News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture, and other topics. The world’s most popular philosophy blog, since 2003.
There’s a simple way to test. Open a pre-2022 essay and copy-and-paste it into a new file.
At the risk of self-advertising:… You claim “AI is unusual in degree, not in kind” and “It is not clear…
Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…
I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
Philosopher Jason Brennan (Georgetown) has been generating a lot of discussion (and some ranting and raving) with his posts about adjuncts. They're worth a read. I'm curious what readers think about these issues. Please keep it substantive.
I think he's right. I knew the odds (which got even worse whilst I was studying thanks to the financial crisis) and went for it anyway. After a year of getting by teaching individual courses, I quit for a non-academic job. Yes, it's frustrating that administrators eat up money that could be better spent on actual research positions. But decisions are made against the backdrop of reality and we should be held responsible for that choice. And Brennan is surely right that in an ideal world, there wouldn't be enough tenure-track roles for all adjunts. I actually don't think he's saying anything that controversial (though I'm open to being convinced otherwise).
This assumption is a non-starter for many adjuncts: "Let’s say the person teaches 2 classes." Adjuncts often attempt to get two classes, but are denied because the university would be required, at that point, to provide health coverage and contribute to Social Security — liabilities they don't want to incur. So if an adjunct is to get a second class (or more), it must be at a different school, which adds to commute distances and expenses, wasted time in the car, and extra office hours at the other school (and less time spent with research, writing, and professional advancement). As to his objection to the objection regarding health insurance: the ACA has been a problem for adjuncts. In addition to universities trying to avoid providing health coverage (see above), there are income limits that disqualify individuals from subsidies through Medicaid. If you are only teaching one class, you typically will make just enough to be disqualified for Medicaid, but you won't be making enough to buy coverage in the ACA marketplace and still have enough money leftover to pay the rent and living expenses — unless you take odd jobs bagging groceries or waiting tables (which constitute time sunk into endeavors that do not advance your research or professional improvement). One simple solution might be to raise the Medicaid eligibility cap or to provide more generous subsidies in the ACA marketplace to low income earners. Unfortunately, I suspect such solutions will sound too "socialist" to someone who calls himself a "bleeding heart libertarian."
Former adjunct is right in that sometimes personal responsibility is glossed over in these accounts. On the other hand, the HuffPo article Brennan addresses is from a union rep and as such of course it will rest on the implied premise that workers deserve a living wage in their trade, whether or not they could have or should have chosen another trade.
This being acknowledged, there are other problems here. While it may be true that there will never be a world in which all adjuncts are tenured, Brennan does not bother to address the fact that those who do have tenure seem more interested in maintaining their own positions and reaping the benefits of those positions than in actively working to make public reinvestment in higher education a major national issue. Indeed it would appear, and this is a very broad generalization, that tenured faculty are more invested in justifying their positions to themselves than in showing solidarity with adjunct faculty. This causes resentment and distrust and only further pushes the two classes apart thereby weakening the case of public reinvestment in higher ed further. Finally, whether or not Brennan's analyses are correct (and his assumptions about hours outside of class spent by English adjuncts teaching composition are just plain wrong), it is distasteful at best and disingenuous at worst to suggest that the adjuncts, who are virtually powerless in their victimization, are the real problem. Tenured faculty, I would argue, have the moral and professional duty to advocate vociferously for improved conditions. Many do not choose to do so, which makes them seem out of touch and, if they are leftists, hypocritical.
I agree with a lot of what Brennan says, but as one commenter noted, it’s puzzling why anyone would oppose efforts by adjuncts to increase their bargaining power (say by unionizing) in order to snatch a bigger piece of the pie. Brennan seems to think that various entrenched and corrupt opposing interests will continue to render such efforts fruitless, but to my mind there hasn’t been a sufficiently sustained organizing effort by (or on behalf of) adjuncts to tell.
The broader political context of this discussion is of course the adjunct unionization movement, which is gaining traction. It is a standard strategy of union-busters to argue that the relevant class of workers are whiners who don't deserve more than they have; Brennan's posts fit this mold perfectly. Yet he says he does not oppose adjunct unionization, and in fact might like it because it would decrease the number of adjuncts, and he would rather not work with "a bunch of adjuncts". So I have a hard time understanding what is really going on in those posts. They seem mostly to be expressions of contempt.
One problem with the analysis is his inference, "adjunct faculty have high IQs. Therefore, they can easily find good jobs outside of academia". Does it need to be pointed out how simple-minded this is?
Another: he says adjunct faculty shouldn't spend more than a particular number of hours on class prep. The "shouldn't" here is one of prudence. The claim seems doubtful to me given how many job postings ask for student teaching evaluations, teaching materials, etc.
There's an important issue that Brennan doesn't discuss: job security. The first thing to note here is that the complete lack of job security causes constant stress and misery. A 30,000 salary might be bearable if one could count on it. When one can't, it's not.
The second thing to note is that if an adjunct wants to ever escape the misery of constant worry about the future by securing a permanent position, she has to try to publish. This means publishing is essentially part of what's required of her by the job market. The other jobs that Brennan compares adjunct work to have no such requirement, and so the workload for the same pay is less brutal. Those other jobs are 9-5; being an adjunct, like being a graduate student, is non-stop.
So she teaches more than twice as much as when she was a graduate student, the same expectations in regard to research, and she earns the same salary. This also makes it exceedingly difficult to supplement her meagre income and it means that her workload is brutal.
Finally, the stuff about increasing adjunct salaries leading to fewer adjuncts having their revealed preferences satisfied is a straw man. Workers' rights movements generally work from the premise that the workers' share of the pie should increase, not that the pie should be distributed less equally. If we combine a demand of this kind with one for job security, medical benefits, and perhaps a modest increase in pay, then we would get a significant increase in the number of adjuncts whose revealed preferences are satisfied. If secondary school teachers can win these benefits through unionization, I don't see why university teachers can't.
One thing Brennan (along with nearly everyone else, so far as I can tell) ignores is the money that goes to pay the layers upon layers upon layers of administration that have accumulated over the past two-&-a-fraction decades, simultaneous with the adjunctification of academia.
Cf. this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html
Not to mention the fact that there are university presidents being paid seven figures! Many more are in the $600K – $900K range.
Not having crunched any numbers, I do not know if massively downsizing these administrations or paying university presidents less would free up enough money to hire every adjunct to a full-time, tenurable position. I doubt it. But it would surely make the present situation better!
Thanks for posting this, Brian.
For other readers, such as anon and Geoff: To be clear, I am not against unionization or against adjuncts working to get a bigger piece of the pie. We minimize use of professional adjuncts at my university, and I support that effort. Instead, my argument was that even if the measures succeed, most adjuncts who prefer full-time, permanent jobs will not get them, but will instead be removed. See here: http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/04/is-the-adjuncts-rights-movement-anti-adjunct/
Further, the more controversial claim was that the majority of professional adjuncts are responsible for their situation for two reasons. First, they either knew or should have known that the odds were bad, and that beating the odds required publishing heavily. Second, and more importantly, most have good exit options right now, as they could leave academia for a gig that pays more and provides benefits. Thus, even if their lot is bad, they've chosen it.
That person must think all courses are logic or calculus or econ 101. I averaged 300 hours per course this year, for which I got paid approximately $25k per course, plus benefits. Now, what separates me from adjuncts in this our lovely job market? One last-minute job offer.
Just for fun, I'll be a little more provocative.
Provocation 1: Let us agree that it is, very unfortunately indeed, somewhat unsafe for a woman in a comprised state of consciousness (i.e. intoxicated) to walk alone late at night, especially if she is dressed in such a way that her body might be visually "appealing" to men. Let us say that an intoxicated woman does choose to walk home late at night, knowing despite her intoxication that it is not a great idea. This woman is then assaulted on her walk. In this case, no one doubts that the paternalistic advice that this woman has no doubt been given more than once about not unnecessarily putting herself in harm's way is correct. She made a poor decision and the assault was not a surprising outcome of that decision. Yet most of us would say that her personal responsibility, while not negligible, is not the key issue here. The larger and more pressing problem would seem to be A) that there are enough people who are taking advantage of those who are less able to defend themselves that we have this problem and B) that in some way it is seen as marginally acceptable by some to assault women based on their attire and the locale in which they find themselves. So there are two different questions at play that operate at different levels: 1) What can a woman reasonably do to avoid being assaulted? 2) What can society reasonably do to prevent such assaults from occurring? The answers to both questions are important, but one is local while the other is systemic.
Provocation 2: Tenured faculty profit most from adjunct exploitation. Further this holds true broadly, that is even in institutions that minimize adjunct labor. As Brennan points out, there is not enough money to support infinite tenured faculty. Why are tenured faculty so expensive? Salaries, of course, account for a large portion of this. But the perks tenured faculty can receive–excellent health care, guaranteed stability, pensions, travel expenses, subsidized housing and childcare and so on–also contribute (note: all things that are denied adjuncts!). More than this though is that the research that tenured faculty (at least at R1) schools do is enabled by the fact that they don't have to teach lower division classes at all, and that they often have to teach very, very little indeed. And yet, more and more students are in need of teaching every day. So in order to do the teaching labor that tenured faculty at R1 schools often don't do, and in order to provide those tenured faculty with all the things that make a tenured job such a good upper middle class position, and in order to do all this with less money than ever, admins have to use adjuncts. Remember that the job of the admin class is to make things "work" as cheaply as possible (themselves possible excepted). So they are doing what they are supposed to do by hiring contingent labor. To blame them for doing it seems strange to me. What tenured faculty are supposed to do, besides research, is teach and engage in departmental service. But they do not teach much, and when they do departmental service they often as not do not include adjuncts as integral parts of their departments. They punt on the matter of contingent labor; they conveniently ignore an unconscionable situation as they reap its benefits. This problem is endemic to higher ed in the States right now, and applies essentially across the board. To localize it by saying "my university minimizes adjunct labor" is again to punt on the issue because the only reason tenure remains broadly viable in the current climate is because it is widely supported by contingent labor.
In general, the following is a pretty bad argument. (1) Someone should have known better than to put themselves in a vulnerable position, so (2) it's OK (i.e. not unjust) for someone else to make use of that vulnerability to provide poor remuneration and bad working conditions for them. The reason it's a bad argument is that (1) can be true, while (2) is false. Perhaps he didn't intend to argue from the fact that "they chose it" to "it's just". If so, I have no objection, but nor do I know why he is putting such weight on this point. About his second point, my guess is that it seriously underestimates how difficult it is to make a career transition. I know Jason has some personal experience here, but I wonder what his evidence is for this strong empirical claim? Surely, he can't be relying on anecdote. If he is, this would be a not unusual example of libertarians making up facts when it suits their arguments. However, if Jason has good evidence about the ease of the career transition in question, then I would be happy to concede that this second point does mitigate the vulnerability in question, without removing it.
I suppose that the unionization movement is part of the adjunct's rights movement. (If not that, what is?) As for the argument that unionization is anti-adjunct, I think Will Wilkinson's comments in his post are spot on. I would only add this. Couldn't the adjuncts, after they win recognition for a union, consider in their negotiations the arguments that the employer will make about the interplay between higher wages, benefits, and the number of adjunct spots at the university? Are the adjuncts at the bargaining table incapable of understanding this argument, or reasoning intelligently about it? They might get a lot of rights that they now lack without breaking the bank, and thereby costing themselves jobs.
Jason,
For your more controversial claim, one can accept responsibility for one's chosen lot (knowingly going into a low-paying position) while still wanting to increase the value of that position and one's opportunities. It's not at all inconsistent to be dissatisfied with one's position (viz. in terms of compensation) while still preferring that position to others on the basis (for instance) of one's love for philosophy.
In other words, I don't think the issue is a matter of adjuncts denying responsibility for their chosen lot in life, but them wanting to see their role more properly valued through maximizing their benefits and own personal welfare. This is a very rational course of action. Of course, there might be some adjuncts who proceed by way of a more resentful strategy, but it would be incorrect and unhelpful to generalize about adjunct advocacy in this way.
Jason, It sounds like you're handing administrators a rationale for replacing all full-time faculty with part-timers without benefits. If everyone were part-time, administrators could defend themselves on grounds that a move to more full-timer workers would cause some people to be removed. That surely isn't the conclusive consideration you're making it out to be.
As to "professional adjuncts" (as you call them) being responsible for their own situation, there are too many applicants per philosophy job partly because there are too many graduate programs. And there are too many graduate programs because of choices made by all sorts of people, not just eventual job seekers.
I wonder what you think about this job practice. What if a business hired US citizens at one salary and non-citizens at half the salary, knowing the non-citizens were desperate for green cards? I wouldn't say the responsibility is all the non-citizens' for choosing these jobs. The employers would be exploiting the non-citizen desire for green cards. Likewise, administrators hiring adjuncts to do the same work for a fraction of the pay exploit the desire of academics to remain academics.
I think the question is what the point of your argument is, not what the argument is.
The post is titled "Is the Adjuncts' Rights Movement Anti-Adjunct?," and you conclude that if the "Adjuncts' Rights Movement" succeeds, it will undermine the revealed preferences of adjuncts. I don't know what the "Adjunct's Rights Movement" is if not the adjunct unionization movement, but "success" for the unionization movement would be higher compensation, medical benefits, job security, etc for adjuncts. Not the death of adjunct labor.
So, yes, I agree that if universities got rid of adjunct labor in favor of only tenure track faculty, they may not hire an equal number of additional tenure track faculty. Maybe instead they'll increase class sizes and faculty course loads. So getting rid of non-tenure-track faculty could produce results many adjuncts would be unhappy with. But that's not what the existing movements are aiming for, so I don't know what the point of the argument is. Aside from making it seem like people are making unreasonable demands.
As many of the others in this thread have already said, I think that the issues here are both deep and systemic. I am not really sure what, if anything, anyone can do to solve them. The University is dying; nearly everyone seems willing to admit that now (this is better than denial).
But death is really all-pervasive in our "culture." Michel Henry's Barbarism, written in the 1980s, today reads as some prophetic text. And what Henry identifies is something that has been brewing for a long, long time. The writing has been on the wall since at least the nineteenth century, we know, because Kierkegaard was already castigating his Copenhagen for identical reasons…
The root of this sickness transcends the social, the political, and the economic (that mightn't be a fashionable view, I know, but maybe it is time that all the worldly true believers, radicals, and revolutionaries start facing up to the historical record). Not sure what is to be done about it.
In the "Adjuncts: Highly Paid Per Hour" post, Brennan shows that an adjunct's hourly wage, while "not great," is "still better than what most people in the US or in the world make." He doesn't explicitly state what we should conclude from this, but if what he means to imply is that adjuncts should stop complaining about their situation, then that is a non sequitur. Someone who is better off than most people in the US or world can still be the victim of economic exploitation.
Professor Brennan points out that adjuncts are paid a high hourly rate relative to all workers, but the increased hiring of adjuncts is only a small part of what's happening elsewhere in society. From a recent NY Times article:
"Nearly three-quarters of the people helped by programs geared to the poor are members of a family headed by a worker, according to a new study by the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California. As a result, taxpayers are providing not only support to the poor but also, in effect, a huge subsidy for employers of low-wage workers, from giants like McDonald’s and Walmart to mom-and-pop businesses."
The last person interviewed in the article is an adjunct with two teaching jobs in Chicago.
The adjuncts' problem won't be addressed unless they successfully organize, or full-time professors organize and fight on their behalf, or we find a general solution, like the universal guaranteed income that some, including some libertarians, have argued for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/business/economy/working-but-needing-public-assistance-anyway.html
Jason's argument (and I quote) is:
(1) "Adjuncts knew or should have known they played a risky game and lost."
(2) If (1) is true, "it's hard to feel sorry for them."
Thus (3), it's hard to feel sorry for adjuncts.
Even if we accept (1)–and I think there are many reasons to question it (but I won't belabor that here)–I see little reason to accept (2). In my view, (2) embodies a rather brutal, "stern father" conception of moral responsibility rather than a compassionate one. And I want to say, if we can choose, we should be compassionate. When someone makes a mistake, even a culpable one, the kind thing to do is help them, not simply blame them.
It seems to me that it is reasonable, in any sort of modern economy, to expect fair compensation for a job well done. It is not reasonable to expect employment in a particular field, if society's are already met with the current pool of practioners.
Based on that, It seems to me that college teaching, whether by adjuncts or some other scheme, ought to be at least as well compensated and secure as public high school teaching. Adjuncts have a right to complain about working conditions that don't provide this, and we should pressure universities to provide this, as public school system do?
On the other hand if the field is too glutted to provide employment, that is on the job seeker. Just as many very talented musicians pay their mortgages by other means, many talented philosophers may need to do the same thing.
"[T]he majority of professional adjuncts are responsible for their situation for two reasons. First, they either knew or should have known that the odds were bad, and that beating the odds required publishing heavily. Second, and more importantly, most have good exit options right now, as they could leave academia for a gig that pays more and provides benefits."
What are these gigs that pay more and provide benefits? After I quit the adjunct racket (and before going to law school), I applied for a number of jobs in the private sector (at, e.g., management consulting firms) but couldn't so much as land an interview. It strikes me as something of a myth that employers like hiring philosophy grads. Most employers don't even know what philosophy is. (I live in Canada, so maybe things are different in the U.S. and elsewhere.)
Marcus,
I think you're missing a key premise here: 2) Adjuncts have many exit options. That's a key point. I don't want to have the "you made one momentous decision and lost" argument. My view on adjuncts is that their situation stinks, universities owe it to their students and a few other stakeholders (but not, I controversially think, the adjuncts themselves) to provide better employment for adjuncts,
I think Sigrid's account hits the nail on the head. The academy nowadays has more or less what economists call a "tournament" model of employment, in which pay and other perks are most concentrated among the top few. The situation isn't as extreme as in baseball or rock music, of course. See the paper here for a start: http://faculty.smu.edu/Millimet/classes/eco7321/papers/lazear%20rosen%201981.pdf
Another overview here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118785317.weom080093/abstract
Thanks, Jason. However, I do not think the tournament model is very apt. The tournament model "explains a system of awarding promotions and bonuses based on the relative productivity of workers, rather than their absolute productivity." (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118785317.weom080093/abstract ).
Professional sports and the music business do this. Academia (in my view) does not.
In professional baseball, one actually has to hit the baseball better than others in order to make the major leagues and millions of dollars. Those who hit the heck out of the ball get to the majors, those who don't, don't. Similarly, in rock music, one actually has to write songs audiences like–and those who write more popular songs get paid a ton of money whereas those who don't, don't.
Academia is very different. Many very well-compensated, full-time faculty members got their positions–and tenure–with relatively few publications. I know more than a few adjuncts who interviewed with far better publishing–and teaching–records than anyone on search committees interviewing them. If this were baseball, the full-time faculty member would have been released or demoted in favor of the more productive producer (the adjunct) along time ago. Which is just to say that–unlike professional sports–this is not really a tournament. Or, at least, not one that reliably rewards actual productivity.
Brennan’s argument that adjuncts are highly paid seems very strange. How many hours a course takes seems like exactly the kind of thing that where estimates are likely to be misleading, since most of us are pretty bad at estimating how long tasks take us. Brennan’s idealization has adjuncts spending much less time per course than many of them think they need to. So… what, exactly? He seems to think the idealization shows the people are wrong, but I don’t know how it would do that.
He approvingly mentions Phil Magness’s claim that 1 hour prep per class is lavish, because adjuncts teach intro classes and a professor should be able to teach intro classes in their field without any prep at all. This seems to depend hugely on the discipline. Maybe, as Magness says, any competent political scientist should be able to give American Government 101 lectures off the cuff (though it’s hard to imagine they would be very good lectures), but it’s hard to imagine that any competent English professor would be able to productively lead a discussion about chapters 1-7 of Great Expectations without any prep.
The central anecdote in the articles I’ve read about over worked adjuncts always seems to be an English adjunct, and I suspect that’s not a coincidence. Brennan allots 45 hours total prep & grade time for a term. Let’s say it takes you 10 hours before the term starts to prepare your class: to adjust your syllabus, set up your course on Blackboard or whatever, get all the readings online, etc. Say you have 25 students and get back two 5 page essays and a final 10 page essay—450 pages total to grade. (If I remember correctly, that was my undergrad English department’s standard for a 100-level class.) You can normally chug through at 2 minutes per page, so 15 hours. But for every assignment there’s at least 3 disastrous papers, and you always have to spend an extra 15 minutes on those, and some of those students will rewrite—together maybe an extra 3 hours. Maybe you spend 2 hours per term figuring out grades—recording paper grades, determining participation grades, uploading midterm and final grades, etc.
Don’t worry, you have 15 hours left to prepare for your class sessions—over 15 minutes per class! That’s plenty of time to… well, you definitely can’t read whatever chapters you assigned. Or half of them. Or skim them. Well, you can skim the SparkNotes version. You’ll be teacher of the year!
Those people who spend only one hour per class on prep and grading must really be astonishingly fast graders. I'm currently grading papers for the 95 student single class I teach as an adjunct, and it's taking more than an hour. In fact, it's going to take more than 15 hours since I'm slower than 10 minutes per paper (how could you read and write comments faster than that!?). That class meets 30 times, so I should only be spending 30 hours on grading and prep. That means after I grade the papers, I have only 15 hours of prep left. That doesn't really give me much time to prep 30 lectures and grade the three sets of exams they take in addition to the paper (95 x 3= 285 total exams). If I'm moving at slower than one exam every 3 minutes, I'll burn up all my time just by grading. Is this really a matter of time management? Should I just be giving them a single Scantron exam for an intro to ethics course? I can assure that is not what my university expects.
It might be that places like Brown and Georgetown cap the enrollments for classes at a low number so you can grade a reasonable assignment set and average an hour per class. But outside those ivory towers things a bit different. The courses I have taught are capped at 160 students. Even at half capacity I can't do the job using on hour of prep per class. But its probably just because I'm an incompetent teacher.
I agree Jason's position that career adjuncts should take some responsibility for their plight, because they do have options, though he does underestimate the challenge faced by career changers.
I want to focus, though, on his assumption that spending more than an hour outside of class per contact hour in the classroom are exercising "bad time management." Let's consider these numbers: Full tuition and fees for an undergraduate at Georgetown are $49,020. Assuming 15 hours per semester, or 30 per year, the profs in the that undergrad's class are spending 60 hours per year teaching those classes. That means that for each hour the student's professors devote to those 10 classes, the student is paying $817 per hour. And that's not tutorial fees. That's asking for the privilege to sit in a class of 15 or 100, get lectured at, and then take a couple of exams. I conclude that no rational person should ever attend Georgetown.
Running the numbers for the adjunct from IUP and Point Park cited in the Huffington Post article ($2,244 per course, PA minimum wage of $7.25 an hour), she would spend 6 hours outside of class per hour in class to make minimum wage. If that's the amount of time Jason spent on his classes, his students would be paying $233 for access to an hour of his time. Admittedly, he's not making anything like that per hour because he's a publishing machine, Georgetown uses tuition for other purposes besides professorial tuition, etc. Still, even if we set aside questions about what a proper amount of prep time actually should be, I think it's clear from the numbers that most people (e.g., students) think he should be spending a hell of a lot more time on his teaching duties than he actually does. Sure, we all know our subjects well, and if we want to walk into class and talk about stuff we like, then give a midterm and final that we scarcely read, an hour outside of class per hour in class is generous. I ask, is that education? Or teaching?
Carl, it's worth noting that at Georgetown, the official numbers (for determining our raises, etc) are that teaching is 30% of our job, research 60%, and service 10%.
PS: As for the rationality of the investment, I suppose it depends on your goals. If you want to make money, our ROI is very high. If you want to develop your human capital, it's not clear that any college in the country is particularly good at that. I think the evidence is rather strongly in favor of the signaling model of higher education over the human capital model, but that's a different argument for a different time.
I think it is a fair estimate that I spend about 45 hours on average outside of class grading and meeting with students. But I also teach the same classes every year, and the new material I rotate in is always material I've read for other reasons. I have very little pre-class prep. I could do my entire PPE course off the cuff.
To my mind mind, the interesting bits in Brennan's discussion offer explanations or at least links to explanations of why we have so many adjuncts these days. Here's one passage from Brennan:
"1. I think Ginsberg’s public choice account of what happened at universities is basically right. Universities have been captured by administrators, and they tend to run things in ways that benefit themselves and those to whom they answer more than faculty or students. Universities suffer from all sorts of Niskanen-type problems and are in many ways highly corrupt. I’m not joking when I say that GEICO is the most moral organization I worked for, and that both universities I’ve worked for have far worse problems."
This comment is in line with what I think is a pretty common belief about administrative bloat. Roughly, the story goes that the administrative layer at universities has proliferated leading to a whole host of institutional pathologies, one of which is the overuse and abuse of adjuncts. However, as the saying goes, this is an empirical question. I don't have a firm view on this, but there are other possible explanations of the particular pathology.
According to a second commonly held belief, decreased governmental support of universities has forced universities to find cheaper ways of doing things, including increasing the ranks of adjuncts. Of course both administrative bloat and decreased state funding might contribute to the overuse and abuse of adjuncts, and it is an empirical question whether either does and to what degree.
Here's a link to a recent study that suggests that administrative bloat is not really that significant of a phenomenon and that decreased state funding is.
The linked study considers alternative explanations of the steep rise in the cost of college tuition. It considers a number of possibilities, including administrative bloat and decreased state funding, and it concludes that by far the most significant contributor is decreased state funding and that at least in dollar terms administrative bloat is not that significant of a phenomenon. If decreased state funding is the main culprit forcing universities to raise revenue by increasing tuition rates, perhaps it is also the main driver driving them to higher and abuse adjuncts in an effort to decrease costs.
[As a related aside, I wonder if the overuse and abuse of adjuncts is by and large relegated to public institutions. Brennan notes that his private institution minimizes the use of adjuncts. And, here's a bit of speculation. If, as the linked study concludes, decreased state funding has forced public universities to increase tuition, this might in turn free private universities to do the same.]
I admit I'm getting a bit ahead of my empirical skis here, but in light of the foregoing, here's a non-libertarian working assessment of the sociological phenomenon that is Brennan's discussion and exchange with his commenters as well as the subject matter of that discussion:
This is just another battle in the class war. Beginning in the early 1980s, taxes rates, particularly those that affect high earners and owners of capital, are slashed at the federal and state level. This, plus an associated animus directed at higher education, leads to massive cuts in state funding allocated to public universities, which in turn leads to increased tuition rates and an increased reliance on and abuse of adjuncts. All this divides and pits administrators, TT faculty, and adjuncts against one another.
"To be clear, I am not against unionization or against adjuncts working to get a bigger piece of the pie. We minimize use of professional adjuncts at my university, and I support that effort. Instead, my argument was that even if the measures succeed, most adjuncts who prefer full-time, permanent jobs will not get them, but will instead be removed."
What is the referent of 'the measures' in this passage? In the link that follows it, no concrete measure is cited and instead, number are invented that support Brennan's claim. Maybe the numbers chosen are appropriate, but no evidence of this is given.
Increasing adjuncts' piece of the pie from x% to y% and adjusting their pay only in response to this increase wouldn't change the number of people who can be adjuncts.
I suspect this approach would reflect the adjunct movement's goals better than the mysterious "measures" discussed by Brennan.
Is it feasible that adjuncts can increase their share of the pie by enough to make a difference? I think three things are relevant. First, high school teachers, who are also in high supply and who have significantly less training, have been able to. Second, it would make a world of difference to allot enough to adjuncts that they can have job security and medical benefits. Even without any pay increase, one or both of those things would make life dramatically better for adjuncts. Third, even if only a modest increase is feasible, when you're earning about $30,000/year, every little bit helps.
A number of commenters have pointed out that the inference from, "X chose Y" to "it is just for X to be submitted to the hardships associated with Y" is invalid.
I would also question the premise. Many adjuncts got into academia before 2008, when the job market was dramatically different. They also entered programs that led them to believe they (the programs) had excellent placement records. Given these issues, grad students beginning graduate study before 2008 could not have known what kind of job market they were getting themselves into.
Maybe Brennan just thinks adjuncts continually choose to be adjuncts by not leaving academia and taking a great non-academic job waiting for them. As others have pointed out, not a shred of evidence has been advanced to show that adjuncts can make this transition as easily as Brennan claims.
Suppose Brennan works what averages out to roughly a 38-hour week, as he did at Geico. That comes out to 1976 work hours a year. He's paid to teach for 30% of that time, which is 593 hours.
He calculates 45 contact hours per class, plus 45 office hours per semester. If he teaches two classes in a semester, that's 90 contact hours and 45 office hours—135 hours. Factor in one hour's prep/grading per class-hour, and that's another 90 hours. So that's 225 hours of teaching time. That's less than half what he's paid to be doing. If he teaches 3 a semester, that's an extra 90 hours, which is still just 315 hours—just over half the time he should be spending on teaching.
But I guess 38 hours a week is a lot for a prominent academic. So suppose he's paid to work 900 hours a year instead of 1976. 30% of that is 270. So if he's teaching two courses, then he's almost working hard enough, but not quite. But 900 work hours a year seems rather a low estimate of what's expected (it's an average of 17 hours a week, or 3.5 hours a weekday)…
The conclusion? Either Brennan should be working much harder (he's skimping on the teaching portion of his job, which is already quite low, and if he has TAs then he's skimping even more), or his argumentative methodology is flawed.
I hit 'submit' then realized I'd made a rather silly error: I was comparing the workload of a semester to the demands for a year. So, to correct the mistake, one needs to double my workload numbers:
If Brennan's load is 2-2, then by his lights he's spending 495 of his allotted 593 hours on teaching. If it's 3-2, then it's 585. That's still a little under, but it's much closer. So if his load is 3-2 and he has no TAs, then I guess that pretty much works out for him. My apologies.
Jason: You may be able to do your PPE courses off the cuff, with very little prep–and I was able to do the same in my year at UBC (also a research institution). But most institutions are at *all* like Georgetown. A member of the Georgetown faculty (yes, from your institution) taught in a visiting post at my teaching-focused institution (University of Tampa) for a year. She said she was *astonished* at how much more prep and grading took.
Our MWF courses do not meet for 50 minutes; they meet for 1:20. Our T/Th courses do not meet for 1:15; they meet for 2 hours. In part because of this, in order to get good teaching reviews–which is what faculty retention and merit depend primarily on at our school–one has to do a whole lot more with students. One has to have graded homework assignments, in-class assignments, and so on. I teach 3 courses for a semester. I spend 12 hours per week in the classroom (compared to, I take it, 6 for you), and I spend almost all of the rest of my week prepping lectures, grading, etc. I have little to no time left for research, in part because I make it a point to do an exemplary job in the classroom (again, an obvious difference between institutions that focus on teaching). And I am a full-time faculty member. All of which is to say that, for a wide variety of jobs, good performance requires *far* more time than you are estimating.
Also, a quick follow-up on the tournament model you are so fond of. There are other obvious–and relevant–disanalogies between professional sports, music, and academia. In professional baseball, everyone gets to play the same 9-inning game: minor-leaguers, major-leaguers, etc. In music, everyone can write and record a four-minute song. The playing field is broadly level in that regard. Everyone gets to compete in the "same game." This is simply false for academia. People who find themselves in a full-time 2:2 job in a major research university are playing a very different game than people who teach a 5:5 with no research support. This is like giving one team 9 innings at bat in a baseball game, and another team 2 innings at bat, and calling the outcome (who wins the game) a "fair tournament." It's not. Academia is much more like a medieval system of patronage than a meritocratic tournament.
@Marcus Arvan:
A brief note about the tournament model issue. In baseball, there are well-known systemic errors in player evaluation that persisted for a long time, and much of importance is still unknown about player evaluation (defensive skill is particularly hard to measure).
Moreover, there are systemic differences in the opportunities and rewards for players from different backgrounds. Googling around for Andrew McCutchen's and Jose Bautista's recent columns on the subject will give a good (popular, readable, short) introduction here.
It is therefore not clear that the features of academia you point to (imperfect evaluation, unequal access to professional training, etc.) mean that the tournament model is inapt. Of course, it might say something about the justice or injustice of the tournament model. Even there, though, baseball economics might provide useful lessons about the likely effects of policy (or cultural) changes in tournament-model-apt fields. Note in particular that baseball has a strong union and a high minimum wage for those in the union; this has had many effects beyond raising the wages of the lowest-paid MLB players.
Suppose that every adjunct takes Brennan's advice and heads off to work for the GEICOs of the world. Suppose, too, that every well-educated but underpaid retail-manager, actor, plumber, you name it, does the same. Eventually, all the desirable positions at the GEICOs of the world will fill up, and those who didn't act on Brennan's advice quickly enough are going to have to go back and work for those companies who, to paraphrase Brennan, don't owe their employees better working conditions. What, then, would your advice be to the losers in this scenario, Brennan?
What these people should do is demand that their companies supply them with better working conditions, just as adjuncts are doing right now.
I would like a list of exit options available to adjuncts. I certainly didn't have many exit options as a philosophy undergraduate, even with an impeccable GPA: I ended up doing a working class gig for some time before going to graduate school.
Sockpuppet's comments are surprisingly useful here, because they nicely illustrate a misunderstanding many adjuncts have about their jobs. Faculty are not "per hour" employees. Instead, we're generally paid and evaluation on the basis of output, to perform at a certain level. I teach 3 courses a year, for 135 contact hours, and have another 90 office hours per year. Other than that and a small number of meetings, they don't care how I spend my time or where I spend it. Most likely, neither does your university. Consider, hypothetically, a professor who manages to produce one book with a good press and four articles per year, but is so amazingly productive that it takes her 10 hours to write all this stuff. Further, suppose her classes go well, but she spends no time outside of class preparing. In contrast, imagine a bad teacher who never publishes, but who works 4000 hours a year prepping. At a typical R1, the first professor will get large raises and promoted quickly, while the second professor will get fired.
The idea that you get paid per hour, and only for the hours listed by HR to calculate your "hourly wage," as an academic lecturer is monumentally absurd.
I think about what I'm going to teach for hours throughout the year. I think about it at night. I read a lot to stay update with the latest material. I meet with students and other teachers to compare ideas about pedagogy. After classes, I meet with students to discuss charges of plagiarism. I devise new ways of reducing cheating. I grade. On and on and on. I get paid for what I deliver, which is a function of years of training, talent, and constant thinking -not quantifiable as a certain number of hours per semester of thinking.
Ultimately, Brennan's position boils down to nothing more than saying if adjuncts who taught five classes M,W,F also worked as office temps Tuesday and Thursday, they'd make pretty decent money. And the fact that they complain about making less money because they only teach, say, 4 classes and consider this a full time job means they are lazy. If you think this is lazy, give working as an adjunct and doing something else a try sometime.
That said, I suppose we adjuncts could just give up and not prepare, think about, or work on our classes for more hours than we are paid. But we adjuncts as a group feel that this is morally wrong to short our students just because we get paid less. We are committed to ideas and good teaching no matter how many hours it takes, and would like to be paid for the value we contribute, not the hours we are actually on campus.
I am disappointed that Brian thinks Brennan's claims are worth debating.
1. What makes you think that Brennan is obliged to spend 30% of his time on teaching?
2. Let's suppose you and a colleague are teaching the same course (let's say an Intro to Ethics general ed) and you spend 150 hours total between teaching, prep time, grading, and all the other stuff. But let's say your colleague is also a much more efficient grader than you and it only takes him 100 hours for the same exact class. You both have teaching evals above the department average for that class & the dean is happy with how both were taught. Should you be paid more than your colleague since you spent 1.5x the time than he did for the same result?
My apologies on #1 – just saw where Brennan said 30% is on teaching above. One might ask if teaching also includes advising grad students, which would presumably add hours.
Still interested in scenario #2 though.
Jason, you write: "Now, the general rule is that one should spend no more than 1 hour of prepping/grading outside of class per class. Many faculty do in fact spend more time, but this is bad time management."
I'm curious about where you got this 'general rule' or what it's meant to represent. You feel so confident in stating it that you're comfortable criticizing us colleagues who spend more time on their courses as incompetent at managing our time. But to me at least, it's a prima facie astonishing claim. Yes, you could go into the classroom without having just reread the works you are covering; you could grade essays and other assignments at a breathtakingly fast rate; you could have a policy of not responding to student questions by email; you could spend little or no time rehearsing your lectures or mini-lectures. Then, I agree, you could do it with just one hour per hour of class. But this is not what seems generally recommended.
I did a search for such rules of thumb, and have so far only found the guidelines from the Berkeley website (http://teaching.berkeley.edu/2006-7-instructor-preparation-time):
"1.For regular, run-of-the-mill courses that you have taught before, it takes 2 hours out-of-class for each hour of class for preparation and grading. This means that, for a routine, 3-hours per week course, the teacher should expect to spend a total of 9 hours: 3 hours of class time and 6 hours of preparation and grading, averaged out over the semester or quarter.
2. For new preparations, i.e, courses one is teaching for the first time, the teacher should double the out-of-class time. That is, plan to spend 14 hours per week: 3 hours of class time and 12 hours of preparation and grading."
Courses that are new-ish, or that you have revised in some important ways that summer to keep the material fresh, should presumably fall somewhere in the middle of that 2-4 hour spectrum.
Is your 1-hour figure intended to represent the least amount of preparation and grading time one could put in and still have no professional repercussions at certain universities? If so, then your figure seems accurate. The standards for teaching at university are often pathetically low and tend not to be enforced or even clearly articulated. If all the adjuncts in your thought experiment are after is having their contracts renewed and collecting their paychecks, then I grant your point.
But I don't think it's good for the profession, or for any of us personally, that many philosophy instructors tend to devote such a small amount of time to teaching. The case we philosophers make over and over again for our departments not being cut or having their funding slashed is that we are doing some real work educating the next generation to be thoughtful, articulate, attentive, critical and self-critical citizens, while at the same time preparing them for the challenges they will face in their careers. And we can do that, and many of us do. But it takes time, care, and attention from instructors. If you go into a classroom without carefully reading over your notes in advance and without patiently getting the day's readings fresh in your mind because you think you've done it already a few years previously, and if you make sure you only have to grade a couple of short essays and that you only spend about ten minutes reading and grading each essay, and if you avoid taking time to interact with your students on online discussion forums, etc. outside of class because it would push you above one outside hour per class, well, if you do all those things whenever you teach, it really seems unlikely that your students are going to get the skills we advertise from taking your course. If you have empirical evidence that shows that most instructors who put in one hour of preparation and grading combined per class are able to impart great skills to their students, then great, I'd love to see it.
Do you have such evidence? Or are you indifferent (and do you hold that we should all be indifferent) about what the students are actually learning, because you think the only important question for us to consider is what you need to do to earn our salaries? I think that approach is problematic not only ethically but professionally, but I want to be sure that's where you're going before I explain why.
Dr. Brennan,
I'm curious how your most recent comment (#37) fits with your observation that adjuncts are highly paid per hour. As you rightly point out, "[f]aculty are not "per hour" employees." Why, then, would the hourly wage of adjuncts be relevant? Shouldn't they be paid according to the value of their teaching, irrespective of how many hours it takes them to prep their classes? It might be true that 3k a class (or whatever) adequately tracks the value of the service that adjuncts provide their universities, but the whole hourly wage business seems to be a red herring (by your own lights).
Re: the recent poll on the main page: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/05/how-much-prep-time.html
The poll seems to only ask how much time one needs to prepare for a lesson, which I naturally read as NOT including grading, office hours, emails related to the course, and so on. "Preparing" in this sense would include rereading/skimming the relevant readings, going over lecture/classroom plans, creating/revising handouts (if needed), etc.
If this is what the poll was intended to capture, then it misses a significant amount of outside the classroom time. If this wasn't what the poll intended to capture, then maybe an addendum should be attached to that post?
BL COMMENT: You interpreted the poll correctly. There is no meaningful answer to a generic question about, say, grading or office hours, it depends on the class size. I'm happy to run a poll separately on that, using some metric like "per 25 students."
Anonymous: Yes, there are some systemic difficulties in talent-evaluation in baseball, and yes, opportunity differentials. Still, you are vastly overstating the similarities to academia. There are plenty of tenure-track (and even tenured) faculty with few (or no) publications interviewing adjuncts with 2-3x their number of publications in equally good or better journals. To continue the sports analogy, this more or less the equivalent of batters hitting .100 in the major leagues, making millions of bucks doing it, and getting to decide not to promote batters hitting .400 in triple-A. That would never happen in professional sports…ever. But its equivalent happens in academia all too often. It is a difference in degree, but an important one. Few tournaments are perfectly fair. But the more unfair a tournament is, the more concerned we should be about, and the more we should care about rectifying it.
I don't know about the norms exactly, but at my R1 university, the working principle is that we allocate our time 40% to research, 40% to teaching, 20% to service. We could assume (to put it in terms lawyers or accountants might recognize) 2000 billable hours per year (a pretty hefty load even at a law firm) that would imply 800 hours per year for teaching. Our course load is 2/2. So that's 200 hours per course, in theory at least. So, given about (3*13) hours of class time per course, that would mean about 161 hours per course outside of class time (4/1 ratio of prep to class instruction. Reducing the billable hours per year to 1600 results in a figure of about 110 hours per class outside of class time–roughly 3 hour prep to 1 hour of class instruction ratio.
Brian, that's an interesting poll you put up. In addition to the broader poll suggested by 43, I think it would also be interesting to have a poll asking not about how many hours faculty students actually _do_ devote to their teaching but rather how many they think one _ought to_ devote.
Maybe this would be a way of capturing this broader new question, together with what you and 43 suggest:
"To do a good job teaching a typical philosophy course with twenty-five students that meets for three hours per week, the average instructor should spend a total of ______ hours in a typical week (combined) in a)course planning, b)grading, c)commenting, d)rehearsing lectures, e)reading, f)revising materials and handouts, g) having discussions with students on online forums, h)responding to student emails, and all other aspects of preparation and grading aside from the holding of office hours. Summer revisions and preparations should be totaled, divided by the number of weeks of the academic year, and then added to your total."
Answers: less than 3 hours per week, 3 hours per week, 6 hours per week, 9 hours per week, more than 9 hours per week.
@Marcus:
Publication count in academic philosophy is not analogous to batting average (or wRC+ or whatever) in baseball. I think you overstate the quality of the publication-count metric as a metric of professional output.
That aside, there certainly are dissimilarities and differences of degree between the philosophy case and the baseball case, and those differences are important. But before we criticize the tournament model as a description of the academic labor market, it's important to understand the model itself. It's an interesting exercise, and it might help us predict the likely effects of various policies.
Comment 42 adjunct:
That post was in reaction to adjuncts claiming they made a minimum wage. I was arguing that if we were to break it down by hour, they're making much more than that. Of course, it depends on how much time you spend prepping, grading, and so on. Still, as Phil Magness pointed out, for adjuncts to be making minimum wage, they'd need to spend about 265 hours outside the classroom for a 45 hour class.
It's worth noting that there's a context to everything I've written. I was reading lots of sob stories in which adjuncts were describing themselves as pure victims. I think they have far more agency and are far more responsible for their situation. It may turn out in the end I've overstated just how responsible they are, but I still see a high degree of bad faith in this debate.
Yes, the scourge of sob stories is the most significant aspect of the growing use of adjuncts to staff stable course needs.
Regarding comment 35:
The general advice here is that if you believe you're underpaid, you might consider taking a different job that pays better. What happens when the stock of better-paying jobs dries up? This question seems to presuppose a model of a static economy in which there's a set stock of jobs that dry up.
As for the tournament model, Marcus, the articles I linked to give some examples in which tournaments occur and in which they're efficient. It's pretty clear that for one reason or another, the academy follows a weak tournament in which only a few get the big prizes, a few bet very small prizes, and most get nothing. I didn't say this was efficient, that it occurs for the same reasons it occurs in baseball, or that it's as dramatic as in baseball.
Leave a Reply to Justin Kalef Cancel reply