Summary
- Adjunct faculty are professors who lack the pay, benefits and job security necessary not only to live a stable, healthy life, but also to properly educate the students who depend on them. This is despite the fact many of them teach as much as regular professors.
- Universities have gotten away with denying adjunct professors equal treatment based on their status as temporary workers paid for each class. This is because it is much cheaper to have multiple part time professors on temporary contracts vs. making more professor positions.
- This legislation would right these wrongs by ensuring adjunct professors get proper compensation for all of the hard work they do, with proportionate job security, pay and benefits such as healthcare, social security and help with research.
We need to pass Adjunct Faculty reform so that long underpaid, overworked and disrespected adjunct faculty workers get the job security, benefits and wages they deserve. So what are adjunct faculty, how do they differ from regular professors, and what will this bill do to change that?
The Problem
Adjunct faculty are faculty who do not have the full-time commitment to a university that regular professors do. As universities have increasingly cut corners amid wavering state funding and growing campus debt, they have resorted to using lower-level faculty (a.k.a adjuncts) in place of regular professor positions.
Compared to a full-time professor guaranteed long-term employment, pay and benefits, being an “adjunct professor” means you only teach at most a few courses every semester, you are paid by the class rather than given a stable salary, and you have to reapply to teach classes every semester. Many adjuncts do as much teaching work as regular professors but with none of the benefits, pay or job security.
Beyond being just underpaid, college administrations have outright swindled adjunct faculty workers of pay and benefits their work entitles them to: in Massachusetts, due to their part-time status, adjunct faculty are not eligible for social security benefits through their teaching posts. This effectively robs them of the hard-earned right of every American.
What’s more, Massachusetts keeps adjuncts classified as “part-time” in the first place by not allowing “continuing education” to be counted towards full-time status in order to deny them basic benefits.
The Solution (Our Bill!)
What would our Comprehensive Adjunct Faculty Reform bill do to right these wrongs? This bill empowers adjunct faculty in three key ways: guaranteed minimum pay, benefits and job security; opportunities for promotion and professional development; and a more inclusive experience through access to college resources and a voice in faculty decision-making.
In order to stop colleges from cheating adjuncts out of full-time status by separating “day” and “continuing education” courses, this bill guarantees equal pay and benefits for these classes. It also guarantees compensation adjusted for cost-of-living differences, compensation for departmental and committee services, and compensation for preparing a course if it gets cancelled.
Job insecurity is one of the other gravest issues adjuncts face, so this bill entitles adjuncts to a standard two-year contract after four successful semesters of teaching at a certain university. In order to fix the problem of adjunct professors not knowing about class assignments in time (which creates crippling uncertainty about the ability to pay bills), the bill ensures professors hear about class assignments at least 45 days before their start dates. In addition, this bill would protect faculty from arbitrarily having their teaching contracts renewed.
This bill also provides for expanded career advancement opportunities. Specifically, this bill outlines a three-tier system with more job security, compensation and benefits with each level. It ensures clear criteria for advancement while mandating transparency and fairness in the promotion process. The icing on the cake? The most eligible adjuncts will get priority consideration for full-time professorships.
To ensure adjuncts get the benefits they need and deserve, this bill guarantees eligibility for healthcare, social security and representation in benefit decisions.
To ensure adjunct faculty can benefit from the extensive resources as well as academic and professional opportunities of campuses they work at, this legislation also outlines access to research grants, mentoring opportunities, help with conferences, as well as yearly funding for professional development. To supplement these material benefits, this bill also guarantees the opportunity to take part in faculty governance and faculty meetings.
Finally, in order for all of this to go through, this legislation lays out requirements for oversight, regulation and enforcement to ensure that adjuncts get to keep these long-deserved wins. These detailed regulations would go hand in hand with resources to monitor institutions’ compliance, investigate violations, and punish noncompliance accordingly.
To empower adjuncts to stand up for themselves and be at the mercy of colleges no longer, this bill also would give them protection from retaliation as well as a system for requesting enforcement and appealing decisions.
Context
The original purpose of adjunct professors was to give retired professors and experts more flexibility to teach. But in recent decades, it has been corrupted into another example of today’s exploitative gig economy, as one long-time adjunct notes.
The percentage of tenure-track professors making up teaching faculty at universities was 78.3 in 1969. But by 2011, full time positions only accounted for 19.1 percent, while 51.2 percent of positions were for adjunct faculty.
Instead of recognizing the importance of full-time, tenured professors who have the time, salaries and peace of mind to properly teach their students, these schools increasingly replace them with scores of teachers who are not allowed to get tenure and never have a guarantee of a job for the next semester.
This hurts students above all: scholars of the Delphi Project found overreliance on adjuncts has a whole host of negative effects on student learning since adjuncts are too stressed and overwhelmed to dedicate enough time and energy to their students.
This model is not sustainable: just look at the statistics. As Julien Berman of the Harvard Crimson reports, one 2019 survey found the median adjunct professor earns between $3000 and $5000 per course taught, while ⅔ earn less than $50,000 per year with all their jobs combined .
Those who manage to scramble together enough one-semester teaching contracts are the lucky ones. Other adjuncts are approaching the poverty line: about ¼ of adjuncts earn less than $25,000 per year.
In another survey, 80 percent said the average employment contract lasts for one semester or less, which robs these professors of the job security they need to properly teach students as well as lead fulfilling lives outside of work.
This second-class status has repercussions for these academics’ support networks, self-worth and morale: in the same survey, only 16 percent said they felt they were treated as equals by their universities, and 25 percent said they’re treated equally by colleagues.
This lack of respect only further enables a lack of enough institutional support: less than 50 percent said their institution provides them enough training to handle different crises, from mental health to sexual harassment to bias.
The widespread lack of a living salary, institutional support, job security and benefits is not simply because these workers are much less valuable than tenured professors. According to the same survey, despite their marginal status, adjuncts are very involved in campus: 68 percent said they participate in faculty meetings, 65 percent said they help students in crisis, and 81 percent said they write LOR for students.
It is also an issue of racial justice: from 1993 to 2013, while the percentage of minority adjuncts increased 230 percent, minorities in full-time tenured teaching positions only increased 30 percent. As the author points out, it is tragic yet unsurprising that minorities have been relegated to dead-end, unlivable adjunct positions just when the golden ticket of higher education became most available to them.
This is why we must pass comprehensive reforms to how Massachusetts treats adjunct faculty. Because when our teachers are beaten down, everyone is hurt. It is also a matter of human decency. We should not expect these promising and passionate faculty to toil with wages comparable to the minimum wage, an overwhelming teaching load and little to no benefits with the expectation that they should just be grateful for doing something they love. The only way they can do that, though, is if they are compensated for it properly.
The alternative is more and more burnt out adjuncts who lose passion for a subject they once loved, become overwhelmed by student debt they cannot pay off because of dismal pay, and cannot focus on teaching because they’re constantly fighting to secure teaching gigs for the next semester.
At the same time, there is no easy silver bullet solution. As labor studies scholar and lecturer Trevor Griffey points out, a key cause of the adjunctification of universities is the devaluation of full-time, tenured professors with PhDs. As a consequence of declining state funding (as with so many of today’s problems in higher education), universities normalized ending tenure positions and relying more and more on workers with only master’s degrees to teach classes.
This made sense for the bottom line: by separating teaching as its own job, universities could select from a much larger pool of workers, then justify only hiring them for short periods, in turn paying little and making them more exploitable.
Based on this, the excuse that adjunct workers’ problems stem from an oversupply of PhDs just isn’t true: if anything, we could need many more PhDs to properly teach courses currently left to adjuncts, but colleges have simply recruited master’s degree holders to adjunct for so long we have not invested in PhD pipelines as much as we need to. But the criteria to be an adjunct being so low is also what has enabled universities to treat them so badly.
Thus, we will need to strike a balance between investing more in simply bringing back tenured positions (and making more PhDs), as well as giving adequate pay and long-term contracts to qualified adjuncts that have become the backbone of so many universities.
This is especially because making these adjuncts reapply for classes every semester and constantly switching between institutions makes no sense when most of them would gladly work full-time. Also, it’s a huge extra pain on top of all of the other stuff on their plate: as Alexandra Bradner writes in her powerful and heart-wrenching piece:
With every institutional move, you have to reprogram all your learning management system course shells. You must transition all your email. You have to learn a new system of general education and major/minor requirements. And you must endlessly retake all the time-consuming tutorials required by each institution on sexual harassment; diversity, equity, and inclusion; cybersecurity; and responsible research.
Any victory of tuition-free college or an endowment tax would be in vain if we cannot ensure our professors have the job security, pay and work-life balance to burn bright and not burn out.