In 2012, four-year tuition at the average public university cost more than $15,000 – not counting books, meals or housing. At the average private institution, that figure was even higher, clocking in at over $32,000. Even two-year and vocational programs ran nearly $9,000 per certificate.
With the cost of higher education skyrocketing, it’s easy to assume that professors – the men and women who educate our students – are doing quite well for themselves. In some cases, that’s true: tenured faculty members’ salaries at leading universities can top $160,000 a year. But the average adjunct professor makes just $2,700 per course, with no health care insurance or other benefits.
Here’s the kicker: 76 percent of university faculty in the United States are adjunct professors. Most have to work at multiple universities and still don’t make enough to stay above the poverty line. And considering the amount of time involved in preparing, teaching and grading each class, many adjuncts make less than minimum wage.
With statistics like these, it’s no surprise that adjunct professors nationwide are forming unions through Adjunct Action, a project of the Service Employees International Union. This past weekend, faculty from more than 20 Bay State campuses kicked off their own organizing drive with an ‘Adjunct Faculty Symposium’ in Boston.
More than 100 professors from across Eastern Massachusetts gathered at the JFK Presidential Library Saturday for the daylong conference – discussing everything from classroom challenges to coalition building. Participants also met in small breakout groups to develop campus-specific organizing strategies and plan next steps, joined by scores of student supporters who were ready to stand in solidarity with their professors.
By the end of the symposium, adjunct professors were well prepared to launch organizing drives on campuses throughout greater Boston. And soon, they’ll be standing arm-in-arm with 15,000 other faculty members who have already unionized through Adjunct Action at SEIU.
For more information on the fight to raise wages and improve working conditions for adjunct faculty, check out this great interview from WBUR’s All Things Considered – or visit Adjunct Action online at www.adjunctaction.org.
I teach at Berklee College of Music, where the faculty–full and part time–is unionized. Part timers get the full suite of benefits (after their first 2 years), ranks/promotions, and a decent, if not generous, wage. This was the product of hard struggles in the 1980s when the union was formed.
I flirted with the idea of landing in academia. I chose not too, scared away from the feast-or-famine future of tenured professor or adjunct professor.
Adjunct professors deserve better, and I hope that they get it.
When community colleges across our Commonwealth hire full-time faculty, it is counted against their budget. However, when they hire adjuncts, it comes out of a general fund shared by all community colleges. So they get some 25% of the work for 0% the cost. What would you do — pay full cost for a full-time prof, or zero cost for four part-timers?
I hadn’t known that. Seems like a crazy perverse incentive.
Even without it, the numbers explain why colleges do it. When I taught as an adjunct in NYC, the tradeoff was “tenure track prof with benefits who teaches 2 courses/term” for $90k all in, or an adjunct who does same for $14k at $3k/course. Evidently in MA, it’s $90k versus $0.
My question: what is the proposal to fund this? Is it the political equivalent of “cut loopholes”? (i.e., we don’t have a plan).