Crowdsourcing a Compilation of Adjunct Working ConditionsYesterday, Michael Bérubé, president of the Modern Language Association and newfound hero of contingent faculty everywhere, published the essay “Among the Majority” on the MLA website. The piece is a reflection on the New Faculty Majority’s 2012 Summit he attended last weekend in Washington, DC, as well as a recap of some of the MLA’s recently-released recommendations for fair standards concerning non-tenure track faculty. In the essay, Bérubé specifically cites this beauty of a quote:
Following a review of best practices in various institutions, the MLA recommends minimum compensation for 2011–12 of $6,800 for a standard 3-credit-hour semester course or $4,530 for a standard 3-credit-hour quarter or trimester course. These recommendations are based on a full-time load of 3 courses per semester (6 per year) or 3 courses per quarter or trimester (9 per year); annual full-time equivalent thus falls in a range of $40,770 to $40,800.
Full posting.
There's only one listing for my university right now, and it made my jaw hit the floor. It's utterly ridiculous. I hope to Thor I never have to fall into the adjunct trap again. :(
ReplyDeleteThe MLA further recommends compensation supplement of one week-long trip to the land of gum-drop trees and one rainbow-colored unicorn, in the case of a semester course, or the attentions of two well-oiled, shirtless youths of the lecturer's gender preference who will provide a massage table and triclinium couch with full Mediterranean-style buffet with musical accompaniment on lyre and biwa for a quarter or trimester course.
ReplyDeleteI think my school pays about a third of this recommendation.
Lemurpants is right. MLA man can "recommend" any f-ing thing he freaking wants to, but it doesn't mean it's even in a realm anywhere near REALITY. HOW are states and colleges supposed to PAY for this fantasy? Huh? Got any answers, MLA guy? Thought not. How about we get some sort of actionable recos that have SOMETHING to do with REALITY, since that's where most of us reside...you know, in the REAL WORLD.
ReplyDeleteI hate to say it, since I wouldn't at all mind a 2/2 teaching load (or any teaching load which allowed for research) myself, but one approach would be to up the teaching requirements and lower the research expectations for the great majority of faculty nationwide. I'm not sure one could do that, contractually, for faculty who have already been hired/tenured on the basis of a lower load, but one could do it going forward, and many state legislatures (and yes, I admit, conservative commentators) would cheer. It's far from the only piece of the puzzle, but at every school I know of that has lowered teaching expectations and raised research expectations for TT faculty in order to better the school's research reputation (and a lot of once teaching-oriented state schools have done this over the last few decades), the proportion of contingent faculty has grown exponentially. The R1 (or even R2-striving-to-be-R1) model is not one that most schools can afford, *except* at the cost of an radically stratified faculty, with a very few privileged researchers and administrators at the top, and a large body of poorly-paid contingent faculty at the bottom.
DeleteIt would also be interesting to cost out what would happen if one eliminated all but student-run club sports, and sought bids from companies interested in running any surplus athletic facilities on a for-profit basis.
CC, what you suggest regarding teaching/research is eminently reasonable, which is why it will never happen. I teach a 4/4 load at a 2-year campus and there is *STILL* expectation of research and publication. It's effing stupid. Most of my colleagues (the ones who publish) publish in journals that no one reads. I've published in an anthology no one will ever read, unless I assign the essay to students. It's phony, it's rigged, and it's basically useless. Therefore, it's not going to change.
DeleteWhat made me laugh out loud from the quote above, though, is the salary. I barely make that much, and I have tenure. Dr Lemurpants is right on.
The really sad thing is that this should be, as the recommendations describe it, a minimum. In many more expensive metropolitan areas, including my own, 40K isn't all that much; for instance, it wouldn't quite qualify one to rent a one-room apartment in a safe, no-frills apartment complex within a 5-10-mile radius of my campus (it would qualify one for subsidized housing, but the waiting list for that is very long). It takes a salary at least in the high 50s to lure an entry-level TT assistant professor who has done hir homework to our area, and even then hir housing choices are limited unless there's a second, preferably higher, income in the household.
ReplyDeleteNone of this would be a problem if contingent work were, as many people still envision it, a temporary stop on the way to a TT job. But of course it isn't. Personally, I think the following parts of the recommendations speak more directly to the heart of the problem:
"the MLA believes that part-time faculty members should be compensated pro rata to salaries for full-time faculty members performing similar duties, whether by a per-course, per-credit-hour, or full-time-equivalent percentage" and "Higher than minimum rates of compensation should apply in cases where contracts or appointments are for one year or less and not renewable, have no provision for a career path consisting of a sequence of appointments leading to longer-term contracts, or (after a reasonable probationary period) provide no rights to due process procedures prior to termination."
And even then, I'm not sure there's enough emphasis on the need for a "career path" to involve a salary ladder that at least keeps pace with the TT one as well as increasingly long contracts. Even relatively privileged full-time contingent faculty tend to develop skills that are very specific to their particular institution's needs, which makes the need to find another job in mid- or late-career, even with considerable warning and "due process," a scary prospect. Ironically, TT faculty are far more likely to be doing things (e.g. publishing) that would make them marketable elsewhere.
And yes, it's all pie in the sky; the pro-rata recommendation, at least, has been around for several decades, and the situation has only gotten worse over that period. But at least the full recommendations make an attempt to address the systemic issues, and that strikes me as as important as the specific numbers involved.
That said, the google doc also strikes me as a very good idea. Now how do we get parents deciding on schools for their little darlings to consult it, and make it a part of their admissions decision?
Adjuncts should make more than they do, but the fact is they don't have comparable duties, even at institutions at which teaching is the primary expectation. Thus I'm not sure what pro rata for comparable duties means. I adjuncted for five years before I got a TT position. Only in the last position, a VAP, was I expected to do comparable work in terms of committee service and professional development (but not research). The pay there worked out to about half what's being recommended here.
ReplyDeleteThat said, adjuncts should be paid for things not officially provided for in many contracts that they tend to do anyway, specifically office hours and grading. My CC pays a flat per-hour rate for a course based only on the teaching. So if your class days have a holiday in the schedule, you'll get paid less than someone teaching the same scheduled class without a holiday. This is also true when TT/tenured faculty teach an overload class, for which we are considered adjuncts for pay purposes. We've flat-out been told that we don't have to have extra office hours for those overloads since we're not being paid for the time. Other CCs in the area pay a flat rate per course with slight adjustments for either "rank" (actually education) or experience. In all cases, it seems the mandatory extra work isn't valued. Adjuncts who are asked or volunteer to do committee work should also be compensated.
Unfortunately I don't have the parent site...but mailing list of those interested in the same area of hamster fur weaving that I am included an interesting crowd-sourced document on adjunct compensation yesterday.
ReplyDeleteMostly I was surprised to see that I'm much farther higher on the adjunct compensation scale than many of my peers at other schools (and especially in other locations).
The real google docs URL is super-long, and I'm a rock who doesn't know how to create a link in blogspot. So here's a tinyURL version that links to the google docs document.
TinyURL version:
http://tinyurl.com/adjunct-project
Full URL:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArLwcJ6E2dSydF9DT3FQUnNJaTR5WGx4QTg4Y1dRa2c&hl=en_US&pli=1#gid=15
Sure am glad I have a full time job elsewhere too!