“Almost half of teachers are thinking about leaving their jobs. Where does that leave America?” (Forbes)

 

We’re at a major tipping point in education. According to a recent survey, 48% of teachers admitted that they had considered quitting within the last 30 days. Of that number, 34% said they were thinking about leaving the profession entirely.

Understaffing has plagued schools for years, but it’s now reaching epic proportions. At a conference last month, I sat around the table with four superintendents from various parts of the country and asked them, “What percent of teachers quitting would create a cataclysmic drop in your organization’s ability to educate young people?” The answers were all shockingly low—with one superintendent answering, “One. One teacher quitting would hurt us in a big way.”

Teachers and administrators alike are stressed, overworked and at the end of their rope. After the tremendous pressures of the past two years, they have nothing more to give. They are already giving everything—time, energy, mental wellbeing, and heart. They’re beyond tired. They’re exhausted. Conditions in the education field have always trended toward demanding, but today they’re a recipe for burnout—which teachers experience almost twice as much as other government employees. 

At the same time, teachers are very hard to replace. The specialization and requirements inherent to the field of education make it extremely difficult to expand the talent pool, as other fields are often able to do. It’s not sustainable. And as a nation, we’re about to feel it.

The vicious cycle

In order to reach and teach students effectively, teachers must forge a human connection with them. Today’s younger generations simply will not move forward in their education and career journey without that connection. This is a non-negotiable; it’s just who they are. 

The vast majority of teachers truly want to forge that meaningful connection with students. In fact, for many it was the driving force behind their decision to enter the profession. But, understaffed and overworked as they are, many simply have no time to show students that they see, hear, and care about them. Survival mode—where many teachers have lived for the past two years—doesn’t allow much room for relationship building. 

This creates a vicious cycle. Students aren’t performing, so more burdens are placed on teachers to help students hit the mark, thus decreasing teachers’ time and bandwidth to forge a human connection with students that is the basis for all learning. Teachers’ legs are cut out from under them, yet they’re still expected to carry their students across the finish line. It’s a gridlock. 

The fallout

What’s the fallout of all this burnout and lack of connection? We’ll see significant drops in three vital areas:

A drop in young people entering the profession. Teachers and students spend hours every day together—and unfortunately, stress isn’t easy to hide. Even teachers that don’t actually mention their stress to the class manifest it in a thousand small ways that young people can observe. 

The elevated and prolonged levels of teacher stress are warning the next generation not to become teachers. Who wants that kind of life, for that kind of money? Obviously, fewer people entering education will only exacerbate the teacher and substitute shortage for the long term. The skills gap is going to hit the education field hard. There just won’t be enough teachers to go around. 

A drop in education quality. As current educators flee the profession and the next generation avoids entering it, we may see class sizes skyrocket—further straining the teachers that remain. Without a healthy student-teacher ratio, the quality of instruction, the individual time spent with each student, and any vestige of a human connection will inevitably drop. 

The quality of education will also drop if states, desperate to staff their schools, lower the bar for teacher requirements. Such a move could potentially bring into the classroom “teachers” or substitutes who lack the necessary training and skills to teach effectively. A lower-quality educational experience will hurt not just the students, but soon the workforce and economy in significant ways. 

A drop in graduation rates. How long before students, unengaged in school and with no human connection there, realize that there are ways they can succeed without that diploma? The gig economy has a place for them. There’s always bitcoin. And no one will question their graduation status if they start their own business. 

Skills, rather than diplomas and degrees, are coming to the forefront in the hiring process. Amid our record talent shortage, employers are frantic for workers and are trying to entice them by any and all means: higher wages, sign-on bonuses, flexible work arrangements and more. How long before they relax their requirements to hire workers with the ability to do the job, even if they don’t have a high school diploma?

This highly entrepreneurial generation is savvy enough to realize they can start making a living now—and worry about getting their GED later. If they don’t feel that human connection at school, they’re checking out, and not just mentally. They’re not going to stay on a sinking ship.

What to do right now

There’s no magic bullet to solve this crisis. There are, however, several things that we can start doing right now to mitigate the worst of it. 

Take stuff off teachers’ plates. What happens if teachers don’t do all the busy work they’re supposed to do? What really happens? Will it change anything in the classroom experience? In our current climate, it’s highly unlikely they’ll be fired for not checking all the boxes. So what if we take the busy work away and free teachers to focus solely on the mission-critical tasks. The number-one question that administrators need to be asking themselves is, how can we lighten the load for teachers—effective immediately? What can we take off their plate to give them more time to focus on the all-important task of connecting with students? 

Stop preaching self-care. Bubble baths and wine aren’t going to cut it. We’re beyond self-care. Teachers don’t have time for it, and at this point, it just becomes another thing on an already overwhelming to-do list. Teachers need care from others, not just from themselves. 

Don’t expect teachers to “catch students up.” The Covid learning slide is a real and serious problem. But somehow, there has been an expectation that returning to in-person learning would magically solve all of it and bring students right back to their appropriate mastery levels. This puts incredible, even impossible pressure on teachers who are already overburdened with ever-changing policies and demands. Instead, as a nation we need to be realistic about where students are really at—and meet them there. That’s the only way we’re going to move them forward.

Start rebuilding trust. One key thing to remember is that everything that students need in the way of a human connection, teachers also need. Many times, there is no human connection between administrators and instructors. We need to uncover where trust has been compromised and commit to rebuilding it.

Equip teachers for their real work. Teachers must forge a human connection with students before students will receive what’s being taught. This is the real work of education: to awaken the mind and unleash the potential of the student. Connecting on a real level with these young people is the only way to educate them effectively. Without that connection, teaching just becomes white noise. We must give teachers not just more time, but also fresh ideas and tools to connect, engage, and answer why for students. 

Raise morale, not just salary. More money is important, but it’s not everything. This is actually good news for administrators working within the bounds of ever-tightening budgets. People want to work in an organization where the culture is healthy. 

No going back

The education crisis isn’t a passing problem. At the beginning of the pandemic, most of us assumed that after a short period of upheaval, we’d return to business as usual, like nothing had ever happened. But it’s clear today that the genie’s out of the bottle. There’s no going back. Leaders in education must heed the warning signs and pivot now to avert the worst of this crisis. Our teachers need us. Let’s be there for them.

 

Why Education Is about to Reach a Crisis of Epic Proportions (Forbes)

“The solution is for students to go on strike until our institutions agree to pay adjuncts a fair wage” - Peter Jacobs

“Universities, colleges and community colleges make heavy use of part-time professors and lecturers, known as ‘adjuncts.’ Chances are very good that if you’re a current college student, you’ve taken a class taught by an adjunct.

“Although they make up a large chunk of college instructors, adjuncts are paid only a tiny fraction of what full-time professors make, often with no benefits and no say in institutional decision-making. Adjunct professors may hold doctorates but are paid on average only $3,000 for each course that they teach. If (and this is a big if) an adjunct somehow manages to secure five courses to teach during the academic year, which is on par with (or exceeds) the load of a full-time professor, they could be bringing in a whopping $15,000 a year…

“Adjuncts fear that if they ask for a raise, they will just be replaced with someone else who is more desperate for work and less argumentative. Adjuncts are also often caught in a cruel catch-22, where they can’t afford to strike for higher pay because their current pay is so low that striking would leave them unable to pay rent or other living expenses.

“Historians Kristen Edwards and Kim Tolley sum up the current adjunct situation quite well in The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘Many colleges claim to advance social justice or develop democratic communities, but few have acted on their own principles when it comes to giving adjunct faculty a living wage and a real voice in decision-making. Everyone who cares about the quality of higher education should demand they do so. Since the founding of the nation, the purpose of higher education has been to develop skilled, thoughtful citizens capable of contributing in meaningful ways to society. This purpose will never be realized with a professoriate composed predominantly of instructors who work without the protection of real academic freedom, and have no role in shared governance, no job security, no benefits, low wages, and no real hope of ever finding a full-time position.’

“Given that our institutions are uninterested in paying these professors what they are worth; given that they are uninterested in allowing adjuncts to participate in college decision-making; given that adjunct professors are in such a tenuous position that they are by and large unable to bargain; given that even successful bargaining brings modest gains at best, and given the staggering amount of money that students pay in tuition, the solution is for students to go on strike until our institutions agree to pay adjuncts a fair wage.

“[We should] argue that $12,000 a course would be much more on par with the value these professors provide. This should come with benefits, job security and participation in institutional decision-making.

“…[Remember]: These adjuncts create courses, give lectures, answer questions outside of class, spend hours grading, help thousands of students learn to think critically and to move toward a better future, while getting paid less than some people make working in the fast food industry. Maybe it’s time we do something for them. Do we care about fair pay? Do we care about fair benefits? Do we care about fair representation? Do we believe that our adjunct professors are worth more than $15,000 a year?

“If we do, occupy lecture halls. Get into the auditoriums. Take over the labs. Sleep in those weird tiny rooms for the upper-level classes that only fit 10 people. Bring mattresses, bring blankets, bring food, bring games, blast music. Make big signs. Bring call-and-response chants. Discuss injustice. Demand justice. Tell our friends at other colleges to do the same. Make a difference for the people who are helping us make a difference in the world” (Peter Jacobs at Press Herald).

There are 68 articles on this social injustice. To access all 68 articles, click here, and then scroll down for each one. Click on "Older Posts" to continue.

An Injustice That Few People Care About: The Adjunct Underclass

“Adjunct professors are the minimum-wage temp workers of academia. Underpaid, overworked, with no benefits and no job security, their numbers have ballooned in recent decades. They are part of what Herb Childress calls ‘hope labor,’ in his new book, The Adjunct Underclass. Childress quotes researchers who define hope labor as ‘un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow.’ For most adjuncts, that hope comes to nothing.

“Childress compares the catastrophe of gig economy college teaching to gig-based employment in other industries like medicine or taxis. He argues that adjunct teachers are the Uber drivers of academia. ‘College teaching has become primarily a pickup job … like running chores for TaskRabbit,’ he writes, reporting that 25 percent of adjuncts depend on some form of public assistance. His book brings to mind the nearly starving, peripatetic scholars, wandering from one university to another, teaching and begging, in medieval Europe.

“The Adjunct Underclass summarizes The Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s account of the death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, who died at the age of eighty-three from cancer she could not afford to treat. She died at her home, for which she could not afford electricity. She had taught French at Duquesne University for twenty-five years, never making more than twenty-thousand dollars a year for her six or more courses and never receiving health benefits or retirement contributions.

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“Childress discusses homeless adjunct professors who sleep in their cars. He cites the San Francisco Chronicle and the example of English professor Ellen Tara James Penny. While teaching four courses per semester at San Jose University in Fall 2017, Penny ‘often drives to a parking lot to grade papers. When it’s dark, she’ll use a headlamp from Home Depot, so she can continue her work. At night she’ll re-park in a residential neighborhood and sleep in her 2004 Volvo. She keeps the car neat to avoid suspicion.’...

“Many adjuncts toil at multiple campuses in a semester, commuting hundreds of miles each day, working essentially nonstop except for sleep, as they teach, grade papers and answer multitudinous student emails. ‘The figure of 45 contract hours is a fiction that conceals 350 hours of work, maybe 400 and maybe more,’ Childress writes. ‘A $3,600 pretax stipend with no benefits like healthcare or retirement contributions, spread over 400 hours of work, comes to $9 per hour.’

“As a result, adjuncts are organizing. This spring, adjunct professors at several Minnesota colleges began agitating for unions, as reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Minnesota’s first adjunct union, at Hamline University, has pursued negotiations for a second contract since July 2018. Meanwhile in January, New York City-based Mercy College adjunct teachers started a drive to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Recently, Fordham University adjuncts ratified their first contract, which mandates substantial pay increases. ‘Nationally about seventy new faculty bargaining units — all but one for nontenure faculty — have sprung up on private campuses since 2012,’ according to the Star Tribune.

“By 2016, gig faculty labor at more than 60 schools was organized by SEIU. In March 2018, ‘University of South Florida adjuncts voted to form a union…. On April 13 adjunct faculty at the University of Chicago ratified their first union contract … adjuncts at Loyola University in Chicago,’ also reached an agreement, according to the Johns Hopkins notice. And Labor Notes recently reported that this past April, international student workers were key to the success of the University of Illinois at Chicago graduate employees strike. Unionization is sweeping the gig faculty labor force, despite fierce management opposition that does not want to cede money or power to what Childress calls ‘the scavengers, the bottom feeders, paid by the course as the need arises.’

“Overworked and impermanent, no matter how excellent their teaching skills, adjuncts lack opportunities to form the sort of lasting mentoring relationships with students that are associated with tenured faculty. So, students suffer. And these students are predominately low-income at community colleges, which employ more adjuncts than four-year schools — at some, 90 percent of their faculty. Adjuncts, Childress writes, ‘are camouflaged to look exactly like their [tenure track] counterparts,’ so students and parents don’t know the difference. This affects lots of students, because there are so many adjuncts. ‘More than one million people are now working as contingent faculty [in the U.S.] … providing a cheap labor source, even while students’ tuition has skyrocketed,’ according to a congressional Democratic staffer quoted by Childress.

“This faculty precariat constitutes almost three-quarters of community college teachers who instruct, in turn, 40 percent of all undergraduates. ‘If community colleges prepare students to mirror their faculty’s lives as isolated individuals, scratching out a tenuous survival,’ Childress writes, ‘the state [universities] also prepare students to mirror their own faculty’s lives, with secure enough jobs that provide for the mortgage, the gold clubs and the new SUV every few years.’ Affluent liberal arts colleges have far fewer adjuncts, while Ivies and other elite universities are certainly not training their students for a precarious survival.

“Stanford education professor David Labaree, quoted by Childress, says ‘stratification is at the heart of American education. It’s the price we pay for the system’s broad accessibility.’ Just as 100 million economically precarious Americans cling to the bottom rungs of the U.S. economy, so too in U.S. education, precarious gig faculty labor teaches those low-income students who can scrape together community college tuition. Clearly community college students have the greatest need for close mentoring relationships with their professors, but, as Childress observes, they are the least likely to get it, since more of their professors are adjuncts. Ironically, it is students at elite colleges, among the least needy, who get the most professorial attention.

“Meanwhile, and not coincidentally, this devaluation of teaching parallels the profession’s feminization. Many adjuncts are women. Childress cites ‘rising discrimination against occupations after the entry of women.’ This has happened in medicine, education, law and veterinary practice. Research ‘shows college grads entering male-dominated fields at starting salaries far greater than those of college grads entering female-dominated field.’ Women’s work is not considered important. This explains why when women enter an occupation, the pay and the standing decline.

“The public-school model provides the best approach. Early on public education became feminized, thus devalued and underpaid. But it unionized completely. Adjuncts in higher ed should do the same, because barring the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, no help other than unions awaits them.

“The Adjunct Underclass lists five ways that universities have whittled away teacher pay: fewer people, longer hours; workers redefined as independent contractors; de-bundled professional activities and the creation of paraprofessionals; outsourced non-core functions; replacement of humans and space with technology. And of course, the glut of Ph.D.-credentialed teachers puts downward pressure on pay.

“Yet colleges and universities still crank out Ph.D.s, tens of thousands ever year. And every year many, many of those people don’t get jobs. They join a pool of surplus educational labor that constantly swells: There are more unemployed adjuncts every year, their increasing numbers putting downward pressure on pay.

“Years of study, papers, exams, the dissertation, followed by ferocious competition for academic employment scraps: It’s high time this sector of the work-force unionized widely, got some benefits for its precarious piece-work and recognized that tenure is, for most, an impossible and destructive dream.”

Eve Ottenberg is a journalist who has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker‘s “Briefly Noted” section, USA Today, and many other newspapers and magazines. She is also a novelist. Two of her novels, Dead in Iraq and The Walkout, deal explicitly with recent political issues. Two others, Sojourn at Dusk and Dark Is the Night focus on 1960s political activism.

Posted in Truthout.org.  

Commentary Redux:

It is well known that adjunct faculty work without job security, without the benefit of healthcare, and without an ethical living wage. Most universities’ priorities are their development of building projects and technology, renovation of infrastructure, management of revenues and investments and reducing operating costs, administrative/bureaucratic positions and salaries, and athletic programs and their resources…  

There is no equity for adjunct instructors. Courses staffed with contingent adjunct faculty cost the same student tuition and provide the same credits staffed by tenured full-time faculty. Adjunct faculty grade compositions and tests, write recommendations and advise students, devise and develop classes, create lesson plans and course materials and improve curricula, among other unpaid responsibilities. 

There are no due process protections for adjunct faculty. There is no equal pay for equal work. There is no professional advancement. There is no equity in the lack of health insurance and retirement benefits available for adjunct faculty. There is little to no inclusion in the way higher education’s formal decision-making procedures and structures are made. Indeed, adjunct faculty are simply part-time contractors, “lecturers,” or non-essential “marginalized” hires who are disenfranchised from high-level governance and required to carry out most of the responsibilities of the full-time faculty (and sometimes at multiple institutions), but for less than one-fifth of the salary of the full-time faculty and without meaningful job security from one semester to another…

Equally demoralizing is that most full-time faculty do not sympathize with the adjunct faculty’s plight. Adjunct faculty are generally without help in their hardship… What is more, most tenured faculty are unconcerned about the slow moral dissolution of higher education and the threats to their own security, even though these debasing administrative trends and practices persist. 

Not surprisingly, at Benedictine University where there is declining student enrollment but increasing student tuition ($33,900 a year (2017)—though only a fraction of this amount pays for college adjunct instruction), full-time tenured faculty are given priority for available classes each semester; thus, an adjunct faculty member’s originally-designed course will be dropped from the core curriculum, no matter how competent and dedicated the adjunct instructor is and respected by students.

Nevertheless, if the reduction of courses taught by adjunct faculty is one of Benedictine University’s severe budgetary constraints, “when contingent appointments are used, they should include job security and due process protections. Contingent faculty appointments, like all faculty appointments, should include: the full range of faculty responsibilities (teaching, scholarship, service); comparable compensation for comparable work; assurance of continuing employment after a reasonable opportunity for successive reviews; inclusion in institutional governance structures; and appointment and review processes that involve faculty peers and follow accepted academic due process…" (Background Facts on Contingent Faculty).

Indeed, “[f]or the [Catholic] Church, there is no distinction between defending human life and promoting the dignity of the human person. Pope Benedict XVI writes in Caritas in Veritate [Charity in Truth] that ‘The Church forcefully maintains this link between life ethics and social ethics, fully aware that a society lacks solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized’” (no. 15) (Human Life and Dignity).  

Surely, flagrant indifference to the mental and physical well-being of adjunct faculty is incompatible with the adage “cura personalis” (care for the entire person). What remains to be seen at universities like Benedictine and across the nation is the rejoinder to an essential ethical question: “To what extent can universities be considered [moral and just] while engaging in practices or ideologies that run contrary to [their Mission, Vision, and Commitment Statements]? ...Catholic universities have to decide whether or not running a [consumerist/capitalist academic structure] that utilizes [and exploits their core adjunct faculty]… fundamentally contradicts Catholic teaching [and its ideals]. Adjunct pay, [their lack of benefits and precarious job security… are] not just a [Benedictine] issue — it is an industry wide issue...” (“The Fordham Ram Unfair Adjunct Wages Go Against Jesuit Values”).

-Glen Brown

Adjunct Faculty Instructor

For the entire article, The Continuing Demoralization of University and College Adjunct Faculty, click here. 

“The Adjunct Underclass”

“How did we discard the idea of college faculty? That is, how did we decide to systematically eliminate an entire class of professionals whom we once trusted to conduct the final distillation of our children into capable, confident adults? How did we come to decide that college teachers didn’t deserve job security, didn’t deserve health insurance, didn’t deserve to make more than convenience-store clerks?

“It wasn’t hard, really.

“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded medical general practitioners: through providing insane rewards to specialists and leaving most care in the hands of paraprofessionals.

“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded cab drivers: by leveling the profession and allowing anyone to participate, as long as they had a minimum credential and didn’t need much money.

“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded magazine and newspaper writers: by relabeling the work “content” and its workers “content providers.”

“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded local auto mechanics: by making all of the systems and regulations so sophisticated that they now require an army of technicians and specialized equipment.

“We discarded college faculty in the same way that we discarded bookkeepers: by finally letting women do it after decades of declaring that impossible, and then immediately reducing the status of the work once it became evident that women could, in fact, do it well.

“Our contemporary religion of innovation has as one of its tenets the following belief: Rather than defeat your competition, make your competitors irrelevant. This is exactly what we see in higher education. College faculty were not defeated after great struggle, after a battle with a winner and a loser. College has simply been redefined, over and over, in ways that make faculty irrelevant. College teaching, as a profession, is being eliminated one small, undetected, definitional drop at a time…

“The problems with the adjunct structure of higher education are not merely quantitative. It’s not just about how badly adjuncts are paid, not just about the inadequate opportunities for our students to build enduring relationships with the faculty who guide them. It’s also about fear, despair, surrender, shame — the messy, hidden human elements that finance and policy always miss.

“The story of the adjunct faculty, of the postdoctoral scholars, of those in ‘alt-careers’ — that story will be incomplete unless we recognize that we are refugees from a nation that would not have us. We have found our way to innumerable continents, but still hold that lost home in our hearts. We still, many of us, in quiet moments, mourn the loss of our community as we make our scattered way across diverse lands.

“The decision to join a community is never solely rational. We discover a way of life we find appealing, learn more about it, start to make friends with others who hold similar values. We shift our vocabulary, our terms of engagement, our enthusiasms. Our calendars are marked by different constraints — rather than birthdays and Thanksgiving, we attune ourselves to semesters, grant-proposal deadlines, the week of our discipline’s national conference.

“We become new people in order to join this new culture. We know that our proposed membership in that community will be subject to great competition. We offer ourselves as contestants in a pageant for people who can’t even describe their own desires. We imagine that with the right costume or the right theme music, we might be chosen. We sniff the air, hoping for a phrase to borrow, to learn this year’s color, to please the taste makers as we pass by in the parade of the damned, hoping for the rare and unpredictable nod that will allow us to move from the slush pile to the long list to the short list to the campus visit to — dare we think it? — an offer of membership.

“Some few will get in. Some larger number will not. But the peculiar cruelty of higher education is its third option — the vast purgatory of contingent life, in which we are neither welcomed nor rejected, but merely held adjacent to the mansion, to do the work that our betters would prefer not to do…”

Herb Childress is a partner at Teleidoscope Group, LLC, an ethnography-­based consulting firm. This essay is excerpted from his new book, The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (University of Chicago Press).

The Chronicle Review

Despite the soaring costs of attending American colleges and universities, students are receiving an education that falls far short of the one experienced by earlier generations

“The sharp increase in costs is clear enough. Between 1978 and 2013, American college tuition rose by 1,120 percent, and became the major source of revenue for higher education. Traditionally, most public colleges and universities had no tuition or very low tuition. But, faced with severe cutbacks in government funding from conservative state legislatures, these public schools adopted a tuition system or dramatically raised tuition...

“This huge spike in the cost of a college education has had a devastating effect upon educational opportunity. Unable to afford college, many young people never attend it or drop out at some point. Studies have found that the primary reason young people cite for not attending college is its enormous cost. Many other young people can afford to attend college only by working simultaneously at paying jobs (which pulls them away from their studies) or by running up enormous debt. It is estimated that three out of four recent college graduates have borrowed to cover their college costs, incurring a debt averaging nearly $40,000 each. As a result, American student loan debt now totals $1.5 trillion.

“Coping with this enormous debt, plus substantial interest, constitutes a very heavy burden for the 44 million Americans who bear it. All too many of them either default on it or give up on their dreams for post-college careers and, to pay it off, settle, reluctantly, for working at jobs they dislike.

“Meanwhile, on campus, education is deteriorating. Those young people who can still afford to attend a college or university are increasingly being deprived of a broad liberal arts education (in which they have the opportunity to consider what life is all about and what it might be) and channeled, instead, into narrow vocational training programs.

“This June, the American Association of University Professors issued an appeal calling for the protection of the liberal arts in higher education. Why? Politicians like Governor Rick Scott of Florida have proposed singling out liberal arts majors―students he apparently considers particularly unworthy of public education―and charging them higher tuition at state universities.

“Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has proposed dropping the goals of ‘search for truth’ and ‘improve the human condition’ from the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement and substituting: ‘meet the state’s workforce needs.’

“Also, many students are taught in vast lecture halls and have little or no access to faculty members with whom they can discuss their coursework, interesting books or ideas, or the possibilities of attending graduate or professional school. Thanks to administrative efforts to dispose of tenured and tenure-line faculty, adjunct and other contingent faculty now constitute 76 percent of the nation’s college teachers. As these underpaid, rootless individuals are often little more than evanescent ghosts flitting by on campus, there are few opportunities to meet with them―if there is even a place to meet with them. And student contact with human beings will be further reduced in the future, as MOOCS (massive online open courses) are substituted for courses taught in classrooms―classrooms that once gave students the opportunity for a face-to-face discussion with their teachers and other students.

“The mistreatment of students is most advanced at America’s for-profit colleges and universities. These private enterprise institutions, often owned by giant banks and investment firms, underwent a surge of growth that started in the 1970s and probably reached its peak from 2007 to 2009, when they numbered nearly 1,000 and could boast about 2.4 million students. Enrolling large numbers of first generation, low-income college students, they became notorious for deceptive student recruitment practices, misleading claims about program credentials, high student debt and default rates, and inferior educational and employment outcomes. 

“The largest for-profit school, the University of Phoenix, which claimed an enrollment of 600,000 in 2010, incurred numerous government fines and payments to students who sued it for shady admissions and educational practices. By 2017, its enrollment (like that of its for-profit counterparts) had declined substantially. Nevertheless, it continues operations today, with 95 percent of its faculty teaching part-time, adjuncts receiving approximately $1,000 to $2,000 per course, and student debt totaling $35 billion―the highest in the United States.

“Corporate investors in the for-profit university system can take heart at the election of Donald Trump, who himself founded a for-profit educational entity, Trump University, an operation that ultimately cost him $25 million to settle lawsuits for fraudulent practices. 

“Betsy DeVos, his choice for U.S. Secretary of Education, scrapped two Obama-era government regulations for the industry during her first months in office. The first of the regulations she eliminated cut off U.S. government funding to programs that performed poorly, and the second made it easier for students defrauded by for-profit schools to wipe out their loan debt. DeVos also appointed a former administrator at a for-profit university―DeVry University, previously heavily-fined by the federal government for fraudulent operations―to police fraud in higher education. Surely America can do a better job of providing educational opportunity for its people” (Today’s College Students Are Paying More for Less by Lawrence Wittner).

What can tenured and tenure-line faculty do to support adjuncts? by Sarah Ellen Zarrow

“…What can tenured and tenure-lined faculty do to support adjuncts? Actions to encourage structural change might include the following:

§  Join the union and the American Association of University Professors. Advocate for adjunct unionization and representation.

§  Educate yourselves on union laws in your state and attend a protest or rally in support of local unions.

§  Openly support adjunct unionization. Write (or sign) a letter of support and deliver that letter to your administration.

§  Address adjunct concerns with your professional organization. Most organizations send out a member survey after the large annual conference. Might your university not subsidize adjunct travel costs? Suggest that your professional organization offer generous, multiple funds for adjuncts, not for extra professional development workshops but simply for attending the meeting. Maybe give these funds on a rolling basis so as not to create an onerous application process?

§  Observe whether adjuncts have representation in your professional organization’s leadership. Are adjunct concerns considered frequently and publicly or are panels about 'the adjunct experience' given the last time slot?

§  In department meetings, recognize, out loud, that not every department member is there. Decisions made in department meetings affect teaching-only faculty, who rarely have a voice in department culture but who may teach a majority of the students in the department -- or who may fulfill your department’s service course obligations to the university.

Although actions that might change structural conditions, if successful, will offer the most long-term benefit to adjuncts (other than doing away with adjunctification as a whole, which might be the ultimate solution but seems unattainable), I would have benefited enormously from the following interpersonal ones, as well:

§  Offer adjunct faculty the same physical resources as tenured and tenure-line faculty. Having a working printer, copier code and business cards is not only a way to help adjuncts feel at home in the department; such resources also make a real impact upon adjuncts’ professional lives.

§  Ask adjuncts about their research and teaching with the idea that they might actually teach you something. They may have published articles and books, and especially if they have worked on other campuses and you have not (or have not for a long time), they may well have a better perspective on pedagogical interventions, assessment and course organization.

§  Invite adjuncts to speak about their research. And, of course, pay them to do so (travel and an honorarium). Promote their work whenever possible to the faculty.

§  Compensate adjuncts for their time outside the classroom. An 'inviting' culture does not feel inviting when some people at the meeting are worried about how to pay for their ride home, since it will be too dark at the end of the meeting to bike.

§  Punch up. Adjuncts and tenure-track faculty, especially minorities and women, have similar interests in the university structure. Humanities departments are hit by some of the same forces that keep adjuncts in subservient positions. Complaining is normal, but complain up, not down. Adjuncts are not your audience; they can be your allies” (A Formal Adjunct Looks Back by Sarah Ellen Zarrow, Inside HigherEd, Aug. 24, 2018).