Yet another article on the turn toward academic part-timers. My wife spent twenty years as an adjunct, which on one level was OK with her, because the community college at which she mostly taught dumped hellish loads on their full-time instructors.
On the other hand, the pay was minimal: $600-900 per course. (Welcome to Colorado, where a view of the mountains is considered to be the equivalent of multiplying your wages by two.)
But it is not just the community colleges that rely on part-time faculty:
Even prestigious schools rely heavily on adjuncts, especially for teaching classes of freshmen and sophomores. At Harvard, adjuncts accounted for 57 percent of the faculty in 2005; at Boston University that year, they made up 70 percent. And over the last three decades, the number of adjuncts employed across the country skyrocketed by 210 percent while tenure-track faculty hirings rose merely 7 percent.
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Good grief! I get I get $1240 per 3 hour class!
Yes, well, welcome to southern Colorado. And those were semester-length courses. A few were online, but most were conventional lecture sections.
David Kociemba is my colleague from Emerson; he does a great job heading the part-time faculty union. One reason I continued to commute weekly to Boston from NY after I loved was the rate of pay for adjuncts was twice what I made in the city I live in now. But they stopped giving me enough work to make it worth the travel. Another little-known dirty secret of adjuncting; once you’ve been teaching at one place for over a decade, the department often tries to edge you out by giving fewer teaching assignments. Because when you’ve been there a while you start to accrue a few perks like, oh, sharing a cubicle with two people instead of three. It’s not like colleges are hurting for fresh applicants to these jobs; plenty of people out there to exploit. There are virtually no full time jobs.
That is pretty minimal. I’m teaching two sections of the same course, which gets me about $600 a month during the semester. I don’t have an office (though they’d probably be able to find me one if I insisted) because I try to stay away from campus except on teaching days (I teach one day a week).
What kills me is not the low pay for the job but the soul-draining quality of teaching desperately under-prepared students things they’re mostly uninteresed in, the lack of benefits, and the lack of stability. It’s a question every semester as to whether I’ll have work the next, which makes me even more reluctant to participate.
I do like my colleagues, who have always treated me with courtesy and sympathy – I just have few incentives to spend time with them, and none to provide any “service.”