Imagine you have two friends, Jim and Tom, and both of them are professors in Massachusetts. They are both 32, both have brown hair, and both love 2000s comedy movies. But there is one crucial difference: Jim is a “tenured” professor, which guarantees him a whole host of privileges from a six-figure salary to paid leave, healthcare and work-life balance. Tom, on the other hand, is stuck as an adjunct professor, and does not have any of these benefits.
Jim’s years of hard work in academia, from getting his bachelors to his PhD, have paid off handsomely since he snagged a professorship on the tenure track. The perks of tenure give Jim the peace of mind to dedicate himself to rigorous research, be the best teacher possible to his students, and live his life to the fullest outside of work.
Tom, on the other hand, does not have the right to any of these benefits as an adjunct professor. Even though Tom did everything right, there are simply not enough professor jobs for all of the brilliant PhDs like him who would be amazing professors.
All that is left are “adjunct professor” jobs where you sign up to teach classes that only pay a few thousand dollars per semester, with no job security, benefits or support. It wasn’t always this way.
This story is much bigger than Jim and Tom: it is the story of how professors across America have been transformed from a fairly equal, well-paying profession into the rigidly stratified, exploitative caste system we see on our campuses today.
The root cause is simple: universities have drastically cut the number of professor jobs and replaced them with much cheaper adjunct professor gigs that pay much less and offer none of the most basic benefits, from healthcare to retirement plans to sick leave.
Tenure-track professors like Jim used to be the majority at universities, numbering 78.3 percent of all professors in 1969. But by 2020, the percentage of tenure-track professors had fallen to 31 percent of all college professors – less than half of what it was half a century ago. Meanwhile, adjunct professors now account for 69 percent of all faculty at American universities.
Universities love adjunct professors because they save them money and give them more power over all workers. Professor positions require livable salaries and basic benefits like healthcare indefinitely, so it is much cheaper for universities to replace regular professors with “adjunct professors” who have no guarantee of a salary or even healthcare since they are only paid by the class. In addition, by creating a lower class of professors for the remaining tenured professors to look down on, universities have made it significantly harder for all professors to fight for their rights together.
Adjuncts’ salaries are usually barely enough to provide for themselves or for their families. The average pay per class for adjunct professors is about $3500. Our adjunct friend Tom, like two thirds of adjuncts, earns less than $50,000 per year with all of his other jobs combined. One quarter of adjuncts earn less than $25,000 per year. The result is Tom and other adjunct faculty have to teach classes at multiple different colleges and apply for new teaching jobs around the clock just to scrape by.
Despite Tom’s immense expertise and passion for teaching, these unbearably miserable conditions have a clear negative impact on his teaching performance that denies students the education they deserve. The Delphi Project found that colleges’ overreliance on overworked adjuncts has a whole host of negative effects on student learning.
In spite of this, adjunct professors like Tom work just as hard if not harder than regular professors and go the extra mile to help their students. According to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey, 68 percent adjunct faculty participate in faculty meetings, 65 percent said they help students in crisis, and 81 percent said they write students letters of recommendation.
Overworked and underpaid adjunct professors like Tom clearly deserve better. We need to require all adjunct faculty to have decent salaries as well as healthcare, retirement plans and other vital support. This is what two bills, the Adjunct Faculty Reform Act (SD.1664/HD.2813) and the Adjunct Pilot Program (HD.2545), would do if passed, so if you agree with this article you should urge your lawmakers to vote for these bills.
When adjunct faculty like Tom get the best treatment possible, students get the best education possible.