We need to pass the Adjunct Faculty Bill of Rights (S. 816/ H. 1260) so that long underpaid, overworked and disrespected adjunct faculty workers get the job security, benefits and wages they deserve.
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) as substitutes for well-paid, fairly worked professors who do as much teaching work as professors with none of the benefits, pay or job security.
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 an Adjunct Faculty Bill of Rights. 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 simply 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. So what are the benefits that this Adjunct Faculty Bill of Rights would bring?
But the Adjunct Faculty Bill of Rights we are fighting for in Massachusetts would go a long way towards giving the adjuncts the pay and benefits they deserve.
According to the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association, this legislation includes guaranteeing more access health insurance and state pension options for adjunct faculty who teach the equivalent of half time or more”; ensure adjuncts receive the same pay as full-time non-tenure track faculty; establish “a minimum of a 7.5 percent state contribution to the SMART Plan retirement account for faculty who work less than half time”, and reforming the system to ensure there are more positions for tenure-track faculty (as in the past) as well as prioritize notifying adjunct faculty of these opportunities.