about putting groceries in my refrigerator.
How many adjuncts look like me? If I’m to go by the anecdotal experience, the answer is not as many as you think.
So I believe it is only reasonable to think there must be a degradation in the product of education if the people delivering that product are so ill paid that they cannot spend the time that I do on delivering that product, which is getting more and more expensive for the buyers of that product.
I suppose that the invisible hand will eventually make graduate schools pump out fewer teachers, or teachers will refuse to be adjuncts, or students will stop going to college or… what?
I do not want to be a hypocrite. In theory, I do not even believe in minimum wages. But I find myself asking questions about what exploitation even is in the free market. How do we define this term? Does it ever exist in a free market system? If it does, how are adjuncts not exploited? How can exploitation be rectified? How is this current system impacting education outcomes?
Should I just shut up and accept the iron law of wages is what Adam Smith would have envisioned for adjunct professors? Should consumers be fine with paying the people who are actually interacting with them on campuses a fraction of what is paid to the administrators they never see who are busy doing… something?
Where does it all end up?
It’s a conundrum for me that I can’t solve in my own mind.
Published in Education
And when certain types of conservative makes economic growth the measure of all that is good, they are valuing the collective over the individual.
So sayeth Schumpeter, and it seems he was a very hard man with whom to argue much.
Oh, no worries. I plead cluelessness.
I’ve heard of Schumpeter, but don’t really know anything about him or his work. Do you have a reference? I think this is a conclusion I came to myself, but in actuality I probably had a lot of help without realizing it. So I’d be interested in comparing.
Wholeheartedly agree.
Conservatives tend to make very good friends of Job.
He coined the term “creative destruction,” which I make sure I at least talk about every semester I teach because it explains all that is good and awful about capitalism.
Anyway, if I’m not mistaken, he comes up with your thesis in Can Capitalism Survive?
I admire him greatly, and he makes total sense to me.
Thanks. Sounds like something I should have read decades ago.
This article is a great introduction. It’s how I first learned of him.
The Churn: The Paradox of Capitalism
from the Dallas Fed. Reserve Bank.
Yes, I think you are 100% correct here. The organizational cost of academic bureaucracy and administration far, far outweighs any measurable improvement in delivery of product. Administration has accumulated on the body of academia like barnacles and sargasso weed on the hull of a ship, and serve about the same purpose.
I spelled this out on page six, but there’s an error here: adjuncts and tenured/tenure-track professors are not doing the same job, even when they teach the same classes. (And often, in practice, they don’t actually teach the same classes. We, at least, bring in adjuncts for subjects we do not have tenured profs available to teach.)
I appreciate the differences you outline on page six. However, It has been my observation that the average adjunct (or, Heaven-help-me, “adjunct-wannabe” like me!) has to pursue the same lines of effort, seeking to get published, finding ways show academic standing, and still making time (uncompensated) for students. I do not doubt that a full-time professor is expected to do more than an adjunct. Is the amount more expected really the difference between sub-subsistence compensation and making a satisfactory salary? As @lois-lane has suggested, if there was less bureaucratic overhead, more might be available to compensate adjuncts?
That is all true if one is trying to get a full-time position.
This is exactly right – all this is part of the larger career goals, but not actually the labor you’re being contracted for on the class you teach. Hey, I totally agree that adjuncts are underpaid given how important their work is. But the origin of the adjunct system was the idea that people with expertise from their full time jobs would come and teach a class ad hoc to share that experience with students; they were not created to be full time, sole-source-of-income jobs. That they continue to not be, when so many people are willing to take them just to say they are nominally in academia, gives no one any incentive to change this.
As a recent retiree (not a prof, one of those evil admin people) from the U of Minnesota, I can say that it is not going to the young assistant and associate profs, who make $50k to $60k, maybe a little more depending on department (Electrical and Computer Engineering would pay more than Sociology). There are lots of people in touchy-feely admin jobs that pay a lot- associated with “diversity”.
And the tuition is not what you see in the news, because of college strategy to use price discrimination to funnel money from the middle class to the favored diversity recipients. A mid-range state university, e.g., Minnesota State at Mankato, may charge an in-state resident around $10k for two semesters, 15 credit load; add room and board to get the total, out-of-state residents pay a good 50% more up to double. Financial aid (scholarships, not loans) may chop a couple of thousand.
Yes, the amount more is unquestionably reflected in the salary. You might do other related work, but the contracted agreement on the labor you are providing for compensation doesn’t include publishing, committee work, university outreach, thesis advising, etc. (There’s another class of contingent labor, lecturers, who are required to do more outside the classroom, and they are usually paid a more livable wage for that.)
Honestly, beyond the suggestions floated here about reducing administrative bloat, the best, market-driven solution would be to eliminate tenure and move everyone on to long-term renewable contracts. People with tenure already have good reason to fight against this (obviously), but a surprising number of people trying to get into the tenure-track jobs are against it too – there’s always the hope of hitting the jackpot and getting to join tenured class. So we stagnate.
I do think any fight for higher wages for adjuncts is going to require cooperation from tenured profs, so don’t start out by denigrating our work saying we don’t teach well or don’t earn our salaries (which in the humanities, are still pretty low given our education).
(So, does anyone know if we have a “Ricochet Academics” group for all of use poor right-leaning souls slogging away in the hostile atmosphere of academia yet?)
@sabrdance should be in it, if you get one off the ground.
Sure. This was how the system started; there’s an oversupply of labor, and that’s fair.
But I don’t know if I am “nominally” in academia when teaching 5 classes in a term, albeit splitting those classes between two institutions. Whether getting benefits or not, that still feels pretty “in academia” to me.
After all, adjunct faculty–whether intended to teach ad hoc at one point or not–now makes up more than 60% of all faculty in one of those two schools….
I’m sure you’re not evil! Those touchy-feely types though… I’m not sure what they add to the equation. I say shift their pay to @thewhetherman and me. ;)
I would be interested. I didn’t see this thread until it had 9 pages of comments, and so have not weighed in.
Completely fair point. I’m only suggesting that if all the excellent adjuncts we have withdrew their labor, there would be people jumping in to take the same jobs at the same lousy wages. There’s a not-insignificant number of people who have not and will not ever get on the tenure-track, but stay on as an adjunct to feel they’re still in the game (at least in my experience).
Personally, if I hadn’t gotten a job that could support me in academia in three years on the market, AND I needed the money to support myself or my family, then I’d do something else. If I could afford to, then I’d probably adjunct for the joy of teaching (which really is a joy, most of the time). But piecing together a bunch of adjunct positions that are not ever going to be full time is not a good long-term strategy.
Agreed. That is how I got into my gig as an adjunct. It was a change from the day job, and it was a lot of fun. I dropped it when credentials started getting more important than knowledge. That was also about the time you started seeing growth in the number of “professional adjuncts.”
Seawriter
OK -having read about 2/3 of the comments:
1.) we joke among the tenured faculty that we’d do the teaching for free. They pay us to sit in committee meetings. They pay us to do research.
2.) I have experimented with my colleagues -I asked them how much money I would have to pay them to cut their teaching load by 2 courses in order to serve on more committees or take on more administrative work. By the numbers they quoted, faculty administrators are actually underpaid.
3.) Higher ed isn’t exactly a free market. It isn’t just tenure, it’s also the public sector regulations that govern state schools. Private schools may be a bit more free market, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
4.) The concern with making higher education a pure market -as opposed to the shared governance form of earlier generations -is that even with shared governance, it isn’t entirely clear that the non-monetary aims of the institution (preserving and building knowledge, the shaping of students’ character) are maintained against the administrative pressures to move the students through and give them the credential they paid for. Remove even what little faculty control there is (which makes administration expensive) and we’d become little more than diploma mills.
5.) Though with the current political slant of faculty, the proliferation of degrees for subjects that aren’t subjects (“leadership,” blegh), I’m not sure we aren’t already diploma mills.
Again, I don’t think that most faculty are overcompensated. However, when I looked up the pay for several full-time faculty working at one of my schools, I was surprised to see what a few particular professors made that was… well… twice what you say you make with more of your responsibilities.
I actually like those people–or most of those people anyway ;) –but I found the numbers posted a bit mind-boggling in light of how little adjuncts make in comparison, which is also pretty low given our education. :D
If the published salaries for staff at that school are correct, the people who are earning those salaries are simply in a different financial boat than adjuncts because they make a very good living.
There’s nothing wrong with that at all–good for them!–but I had thought that we had more in common in that we were both underpaid for what we did. They look well compensated.
I’m reminded of a line from Terry Pratchett’s novel Maskerade:
“The wages [as a member of the opera chorus] weren’t much; in fact, they were less than what you’d get mopping floors. The reason was that, when you advertised a dirty floor, hundreds of hopefuls didn’t turn up.”
The only reason adjunct wages will ever go up is if the supply of people willing to teach drops below the demand for people to teach courses. Frankly, given the growing reputation of college as a place where you spend money you don’t have to not get an education that will not help you with future employment and the growing reputation of non-collegiate courses and certifications, I wouldn’t put any money on the prospect.
I think this. The “leadership doctorate” is a hoot.
Thanks for joining the conversation.
I’d love to be in a group for people working in some capacity in academia.
It seems as if there are a lot of people here who are involved in some way with higher education.
Yes. Me and the opera chorus.
Funny line.
I was so sorry that Terry Pratchett had such a hard end with Alzheimer’s.
That really did seem unjust.
I’d want more information – are they taking on administrative roles in addition to their courses (the chair of a department earns more, for example), or does their published salary include money paid out from a competitive internal grant (mine does, but it doesn’t note all the “overtime” I worked to get and then administer the grant)? Does the department offer merit pay (a one time bonus for publications or other contributions)?
In other words, how much did they have to hustle to make that salary for that year? They can be making good money and still be underpaid – then you’re just both underpaid. Yay, solidarity.
Or they’re just super lucky, in which case I would be a little bitter about it.
I’ve always marveled at the irony that a man who disagreed with my religious and political positions did such an amazing job writing stories that strengthened my belief in those positions.