I Am an Adjunct Professor Who Teaches Five Classes -- and I Earn Less Than a Pet-Sitter | Alternet

Like most university teachers today, I am a low-paid contract worker. Now and then, a friend will ask: “Have you tried dog-walking on the side?” I have. Pet care, I can reveal, takes massive attention, energy and driving time. I’m friends with a full-time, professionally employed pet-sitter who’s done it for years, never topping $26,000 annually and never receiving health or other benefits.

The reason I field such questions is that, as an adjunct professor, whether teaching undergraduate or law-school courses, I make much less than a pet-sitter earns. This year I’m teaching five classes (15 credit hours, roughly comparable to the teaching loads of some tenure-track law or business school instructors). At $3,000 per course, I’ll pull in $15,000 for the year. I work year-round, 20 to 30 hours weekly – teaching, developing courses and drafting syllabi, offering academic advice, recommendation letters and course extensions for students who need them. As I write, in late June, my students are wrapping up their final week of the first summer term, and the second summer term will begin next week.

I receive no benefits, no office, no phone or stipend for the basic communication demands of teaching. I keep constant tabs on the media I use in my classes; if I exhaust my own 10GB monthly data plan early, I lose vital time for online discussions with my students. This, although the university requires my students to engage in discussions about legal issues and ethics six days a week, and I must guide as well as grade these discussions.

Three of my Philadelphia-area friends are adjuncts with doctorate degrees. One keeps moving to other states for temporary teaching posts. The others teach at multiple sites to keep afloat financially – one at no less than seven colleges and universities.

I Am an Adjunct Professor Who Teaches Five Classes -- and I Earn Less Than a Pet-Sitter | Alternet

How one professor’s American dream -- teaching -- turned into the American nightmare | Making Sen$e | PBS NewsHour | PBS

I am an adjunct professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University, a major, private U.S. university. I have worked there for over 11 years, teaching consistently almost every semester. Despite the fact that I have the same credentials as my tenured colleagues, there is no opportunity for advancement. There are no full-time tenure-line positions that have opened or been established in my particular discipline at LMU for many years. However, they always seem to have more than enough classes that need to be taught in those very same disciplines, so they hire numerous part-timers to teach them.

As adjunct faculty members, we receive no benefits of any sort. I have never received a merit-based raise or a “promotion” (whatever that is), only the occasional cost-of-living adjustments that everyone else at LMU receives every few years. I have no job security, no assurance of academic freedom, no dedicated office space other than a small designated room that I share with four to five other adjuncts. I am also institutionally ineligible for the grants and professional development monies that tenure-line faculty have access to.

Working numerous jobs, some in the classroom and some in other segments of higher education, such as consulting and low level administrative work for small startup colleges, I have no time to contribute to research and publication in my chosen field. While I have done my best to publish, that part of my dossier is underdeveloped compared to others who hold tenure-line jobs. Their positions allow them to devote time to this; they are paid to do so. But when I should be researching and writing, I have to drive to another job. It has been this way with me for years. So even if a tenure-line job were to arise that I am eligible for, that gap in my dossier would hold me back, even though I have over a decade of highly successful teaching experience.

[,,,]
Now that my parents are gone, I want to honor them by helping to change academia for the better. University administrations have failed to safeguard their hallowed halls against greed and the service of short-term savings, going the way of big business. And the accrediting bodies have failed to guide and censure them as well. If this situation continues unchecked, it will signal the destruction and disintegration of higher education as we know it, though many tenured faculty still do not recognize the inevitable, morbid outcome if this current trend is not immediately reversed.

I have no intention of letting that happen. My father was a grade school teacher. And he used to say that if not for the unions, teachers would have starved. Now, as an adjunct, I am experiencing what it would have been like for grade school teachers to be unsupported by the unions.

How one professor’s American dream -- teaching -- turned into the American nightmare | Making Sen$e | PBS NewsHour | PBS