Seeking qualified alumni for zero-time (adjunct) status
April 25, 2018 10:38 AM   Subscribe

Public universities in Illinois have faced severe financial issues stemming from state budget impasses. Now, Southern Illinois University has proposed a novel approach to staffing shortages: a “pilot project” in collaboration with the SIU Alumni Association to "create a pool of potential, volunteer adjuncts with advanced academic degrees who might contribute as needed for up to three years after their approval." Reaction has been, as expected, unfavorable (Twitter thread).

The Southern Illinoisan:
Dave Johnson, president of the SIUC Faculty Association....said he's concerned by the apparent attempt to make alumni into "ersatz faculty" by giving them zero-percent appointments, which could allow them to take on duties normally performed by regular SIUC faculty with 100-percent appointments.

“… What SIU is asking alumni to do is to volunteer unpaid labor, and in some ways that’s going to take pressure off the university to pay people to do this, and this work is important. Graduate faculty are highly trained and committed to their students,” Johnson said.

Johnson said that for underemployed and unemployed recent graduates who want to do some academic work, even if it’s unpaid, there might be some motivation to do it.

“But I think there’s also a risk that alumni, particularly recent graduates, who feel they need to keep in the good graces of their alma mater would feel some pressure to do this even if they don’t want to do it,” Johnson said.

He said the union is consulting with lawyers to find out whether the program would violate the faculty contract.
The letter from Michael R. Molino, Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and Research, can be found on Facebook here.
Dear Chairs,

I know you are swamped right now with various requests and annual duties. I apologize for adding to that, but I am here to advocate for something that merits your attention. The Alumni Association has initiated a pilot program involving the College of Science, College of Liberal Arts, and the College of Applied Sciences and Arts, seeking qualified alumni to join the SIU Graduate Faculty in a zero-time (adjunct) status.

-------> Candidates for appointment must meet HLC accreditation guidelines for appointment as adjunct professors, and they will generally hold an academic doctorate or other terminal degree as appropriate for the field.

These blanket zero-time adjunct graduate faculty appointments are for 3-year periods, and can be renewed. While specific duties of alumni adjuncts will likely vary across academic units, examples include service on graduate student thesis committees, teaching specific graduate or undergraduate lectures in one’s area of expertise, service on departmental or university committees, and collaborations on grant proposals and research projects. Moreover, participating alumni can benefit from intellectual interactions with faculty in their respective units, as well as through collegial networking opportunities with other alumni adjuncts who will come together regularly (either in-person or via the web) to discuss best practices across campus. <-------

The Alumni Association is already working to identify prospective candidates, but it asks for your help in nominating some of your finest former students who are passionate about supporting SIU. Please reach out to your faculty to see if they might nominate a former student who would meet HLC accreditation guidelines for adjunct faculty appointment, which is someone holding a Ph.D., MFA, or other terminal degree. One of the short-comings with our current approach to the doctoral alumni is that the database only includes those with a Ph.D. earned at SIU, but often doesn’t capture SIU graduates with earned doctorates from other institutions. Here are the recommended steps to follow:

· Chairs in collaboration with faculty should consider specific needs/desires of their particular department, and ask how they could best utilize adjunct faculty. For example, many departments are always looking for additional highly qualified members to serve on thesis committees, and to provide individual lectures, seminars, and mentorship activities for both graduate and undergraduate students.

· Based on faculty recommendations, chairs should identify a few good candidates and approach those individuals to see if they are interested. The interested candidate should provide his/her CV (along with a brief letter of interest outlining areas in which they are willing to participate) to the department chair, who can then approach the Graduate Dean for final vetting and approval.

The University hasn’t yet attempted its first alumni adjunct appointment, but this is the general mechanism already in place. Meera would like CoLA to establish a critical mass of nominees before the end of the summer. A goal of at least one (1) nominee per department would get us going.

Thanks,

Michael

--
MICHAEL R. MOLINO
Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and Research
posted by Existential Dread (111 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
The Alumni Association has initiated

This was the alumni association's idea? Good lord.
posted by rhizome at 10:41 AM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


How ... embarrassing.

I honestly think I'd quit before I wrote the words above and put my name under them.
posted by Dashy at 10:42 AM on April 25, 2018 [15 favorites]


That guy who's always down by the bus station could teach philosophy
posted by thelonius at 10:45 AM on April 25, 2018 [20 favorites]


Seriously.

I mean, this is terrible. For a dozen different reasons.

The main two being that it basically induces less experienced people to give their labor for free, and then it puts economic pressures on the full-time faculty so their work and experience are valued less highly.

It's a win for the institutional administrators that don't want to pay for labor, a win for tax-cutters that don't want to raise funds to pay for education, a lose for all employees involved, and a lose for the community that will end up having less qualified and less engaged faculty teaching higher ed coursework.
posted by darkstar at 10:46 AM on April 25, 2018 [53 favorites]


"But you teachers are always talking about how much you love your work, and what a privilege it is to do it, so how greedy ARE you, expecting to be PAID for it?"
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 10:47 AM on April 25, 2018 [26 favorites]


I mean, this shit just gets mentioned in passing:
A protracted political showdown left the state without a budget for about two years, and in 2016 the university's president told The Chronicle that his system had left vacant nearly 200 positions, many of them on the faculty.
"Oh, just a budget impasse. Nothing we can do anything about."

P.S. The first Chronicle of Higher Education link is paywalled
posted by rhizome at 10:48 AM on April 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


WTF.

I hope this blows up in their stupid faces - that is, I hope that they don't just go ahead after the backlash has died down and further undermine vulnerable, debt-ridden workers trying to survive in a parasitic system.

I hope there is already an ongoing effort to educate any potential applicants to this program about how exploitative it is. As in, I hope someone has leaked the goddamn alumni email list so that a warning can be sent out.

Also that someone finds everyone responsible and pies them, specifically with a fish pie.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:49 AM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is the ultimate "For the Exposure" scam.
posted by happyroach at 10:53 AM on April 25, 2018 [35 favorites]


P.S. The first Chronicle of Higher Education link is paywalled

Crap. Sorry, I'm at an academic institution and it didn't even occur to me that it might be paywalled. Is the main link to the story accessible?
posted by Existential Dread at 10:53 AM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


Crap. Sorry, I'm at an academic institution and it didn't even occur to me that it might be paywalled. Is the main link to the story accessible?

It's all good, I just signed up to be a volunteer adjunct professor at Southern Illinois University so that I could have access to all the websites and journals and databases for free.

*weeps* information wants to be freeeeeee!!!!
posted by Annika Cicada at 10:58 AM on April 25, 2018 [77 favorites]


Well, this is horrifying.
posted by meese at 11:05 AM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I bet there are quite a few CFOs and the like out there who would be happy to give up some time to act as Associate Dean of Budget at a respectable university, in order to take advantage of the prestige associated with that and to enhance their CVs. Why not get a few of those together to make some budget savings?
posted by biffa at 11:06 AM on April 25, 2018 [34 favorites]


I have been making so much noise about this. I thought adjuncting was bad, but someone up the chain thought to themselves, "We really pay adjuncts too much... have we tried paying them nothing?"

The academy is dead, y'all. All that's left to do is weep. I speak as an academic and as someone who is watching this rotten beast cannibalize itself. I've been told that my desire to teach students critical thinking skills is "lofty idealism" and that we need to focus on teaching them "skills to get jobs."

Workers of the world, fucking unite, like, yesterday. Please?
posted by sockermom at 11:07 AM on April 25, 2018 [90 favorites]


This is the ultimate "For the Exposure" scam.

This exposure may get you an unfunded position on a full-time basis!
posted by zippy at 11:08 AM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Why yes, I would definitely like to prepare and teach a class, grade papers and proctor exams for free. I would also enjoy serving on committee for free. Who wouldn't enjoy doing a lot of administrative work and grading in their spare time for free?

I mean, I've actually taught continuing ed classes (for free!) and just preparing and teaching a low-stakes weekly class with no grading eats up a LOT of time. I could do it because it was basically the fun parts of teaching and very, very little of the non-fun, but if I'd had to grade, enforce classroom order, give exams, design homework and deal with students who didn't do the work or who plagiarized a paper? For free? Are you joking?
posted by Frowner at 11:08 AM on April 25, 2018 [23 favorites]


I bet there are quite a few CFOs and the like out there who would be happy to give up some time
Because this problem will NOT be solved by CFOs and industry types. We can trace the death of the academy to the rise of the business school in the late 70s and early 80s in America. It's absolutely connected. We need fewer, not more, CFOs and CEOs and bloodthirsty capitalists in the academy.
posted by sockermom at 11:09 AM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


I bet there are quite a few CFOs and the like out there who would be happy to give up some time to act as Associate Dean of Budget at a respectable university, in order to take advantage of the prestige associated with that and to enhance their CVs. Why not get a few of those together to make some budget savings?

You think an associate dean of budget is going to find savings? Oh sweet, sweet summer child.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:11 AM on April 25, 2018 [12 favorites]


As much as I love blaming everything on the late 70s and early 80s, we can place this one squarely on the internet.
posted by Melismata at 11:13 AM on April 25, 2018


Sorry, I have a lot to say about this. Part of the issue here is also that so much of the academy already runs on free labor. I can't tell you how much I do that is totally uncompensated, "for exposure," with exposure being a line on my CV. This is just a natural extension of a process that's already been going on forever. Peer review is a great example of totally uncompensated, yet expected labor that academics do in exchange for a CV line. There are many other examples.

As much as I love blaming everything on the late 70s and early 80s, we can place this one squarely on the internet.
In what way? I'd love to hear your take! I don't think the Internet is not a factor here, but I also don't think it's the driving factor or the root cause of the death of academia.
posted by sockermom at 11:15 AM on April 25, 2018 [15 favorites]


The people who thought up this idea are vile.

The only ethical way to take this job would to agree to it, show up, then immediately go on strike. Anything is is being a scab.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:17 AM on April 25, 2018 [20 favorites]


Carbondale, where SoIU is based, is where the past total eclipse track crosses the next total eclipse track.

It's also where many a hurricane, long worn down to a tropical depression, has come to die.

If Stephen King weren't from Maine, he would have been from Carbondale.

The though of providing unpaid skilled labor, while living in Carbondale, really does fail the giggle test.
posted by ocschwar at 11:19 AM on April 25, 2018 [15 favorites]


Will the university administrators do their part and also work for free?
posted by ardgedee at 11:25 AM on April 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


Related: McSweeney's A Poem About Your University's Absolute And Unwavering Appreciation Of Its Faculty In Spite of Said Faculty's Crap Salaries:
We assume that humanities faculty
Do not concern themselves with
Grossly material things
Like health and money and the houses they live in
Because they get to read books all day,
And that’s hardly a job at all!

posted by TwoStride at 11:27 AM on April 25, 2018 [27 favorites]


This guy makes 108k, I bet that goes a long way in Carbondale.
posted by Kwine at 11:27 AM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


That guy who's always down by the bus station could teach philosophy

Those are the guys who are always smoking outside the coffee shop in Myville.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:28 AM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think the people who are calling this "Indentured Servitude" are overreacting.

It's actually "Debt Peonage."
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 11:29 AM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Because of the internet, knowledge is much easier to get than it used to be. We used to pay for the privilege of sitting in a classroom, because it was exclusive and going to the library to share a special book in reserve was the only place we could get it. But not anymore. Just as there are no more record stores or book stores, universities are not necessarily a place people "need" to go to live their lives.

Just yesterday, the Boston Globe had an article about the decline of local culinary schools, pointing out, among other things, that the elite schools and the community colleges with culinary programs are using the exact same textbooks. Schools need to become unique again, or they will not survive.
posted by Melismata at 11:32 AM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


According to that dean's letter, candidates "will generally hold an academic doctorate or other terminal degree as appropriate". How big is the candidate pool of Ph.D.s with time on their hands and enough financial resources to teach a course for free in Carbondale which has a population of about 25K people in a county of 60K people?
posted by plastic_animals at 11:35 AM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


How big is the candidate pool of Ph.D.s with time on their hands and enough financial resources to teach a course for free in Carbondale which has a population of about 25K people in a county of 60K people?

I'm betting the alumni association found one retired dude with a PhD in leadership or something else business-school-ish who is bored and/or they hope will donate a building soon if he just feels more connected to the school...
posted by TwoStride at 11:37 AM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


I disagree that access to knowledge via internet has lead to the decline in the academy, if solely due to the fact that bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees are used as a gatekeeper for career advancement. You can certainly learn the equivalent of a B.S. in electrical engineering using online resources, but you wouldn't have the asset that a B.S. represents.

I would identify the culprit as the deinvestment in education at the state and federal levels, combined with the ballooning financial burden of highly paid executives and the demand for newer and more expensive buildings on campus. The loss of public funds for public education has been disastrous for both primary education and higher learning.
posted by Existential Dread at 11:40 AM on April 25, 2018 [42 favorites]


We used to pay for the privilege of sitting in a classroom, because it was exclusive and going to the library to share a special book in reserve was the only place we could get it. But not anymore.

I can guarantee you that reading a book and actually comprehending it are two very separate things. Access to material is not the point of a college education; it's the contextualizing, checking comprehension and application of ideas, and establishment of good intellectual habits like critical thinking that are the real benefits of a formal program of instruction. Source: I work in higher ed.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 11:41 AM on April 25, 2018 [56 favorites]


How big is the candidate pool of Ph.D.s with time on their hands and enough financial resources to teach a course for free

Presumably they'll try to shift the institution to this model. So the people currently scraping by as adjuncts will now have to work for free for some period of time to eventually be considered for any future paying adjuncting jobs. This scam has long been run on paid adjuncts, who bump along for years in the hope of staying on the departmental radar and being offered a one-year renewable lecturer gig. And the lecturers are, in turn, strung along on year-to-year contracts in the vain hope that eventually funding will open up and they'll be first in line for a tenure-track position with the department they've served so long and so faithfully while being so precariously employed and so underpaid.

But the lecturers somehow never end up on the tenure track. And the adjuncts rarely end up as lecturers. Adjuncts will now similarly be asked to pay their dues in the hope of someday graduating from volunteer to paid position, I'm guessing; I don't expect it will work out much better for them.

But sunk-cost fallacies and a lack of other employment prospects keep desperate adjuncts and lecturers hanging on at plenty of places, and very possibly it'll work here, too. It's not sustainable, of course; eventually people leave, taking their experience and institutional knowledge with them. And there's sufficient churn to keep the con going, as they're replaced by new desperate grads who make the same mistake of trying to make it work for a year or three or five.
posted by halation at 11:45 AM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


I've also noticed that motivation is much harder to gather up when you're learning as an atomized individual online instead of as part of a group at an institution. For some people it might be the competition, for other people it might be seeing that other people care about this knowledge, too, for others it might be about mentorship or community. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people.
posted by clawsoon at 11:47 AM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


Schools need to become unique again, or they will not survive

I find your comment somewhat baffling as presented. The proportion of people with college degrees, in the US, has been increasing year on year since at least WWII. That trend has not changed. I don’t understand what competition from the internet has to do with the appalling corruption that has infested academia.
posted by howfar at 11:51 AM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


Because of the internet, knowledge is much easier to get than it used to be.

I run into internet-educated hobbyists in my field (linguistics) all of the time. I love that they're passionate enough about the subject that they spend their free time reading about it. But boy, the number of them that could pass an introductory class is pretty low.

If anything, the amount of information available on the internet makes it even harder for the self-educated because it's so overwhelming. How do you choose what to read? How do you organize the patchwork of knowledge that you've gained into a coherent framework for understanding? How do you even know what you need to learn?

Some people are skilled or lucky and are able to do it, but a lot of people just don't have that ability and need more than just being set loose in a virtual library.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 11:53 AM on April 25, 2018 [50 favorites]


I was all set to give them the benefit of the doubt that a "zero percent appointment" didn't mean volunteer work, but rather meant no guaranteed hours but that they'd be paid for the actual work they did. Then I read the Chancellor's statement which makes it clear this actually is volunteer work. Cripes.

There are scenarios where having an unpaid faculty affiliation would be genuinely good for everyone. If, say, you have a full time appointment at a national lab or museum and you want to either add teaching to your cv or be able to directly supervise students from a local institution who work with you. I collaborate with several people who have a similar arrangement. In those cases, it's an entirely ethical transaction.

But, it's hard to imagine publishing an institution-wide call for such a position unless you're actively looking to exploit the desperate.
posted by eotvos at 11:55 AM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Exposure to information is also not the same thing as learning critical thinking skills, which is what we teach in college. Access is a multidimensional concept that goes beyond simple availability.

Knowledge is also socially constructed; in order to actually learn critical thinking, critical information literacy, etc. skills it is incredibly advantageous to do so in a group, together, not as single atomized units spread out over time/geographic space.

Schools should not have to compete to survive. There are three inalienable rights in our culture: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These directly correspond to healthcare, politics, and education. NONE of these things should be subjected to "market forces," they should exist beyond and/or outside of the capitalistic market, and should be treated as such. The refrain to "get money out of politics" should absolutely extend to healthcare and education. The problem here is that the academy has been monetized (which is why I blame this fall on the rise of the MBA in the 70s and 80s).
posted by sockermom at 11:55 AM on April 25, 2018 [14 favorites]


"But you teachers are always talking about how much you love your work, and what a privilege it is to do it, so how greedy ARE you, expecting to be PAID for it?"

This exact thing happened at my school when an instructional minutes change forced us to change our bell schedule, and parents were upset that they would have to pick up their kids a little earlier... we had a parent meeting about it and it was me (union rep) standing in front of 100 or so irate parents, and one of them stood up and said, "Well, you always talk about how much you love teaching and that this is your calling, so why don't you just have a homework club or something for the extra time?"

And because I was OVER the whole process I just dismissed it by saying that we weren't going to work extra hours for free, period, and that by contract the teachers had to approve any schedule changes, so...

We eventually worked it out, but I really wanted to ask that mom if she would ask her kid's doctor or dentist or whatever to do some work for free just because... and what reaction she'd expect.

Also, support your local union! The only reason we have a say over the bell schedule!
posted by Huck500 at 11:56 AM on April 25, 2018 [25 favorites]


S T R I K E
posted by mondo dentro at 11:57 AM on April 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


Btw, I don't disagree with what everyone is saying--academia is necessary and important.

Small schools around here are dropping like flies or merging due to low enrollment. One was a former secretarial school that switched to being a community college in order to survive, but even after that people were saying what can I learn here that I can't learn in an online course? I'm not saying it's right, but it's happening.
posted by Melismata at 11:58 AM on April 25, 2018


I have a super ignorant question for US academics in the thread—how is it that this stuff is happening when you guys have senates and things that give academics themselves a significant voice in decision-making? From the UK side of the pond, I’ve vaguely thought that US universities offer the collective body of tenured academics a lot of autonomy and decision-making power, allowing them to vote on university policy and override management decisions. Did I make that up, or did I radically misunderstand its effects, or have I missed something else about the US context?
posted by Aravis76 at 12:15 PM on April 25, 2018


^ University senates typically only have power over academic matters, explicitly not budgetary matters.
posted by eviemath at 12:22 PM on April 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


If anything, the amount of information available on the internet makes it even harder for the self-educated because it's so overwhelming. How do you choose what to read? How do you organize the patchwork of knowledge that you've gained into a coherent framework for understanding? How do you even know what you need to learn?

This is so so true. Knowledge is something entirely different from information. A vast command of facts without knowledge of the relative importance of those facts, or to how they are placed historically, or to their relationship with other facts, is almost inevitably crankery. And that is something that is very very difficult to acquire on one's own because it requires 1) someone who already has a command of the whole and 2) someone who reliably has a command of the whole.
posted by octobersurprise at 12:24 PM on April 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


Thanks, eviemath, that’s helpful. (Though it seems an odd distinction in principle—how money is spent by an institution reflects and shapes what its ultimate priorities are and surely staffing decisions are a matter for academic judgment if anything is.) But I now see that we’re all in very similar sinking boats.
posted by Aravis76 at 12:26 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


How you can tell this plan is already working out just super great, from the very end of the Southern Illinoisian article:
Neither Molino nor university spokeswoman Rae Goldsmith returned requests for comment Tuesday.
This wasn't in response to some surprise event. This was a program they themselves initiated and issued a public statement about. Were they so naive and/or foolish that they didn't have PR statements ready to go?
posted by mhum at 12:27 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


you guys have senates and things that give academics themselves a significant voice in decision-making

Only tenured faculty get a voice in the senates -- and how much power they have varies from institution to institution. But adjuncts and sessionals and lecturers aren't tenure-track, and have no voices at all unless they're unionised. And, to be honest, there's often not much solidarity between tenured and contingent faculty; often tenured faculty are too busy, too insecure, or too out-of-touch to care. Many are just happy that the shitty intro courses they really don't want to teach are getting taught by someone, so they can focus on their own research or teach the fun stuff, to the extent they think about contingent faculty even existing. Others know about the issues but don't want to spend their limited time and political capital in the department or in the institution agitating on behalf of contingent faculty.

Some do care about the plight of contingent faculty. But many don't.
posted by halation at 12:28 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


just curious if anyone has good graph of student:faculty:admin ratios over last 30-40 years.
it's my impression(but i cant find data right now) that student:faculty ratios at many schools haven't changed a lot but # of admins/middle bureaucrats has ballooned at most american universities...
true??
posted by danjo at 12:28 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


> happyroach:
"This is the ultimate "For the Exposure" scam."

Came here to post this. F;B.
posted by Samizdata at 12:28 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm writing this from under my desk, in a fetal position, while I rock myself back and forth and chant It will never happen here. It will never happen here. Oh god please don't anyone ever suggest that here.

I work as an academic policy analyst for a large public university, and much of my job involves dealing with personnel issues and policy compliance for about 10 different categories of academics. The one that takes up most of my time, by far, is the group of Lecturers who are represented by a collective bargaining agreement. Probably 50% of my week involves either dealing with union issues or trying to head them off. If anyone ever suggested this here OH GOD I NEED TO GO BACK TO CHANTING TO MYSELF
posted by mudpuppie at 12:29 PM on April 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


Nobody asks university admin to admin for free.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:29 PM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


Where I live they're trying to get volunteers to work as armed guards in k-12 schools, under the assumption that bored retirees would eagerly sign on, so I wonder if that was who SICU expected to sign up for this. Were they hoping to monetize idle wealthy Boomers?
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:33 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


OK, for serious, where is the money going?

College tuition has skyrocketed in the past few decades. I went to a piddly little third rate state university and I've been paying off the debt I acquired there for a decade or so and I'm going continue paying that deb off for at least another decade.

They aren't paying their non-teaching staff much at all. They aren't paying the professors much at all. They aren't paying the adjunct teachers much at all. They aren't paying the grad students hardly anything.

Yet they're taking in more money than ever before and claim to have financial woes?

WTF? Where is it actually going?

Back in the 1960's you could go to Harvard, HARVARD, and pay the tuition and housing costs with what you'd earn making minimum wage. Today the very concept of working your way through school is laughable. It can't be done.

Is it all going to upper level administrators or what? Do we just need to fire all the Presidents and Deans and all those people and replace them with new administrators making, at most 1.5 to 2 times what the highest paid professor (not coach, professor) makes?

Or are there really unseen expenses that are draining all the money, demanding ever higher tuition and student debt, that are legitimate?
posted by sotonohito at 12:33 PM on April 25, 2018 [24 favorites]


I'm an adjunct. I'm retired. I can afford to get paid pathetically little at Large State University because I also have Social Security. Repeat: Pathetically little. Astonishingly small amount. Hilariously.

But my kid, who just finished her doctorate at the same university, could not afford to continue teaching there and is making decent money with health insurance in a nonprofit. If nonprofits can afford to pay people better than Large State University which is talking about building a football stadium on its urban campus, things are really off the rails.
posted by Peach at 12:34 PM on April 25, 2018 [20 favorites]


Yet when I was a middle school teacher and I told people what I did, the response was a condescending and disappointed, "Oh" where when I tell people I'm an adjunct professor, they're all impressed and stuff. Dag.

I made SO MUCH MORE MONEY as a middle school teacher.
posted by Peach at 12:35 PM on April 25, 2018 [16 favorites]


This is a variation on the “bring business people from the community into the classroom as teachers” scheme that comes up regularly as a fix for public schools, only sans any pay. That the alumni association came up with it isn’t exactly a surprise.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:36 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Yet they're taking in more money than ever before and claim to have financial woes?

WTF? Where is it actually going?


To the C-level executives (or whatever they call them to pretend that the university is still an academic institution rather than a bog standard corporate entity) I assume. And the football teams.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:36 PM on April 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


What a horrible idea that needs to be nipped in the bud. I can think of any number of states (my own included) where the politicians and businessmen that sit on the board of regents and/or pass the budgets in the legislature would love this idea.

However, there is a similar idea that might be worth exploring with potentially much greater cost savings. I bet there are a lot of people out there who would jump at the chance to be an adjunct coach in the athletic department, even for free. C’mon NCAA, let’s take amateurism to the next level by including the coaching staff!
posted by TedW at 12:36 PM on April 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


WTF? Where is it actually going?

If you add together the salaries of the 15 highest-paid administrators at one of my institutions, it's more than the annual paychecks of all 500+ contingent faculty, added together. So, that would be where it's going.

meanwhile, every electrical outlet in one of my classrooms is broken, and the office leaks when it rains, and a fair number of us adjuncts are on medicaid or have no health insurance at all, but, you know, vice assistant provosts of engagement facilitation don't come cheap
posted by halation at 12:38 PM on April 25, 2018 [45 favorites]


My brother the Foreign Service officer was thrilled to get a job as visiting professor at an elite university, because it was his dream job. After a year of teaching he is thoroughly disabused of his fantasy and has accepted a posting in New Delhi, possibly the most polluted city in the world. These people who want to get CEOs to teach are going to radicalize a whole series of CEOs, believe you me.
posted by Peach at 12:38 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]




But adjuncts and sessionals and lecturers aren't tenure-track, and have no voices at all unless they're unionised.
The faculty union in my state explicitly excludes adjuncts. I've heard that there's a retail/customer service union that adjunct instructors can join.

OK, for serious, where is the money going?
Here's one hint: "The leaders of three Florida public universities, including President John Hitt at UCF, were paid more than $1 million during the 2016-17 fiscal year."
posted by Kitty Stardust at 12:39 PM on April 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


just curious if anyone has good graph of student:faculty:admin ratios over last 30-40 years.
it's my impression(but i cant find data right now) that student:faculty ratios at many schools haven't changed a lot but # of admins/middle bureaucrats has ballooned at most american universities...
true??


Anecdata, but I am professional staff at a public university. I have seven bosses.

OK, for serious, where is the money going?

Infrastructure debt service and (to a much lesser degree) administration salaries. Build/renovate thirty or forty multi-million-dollar structures and see how much that costs.
posted by FakeFreyja at 12:40 PM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]


Yet they're taking in more money than ever before and claim to have financial woes?

WTF? Where is it actually going?


Administrative and student services bloat is part of it, but more of it for a lot of schools is sprucing up the (non academic) infrastructure: you can't attract the students if you don't have, like, a climbing wall and a jacuzzi in the dorms and a dining hall that looks like Hogwarts.
posted by TwoStride at 12:40 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


Or are there really unseen expenses that are draining all the money, demanding ever higher tuition and student debt, that are legitimate?

For a lot of state schools the amount of support from the state budget has steadily decreased. Part of the conservative doctrine that any institution (for example museums, parks, public broadcasting) should be profitable in order to justify its existence. Except for the military.
posted by TedW at 12:42 PM on April 25, 2018 [24 favorites]


I've heard that there's a retail/customer service union that adjunct instructors can join.

Yeah, mostly when adjuncts organise it's through one of the other larger unions. SEIU has been doing a lot of organising. I used to belong to CWU. Columbia's grad assistants are currently striking because they're trying to organise through United Auto-Workers and Columbia refuses to let them start negotiating a contract.
posted by halation at 12:42 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


OK, for serious, where is the money going?

Based on my observations, my guess is that a lot of that goes to admin salaries, athletic salaries, and real estate. (A well as the chunk that goes to purchasing and repurchasing IT hardware and licensing.)

("Remember—a great university rests on three pillars: research, excellence, and parking," as a mentor of mine used to remark ruefully.)
posted by octobersurprise at 12:43 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


As TedW says above, tuition may be increasing, but other sources of funding are dramatically decreasing.
posted by tofu_crouton at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


At the university my wife is doing her PhD at, grad students with office space have been asked to perform basic janitorial tasks themselves. The rest of the cleaning doesn't get done very often, either.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:44 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


OK, for serious, where is the money going?

It took me a long time to realize this, but public university systems are as much about making money as corporations are. They criticize for-profit education, but at least for-profits are more transparent about the fact that they do want to make a profit. When an individual professor here receives a grant to do their research, the university keeps 40%. You get $10 million in funding, but $4m of that goes into university coffers. Simulataneously tuition keeps increasing, as ours is next year.

That doesn't answer your question about where the money is going, because I really have no idea. I do know the chancellors of my 10-campus university system make over $500,000 a year, and who knows how many Vice Chancellors and Executive Vice Chancellors and Assistant Executive Vice Chancellors there are.

TLDR: The university fundamentally is about making money while education students. You'd think that latter part comes first, but it doesn't. It's about the money.

It's expensive to keep the rich people rich, basically.

(And don't even get me started on the amount of fundraising universities do.)
posted by mudpuppie at 12:45 PM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


WTF? Where is it actually going?

Some of it is going to replace the money that the state used to pay to support public universities - in Minnesota, we get something like half as much per student from the state as we used.
Some of it is going to pay "competitive" salaries to career administrators instead of the high but not astronomical salaries that used to be paid when Dr. Faculty Member was chosen to become Dr. Dean.

Some of it provides the things universities need to be "competitive" now - fancier dorms, more food choices*, larger and fancier gyms, etc. I went to college in the nineties and lived in dorms that were pretty minimalist even by mid-century standards, all of which have been replaced by much more intrinsically fancy buildings - not just modern but fancier.

Some of it is going to support greater reporting requirements - when universities lose state funding and get more dependent on grants and foundations, all of that money requires extremely elaborate reporting, which means you need grant administrators and grant and foundation offices. When the state says, "Here is X amount of money, we'll audit you sometimes but basically you can spend it at your discretion", the cost of spending that money is relatively low. When you have fifty grants from fifty different places and each of them requires quarterly reporting, the cost of that money is high.

Some of it supports things that we'd all agree are worthy - more student services like healthcare and advising. Need walk-in counseling in 1955? Good luck with that.

Basically, we need to shrink the top salaries, hire administrators from late career faculty and increase the amount of non-tied state funding.

*Though not necessarily healthier ones - I ate at a student cafeteria which had burgers and a grill, pizza and calzone, traditional meat and veg, frozen yogurt, ice cream, waffles, a cookie bar and a pasta bar, but the only vegetables on offer were from this anemic salad bar whose high point was that it had spinach in addition to iceberg lettuce.
posted by Frowner at 12:53 PM on April 25, 2018 [29 favorites]


Part of the issue here is also that so much of the academy already runs on free labor. I can't tell you how much I do that is totally uncompensated, "for exposure," with exposure being a line on my CV.

This is especially true if you expand "the academy" to mean not just the universities in their instructional capacity, but to mean the larger apparatus of grant reviewing, book reviewing, journal editing, running academic societies, putting on conferences, and all the rest of it. One time a student asked me how much professors get paid for reviewing books for scholarly journals, and I laughed so hard I nearly peed.

This is the ultimate "For the Exposure" scam.

As a friend of mine puts it, people DIE of exposure.

OK, for serious, where is the money going?

You've already gotten several good answers on this, but the short answer is (1) administration bloat, (2) student amenities (why buy books when you can buy a nice new climbing wall for the fancy gym. And no, professors don't get to use it for free. And no, our kids don't get free tuition or even a tuition cut. Benefits like that went the way of the dodo back in the 80s).

At the university my wife is doing her PhD at, grad students with office space have been asked to perform basic janitorial tasks themselves. The rest of the cleaning doesn't get done very often, either.

My office has never been cleaned. The university simply does not offer this service -- and only begrudgingly empties the trash about 1x weekly. We lost our office phones back in the crash of 2008.
posted by pleasant_confusion at 12:53 PM on April 25, 2018 [10 favorites]


It took me a long time to realize this, but public university systems are as much about making money as corporations are. They criticize for-profit education, but at least for-profits are more transparent about the fact that they do want to make a profit. When an individual professor here receives a grant to do their research, the university keeps 40%. You get $10 million in funding, but $4m of that goes into university coffers. Simulataneously tuition keeps increasing, as ours is next year.

What "goes into the university coffers" is the facilities & administration rate, which is written into the grant - you ask for $100,000 to Do Science, and NIH tacks on $50,000 in F&A.

This money goes to building expenses like janitorial services and electricity, reporting expenses like your sponsored projects office and your grant accountant and support for things like university scientific imaging facilities and consulting staff.

F&A funds are tied, and there's always a hole in the budget that needs filling. If Sarah Scientist has four months between the end of one grant and the start of another, Daisy Department-Chair doesn't want her to fire her technicians or stop getting a paycheck, because starting up the lab again when the new money comes in is stupid and ineffective. So you have four months of salary and fringe for Sarah, Tina Technician and Ciara Crystallographer, and that has to come from department funds - F& A if you're lucky, begging Central if you're not.

When I was a very junior grant accountant, the chair of the most research-heavy department in our unit said a number of times that if he was actually budget-smart, he'd discontinue research all together, because when you added up the expenses it was a money-loser.

Research categorically does not fatten university coffers.
posted by Frowner at 12:59 PM on April 25, 2018 [26 favorites]


"But you teachers are always talking about how much you love your work, and what a privilege it is to do it, so how greedy ARE you, expecting to be PAID for it?"

In business school I had a highly wealthy chief executive-turned-lecturer who explained to the class that it was a bad decision to pay teachers and performers more than the paltry amount they currently make, because it is a "labor of love" for them and they're not motivated by money the same way they're intrinsically motivated to teach kids or play music, etc. It was delivered as if it were just plain common sense.

If this is the sort of perspective among the donors/admin higher-ups/legislators then this sort of decision-making will just self-perpetuate until lecturing especially in the arts becomes second-class to everything else, the antithesis of the professor-driven model that seemed to work for centuries.
posted by hexaflexagon at 1:16 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


It's actually "Debt Peonage."

Only if they’re offering to cancel student debt in exchange for such adjunct teaching. Which, I rather suspect the answer is “not”.
posted by corb at 1:18 PM on April 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


As far as why college costs more, I'll quote myself quoting an article:
In reality, however, the numbers show that wage inflation is — literally — the least of the problems when it comes to university cost inflation. Check out this excellent report, for instance, entitled “Trends in College Spending, 1999-2009″. The first thing to note is on page 26: spending on faculty compensation is never more than 40% of total spending, and “has remained steady or decreased slightly over time”. Then have a look at the numbers.

Overall, if we exclude for-profit schools, which were a tiny part of the landscape in 1999, we have seen tuition fees rise by 32% between 1999 and 2009. Over the same period, instruction costs rose just 5.6% — the lowest rate of inflation of any of the components of education services. (“Student services costs” and “operations and maintenance costs” saw the greatest inflation, at 15.2% and 18.1% respectively, but even that is only half the rate that tuition increased.)

The real reason why tuition has been rising so much has nothing to do with Baumol, and everything to do with the government. Page 31 of the report is quite clear: “except for private research institutions,” it says, “tuitions were increasing almost exclusively to replace losses from state revenues or other private revenue sources.”

In other words, tuition costs are going up just because state subsidies are going down. Every time there’s a state fiscal crisis, subsidies get cut; once cut, they never get reinstated. And so the proportion of the cost of college which is borne by the student has been rising steadily for decades.

There are other culprits, too, behind the rise in tuition costs. Surowiecki touches on one when he talks about “the arms-race problem”, where “colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high-profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio”. Another is simply the ever-increasing amounts of money being spent on administration rather than instruction. And a third is the fact that administrators at many high-profile universities have no incentive to decrease costs, and in fact have an incentive to increase costs, since total spending outlay tends to show up as an input in university-ranking algorithms.

But of all the reasons why tuition’s going up, teacher productivity is — literally — at the bottom of the list. Whether or not teachers today are or are not more productive than they were in 1980 (and I suspect that actually they are more productive), that’s not the reason student debt in America is approaching one trillion dollars.*
Here's the article.
posted by MythMaker at 1:26 PM on April 25, 2018 [29 favorites]


Christ, this is the kind of thing that makes me feel deeply glad to be out of academia.
posted by praemunire at 1:36 PM on April 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


The number of "highly paid administrators" at any given R1 seems like a lot if you're coming from a small or even medium-sized business but in the grand scheme of an entire institution's budget, it's really not a lot. We could get rid of every administrator between Dean and Chancellor here and the budget would barely hiccup. This is institution employs 5000 faculty, and 7000 non-academic staff, serving 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students. You do need a few Head of Things to run that.

What MythMaker says is true. Public higher education was highly subsidized by the government and now it isn't. Every single year we--the staff of the university--have to write letters to our state reps begging them to please please please not cut the paltry sum that still does come our way. The students and their families are making up the difference, unfortunately.
posted by soren_lorensen at 1:42 PM on April 25, 2018 [9 favorites]


Because of the internet, knowledge is much easier to get than it used to be.

So a while back I was helping to teach an engineering course. A bunch of students didn't want to buy the textbooks because they were expensive and they thought you could find all that information on the internet.

And it was true that you could find information on the internet, as long as you knew exactly what you were looking for, but if you're learning it, you don't know exactly what you want and what terms to use. Like I, a person who has been studying this stuff for decades, could find it, but students couldn't. It turns out that if you want somebody to lay out a bunch of information in a coherent way for somebody to learn from, we have that, it's called a textbook.

Anyway, I ended up buying a bunch of 20 year old editions of the textbook for $5 each on Amazon and handing them out like candy. Then after the semester ended they all gave them back to me even though I told them to keep them, and now I have a bunch of copies.
posted by Comrade_robot at 1:45 PM on April 25, 2018 [11 favorites]


F&A funds, at least at the universities where I have worked, absolutely do not fully pay for the true cost of the things they’re meant to pay for. Research, barring the rare unicorn of raking in a ton of money by inventing the next Google at your university, is not a money making enterprise for a university as a whole. It might be a moneymaker for a specific department with a hot research area or really good ties to industry or something.
posted by Stacey at 1:46 PM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]


Further on the F&A rate: Faculty always want their F&A money, and who wouldn't? But if you give the faculty their F&A, how do you pay for the things you currently spend the F&A on?

We ran some numbers at my old job when the idea was raised that faculty would get their F&A back but would then be charged on a per-foot basis for things like electricity, their share of janitorial services, etc. And it turned out that this would be more expensive for faculty, and people with large labs would either have to give up lab space or find the money elsewhere.

We've all developed this Amazon-like mentality that everything should be really, really cheap and that if it isn't then something is wrong somewhere. Research is expensive, even if you're paying your staff below market, because even a below-market technician in the midwest makes in the mid-thirties plus insurance, and because you need to buy research supplies, and because you need to go to conferences, and because part of your function as a faculty member is to support a grad student or two. Three or four hundred thousand goes pretty fast if you have a couple of staff scientists, a percentage of your salary, two grad students and conference travel, and that's not because you're wallowing in luxury, it's because things cost.

As more wealth is redirected to the 1%, they're all, "$600 for this pair of sneakers? Let's get two pairs!" and we get suckered into being, "Why can't we pay a crystallographer less than $30,000 a year? Also the janitors should make minimum wage!!!" The 1% throw their money around on selfish personal crap and manipulating the government while we fight over the horrible wrong of having to provide grad students with health care.
posted by Frowner at 1:51 PM on April 25, 2018 [16 favorites]


That guy who's always down by the bus station could teach philosophy

that woman four posts down could teach childbirth
posted by pyramid termite at 2:11 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I'm starting to witness the popping of the higher education bubble because I live in Boston. The avalanche has begun, and it is too late for the snowflakes to hold another vote. Since the value of my home is highly tied to the value of a bachelor's degree from the universities around Boston (and the extremely strong symbolic value of a Boston-based education in the US), I am dreading this. I'm not in academia, but I depend on academia to figure out a soft landing so when we sell our house, Mrs. Ocschwar and I can retire to something better than a van by the river.

But this needs to be said:

Academia in the US is still structured to carry out the post-WW2 expansion and still needs to transition to a steady state again. There are still too many PHDs being minted for people who might find work as college professors, or as high school teachers, but who will not and cannot become university professors. In a steady state, only one PHD holder gets a university tenured spot for every university professor who retires. The others have to be willing to teach undergrads (and only undergrads) in a college, not a university. I've been in Boston long enough to see some colleges rename themselves as universities. Sanity will resume when they rename themselves back as colleges. Until then there will be a lot of gnashing of teeth, and SIU is just the beginnig.
posted by ocschwar at 2:14 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


To the C-level executives (or whatever they call them to pretend that the university is still an academic institution rather than a bog standard corporate entity) I assume. And the football teams.

And if it's a state institution, to the extreme, deep, budget cuts the state has instituted almost every year since the late 1990s (at least in Arizona.)

And to the coaches' salaries. And to the legal team for the lawsuits against the coaches for whatever illegal shit they are up to this year.
posted by Squeak Attack at 2:14 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


What MythMaker says is true. Public higher education was highly subsidized by the government and now it isn't. Every single year we--the staff of the university--have to write letters to our state reps begging them to please please please not cut the paltry sum that still does come our way. The students and their families are making up the difference, unfortunately.

Just looking at one major public university system, you can see how little state money accounts for the budget. That fraction keeps getting smaller and we have to get more creative and inventive to stay afloat, which leads to efforts to monetize everything. It's also why learning analytics are a thing as we focus on "student success" which ultimately reflects their ability to contribute to the economy. I was joking with some lecturers at a recent union meeting that we must be suckers for still believing in Clark Kerr's Master Plan because those halcyon days are so far behind us, it's like a fantasy land.

I think a lot of public university employees are feeling the squeeze at all levels. Grad students are organizing across the country. All the service workers in a major public university system just voted to strike, with other unions now voting to strike in solidarity. It's an interesting time in higher ed.

But back to the SIU example - of course it's Illinois given their state's budget dysfunction! It's a great example to point to and say "look how buster academia is!" but it's also so comically terrible that I worry people won't recognize everything crumbling around them.
posted by kendrak at 2:27 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


From the alumni association bid: Please reach out to your faculty to see if they might nominate a former student who would meet HLC accreditation guidelines for adjunct faculty appointment,

Nice try, but this still seems like a really good way to jeopardize your accreditation. My university is going through HLC accreditation in a year or two and we've been in a 4 year flap leading up to it.

They analyze how many of your classes are taught by tenured or tenure track faculty and they expect it to be a large number. My department had to bend over backwards to justify why one person out of our 30 faculty members did not have a degree in our field. He does have a PhD, of course, but in Mathematics, not the specific science we teach.
posted by Squeak Attack at 2:31 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Ochswar, when you're cloistered in the academic bubble it's easy to forget that people with PhDs can and do contribute outside of the academic realm. I have a PhD in the natural sciences (and did my time in the adjunct trenches back when my kids were little) and am now in industry. At my company there are an awful lot of people like me--folks with terminal degrees in roles that absolutely require that level of subject matter expertise, as experimentalists or otherwise. Management, IT, executive leadership.

I love my job; the pay, work expectations, and company culture leave any university I've ever seen in the dust. Much as I loved teaching, and I did, and much as I love my alma mater, and I do, I will regretfully decline the volunteer adjunct corps if they come a-callin'.
posted by Sublimity at 3:24 PM on April 25, 2018 [8 favorites]


The first Chronicle of Higher Education link is paywalled

The workers who put out the Chronicle of Higher Education deserve to be paid for their labor just as much as the adjunct faculty of the University of Southern Illinois do.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 4:22 PM on April 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


> there are still too many PHDs being minted for people who might find work as college professors, or as high school teachers, but who will not and cannot become university professors. In a steady state, only one PHD holder gets a university tenured spot for every university professor who retires.

Really, though, the expectation is that as each university professor retires, they're replaced by an adjunct or postdoc making a fraction of the university professor's pay, and without the university professor's job security or academic freedom.

Basically, what I'm suggesting here is that it's less a matter of schools making too many PHDs for not enough jobs, and more a matter that the nature of academic employment has changed dramatically over the course of the last 40 years, and so now the job that a PHD qualifies you is underpaid and contingent instead of reasonably paid and secure. Yes, there's schools that have graduate programs that have no business having graduate programs, and there's schools with graduate programs that are too big — but the chief problem isn't oversupply of PHDs, it's the casualization of academic work.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 4:28 PM on April 25, 2018 [17 favorites]


> They analyze how many of your classes are taught by tenured or tenure track faculty and they expect it to be a large number.

!

Is this a new thing? There's a number of highly-regarded schools where the lion's share of the classes are taught by casualized workers — for example, over 4/5ths of classes at the New School are taught by adjuncts — and so my brain throws an exception when it tries to think about accreditation boards actually caring about increasing the percentage of classes taught by tenure-track faculty.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 4:32 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


In addition to the many reasons this is a horrible idea, if I were a student there, I'd be pissed. Hire faculty based on willingness to work free and being an alum? sure, great way to provide a quality education.
posted by theora55 at 4:43 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Is this a new thing? There's a number of highly-regarded schools where the lion's share of the classes are taught by casualized workers — for example, over 4/5ths of classes at the New School are taught by adjuncts — and so my brain throws an exception when it tries to think about accreditation boards actually caring about increasing the percentage of classes taught by tenure-track faculty.

Adjunct ≠ lack of Ph.D. Indeed, the increasing reliance on adjuncts (few to no benefits, paid a fraction of what tenure track faculty are paid, little to no say in governance) depends upon and feeds the overproduction of Ph.Ds.
posted by pleasant_confusion at 4:56 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


yeah but the comment I was quoting said that HLC analyzes the percentage of classes taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty, and wants that percentage to be high.

Is the midwest just better at accreditation than the coasts are?
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 5:02 PM on April 25, 2018


For everyone who is asking about why college in the U.S. costs so much or where the money is going, please look into Baumol's Cost Disease. If you want the really long read, Feldman and Archibald's book "Why Does College Cost So Much?" is pretty good and goes into this in detail. (I actually prefer Baumol's book-length treatment of his theory, "The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get Cheaper and Health Care Doesn't." It's pretty light and readable especially for a book about economic theory!) The really short explanation is that it's really difficult to make significant productivity gains in higher education but it's comparatively easy to make productivity gains in many other sectors of the economy especially those that benefit from economies of scale e.g., manufacturing, farming, transportation. When many sectors of the economy steadily get a lot cheaper over time the sectors that don't become steadily more expensive in comparison.

Reductions in state funding, constantly increasing regulations and similar requirements, and significant increases in the costs of benefits, especially health care, are also significant factors. Excessively high salaries for a few administrators (And faculty! Have you looked at the salaries of some of the medical faculty, business faculty, and engineers especially the superstars?) and excessive amenities are relatively insignificant in the big picture. But they're such huge image problems that I think that they're a net negative for colleges and universities.
posted by ElKevbo at 5:12 PM on April 25, 2018 [5 favorites]


Hm, good point. Re regional differences, I doubt it (though I would bet that there are differences in how they treat, say, small colleges vs. R1 university systems). I think it's another one of these academic catch-22s, in which accreditation agencies demand things that are increasingly not part of the reality on the ground, or demand things that feed the mania for assessment and measureable outcomes.
posted by pleasant_confusion at 5:15 PM on April 25, 2018


The different regional accreditors do indeed have different requirements all over the place. SACS here in the southeast requires all faculty to have 18 graduate credit hours in any area in which they teach. None of the other regional accreditors actually count credit hours. Academic types may have noticed this because when you apply to jobs in the southeastern US you have to submit your transcripts up front, so that they can literally count the credits to make sure if they're hiring you to teach biochemistry that you took 18 graduate credit hours in biochemistry. Everybody else just maybe wants to see your transcripts before they hire you in case you're lying about having a PhD. It's just a difference because they really are different agencies.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:21 PM on April 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


Hydropsyche, HLC is implementing a very similar or identical policy as SACS with regard to faculty qualifications. I don't know if any other regional accreditors are planning to do the same thing; I'm at a MSCHE school, the regional accreditor for the middle of the east coast, and I haven't heard anything and we just updated our accreditation standards and practices.

It's important to remember that regional accreditors are member organizations. Their standards and practices are set by the members. When MSCHE updated the standards a year or two ago, it was done by a vote of all of the member organizations (typically the president of each college or university casts the actual vote). The review teams are all composed of faculty and staff at similar institutions in the same region. We get some very broad guidance from the Department of Education and there are a few very specific rules (in scattered places because they're usually linked to specific laws) but in general the accreditors and even the review teams have a lot of latitude - too much, the eyes of many critics - in how they conduct their business.
posted by ElKevbo at 5:29 PM on April 25, 2018


> When MSCHE updated the standards a year or two ago, it was done by a vote of all of the member organizations (typically the president of each college or university casts the actual vote).

See, that's why I was so confused about % of classes taught by adjuncts being a concern for any accreditation organization — seems like structurally they're always going to favor the desires of the administration over the needs of faculty or students.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 5:41 PM on April 25, 2018


Is this a new thing? There's a number of highly-regarded schools where the lion's share of the classes are taught by casualized workers

It was part of the report I did for our institution, during one of the HLC flaps. Maybe it was just for my institution though? Our institution, while public, has placed importance on the majority of undergrad classes in a department being taught by tenured or tenure track faculty on and off over the past decade. Like, sometimes they care and sometimes they do not.

(Also my department has a focus on the majority of our teaching being by tenured/tenure track faculty. Which is good because we didn't get in trouble for having undergrads teaching undergrad classes unlike some other departments during this whole process.)

SACS here in the southeast requires all faculty to have 18 graduate credit hours in any area in which they teach. None of the other regional accreditors actually count credit hours.

I think HLC is doing something like this too, it seems like it was part of the criteria I had to collect the PhD subject matter/department of all our faculty. Sorry I'm vague, this was all about a year ago.
posted by Squeak Attack at 6:11 PM on April 25, 2018


Arizona is a textbook case for the Wal-Mart-ization of higher ed.

I’ve mentioned before, but the Maricopa County Community College Board was recently (in February) taken over by a majority of conservatives when one member was in a car accident and his replacement was appointed by Gov. Ducey. Yes, the same Gov. Ducey that has been screwing the K-12 teachers so badly that they are staging a statewide walkout tomorrow (#RedforEd).

Anyway, the conservative majority rammed through a change to Faculty policies to completely eliminate Meet and Confer, the 40-year-old process by which Faculty can make recommendations on their job parameters, accountability, compensation, etc. I stress, recommendations that aren’t even binding, which now no longer have a process to be voiced on behalf of the faculty.

The Board has also said they are eliminating faculty contracts completely, to be replaced by policies that are not yet written. This is supposed to take place in October, right in the middle of the fall semester.

Why do something so ridiculously disruptive in the middle of the academic term? Two reasons: first, by waiting until after the semester starts in September, it means instructors are stuck, since it would be too late for them to apply to another institution for the academic year, and second, four of the seven Board members are up for re-election so they have to jam through the change before (hopefully) a few of them get voted out in November.

All through this fiasco, we have one conservative Board member, Jean McGrath, who has vocally supported having the State lege eliminate funding for the community colleges (we teach over 220,000 undergraduates a year, more than the state universities, and we’re the number 1 provider of workforce training in the state). The state has reduced its subsidy of its community colleges from about $60 million annually twenty years ago to $0 — that’s ZERO dollars — annually now. Guess which party controls Arizona’s legislature...

McGrath has also supported a white paper calling for making all faculty part timers, so they could be paid the abysmally lower adjunct rates (which is another serious scandal) and they wouldn’t need to pay for medical benefits or for dedicated faculty offices.

Another conservative Board member, Joanna Haver, has said she wants to eliminate faculty contracts to make it easier to fire faculty. I stress here that for us, our “tenure” simply means that they simply have to show just cause for termination and there is an evidentiary hearing, which rather sensible guidelines, evidently, are a bridge too far when you just really want to fire someone but, I guess, can’t come up with any actual evidence to support your whim.

They are led by Lauren Hendrix, a former Republican state legislator who has a track record of voting against funding public schools, and who thinks it would be a great idea to have students carry guns on campus.

The Board are also screwing over the regular non-faculty staff with policy changes that make layoffs much more easy to effect, and more injurious to employees (greatly reduced or eliminated opportunity for retraining or lateral transfers, eliminated grievance procedures, etc,)

So we have a Governing Board that is fundamenrally doing their best to kill off the community college system. Our only hope right now is that in November, we can send a few of them packing and elect a majority that actually cares about the community colleges and their role in promoting an educated, well trained community.

If you are a voter in Maricopa County, please don’t forget to vote the whole ballot if you want to keep the community college system from collapsing.

The good candidates that seem to have the best interests of the institution and the college districts in mind, are:

Roc Arnett (County-wide slot — anyone in Maricopa can vote for Roc)
Marie Sullivan (District 3)
Stan Arteberry (District 4) and
Tom Nehrini (District 5).

The two good eggs currently on the Board are Thor and Saar. Thor is a former college President who understands the stakes, and Saar is a reasonable centrist who has a clear eye. We’d like to see them remain on the board, and fortunately, neither of them is up fir re-election this year.

The others on the Board are part of the right-wing agenda here in AZ that fundamentally equates to devaluing instruction and destroying access to high quality, public higher education.

(You can find out which MCCCD District you’re in by checking here. Note that it will give a specific district number for “Supervisiorial/MCCCD/SPHCD” district.)

There. I’m done (for now).
posted by darkstar at 6:48 PM on April 25, 2018 [26 favorites]


Someone mentioned "adjunct coaches" - be aware that in most sports, head coaches are paid relatively little and there are in fact unpaid coaches. A few years back, I turned down the offer to be Large State University's assistant fencing coach even though I was offered lots of university swag as an incentive (but no pay)

Everything isn't football. Or even basketball.
posted by Peach at 7:57 PM on April 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


If academia can be compared to a small country, it is what we typically call a "failed state."
posted by runcifex at 8:05 PM on April 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I'm thinking of the academic retirees I know, all of whom have been like, "fuck dis shit, I am OUTTA HERE" and when you run into them, they're soooooooooooo happy to be gone. I know one who went back and then she quit again after a month or two. So I'm wondering who the heck they would actually GET to "volunteer" from the retiree pool. If anyone.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:10 PM on April 25, 2018


MisantropicPainforest: "The only ethical way to take this job would to agree to it, show up, then immediately go on strike. "

I'd be so tempted to show up; monologue off the top of my head about what ever subject appealed at the moment; and then hand out As to everyone whether they showed up or not but I recognize that wouldn't be fair to students.

Melismata: "Because of the internet, knowledge is much easier to get than it used to be. "

Sure, but learning is just as hard as it always has been and a lot of the "knowledge" on the internet is disseminated by people who either don't have a clue or are intentionally fucking with people. I'm an electrician. About 50% of the Knowledge I see on the internet is down right dangerous. And the ignorant aren't capable of differentiating.

sotonohito: "Back in the 1960's you could go to Harvard, HARVARD, and pay the tuition and housing costs with what you'd earn making minimum wage. Today the very concept of working your way through school is laughable. It can't be done.

Is it all going to upper level administrators or what?
"

Besides what everyone else said keep in mind that the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation by any stretch of the imagination. Plus my impression is there is a lot more job insecurity now then then, at least for the demographic groups that were going to Harvard on minimum wage.
posted by Mitheral at 12:41 AM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm wondering who the heck they would actually GET to "volunteer" from the retiree pool. If anyone.
They’re not looking for retirees. They’re looking for the people who got PhDs and who were unable to make a go in academia. I went to a top tier university in my field for my doctorate, and only about 5 of the 30 people I know who graduated in the past few years (including myself) got tenure track positions. It’s a lot more common for people to end up adjuncting somewhere, or in a dead-end postdoc, or to... I don’t know where the others go. When people leave, it is often a pretty ugly breakup for them, and they don’t stay in touch.

I do know that for the first few years after they graduated, many of them stuck around our university. You build a life in a place and if you don’t get work, why would you move? And lots of times, they do work for the university. They work at the library, or are hired as a grader for a class they once taught, or as a part time lab tech, or something. They still want to be in the academy and have been sold the line that having a little more experience on their CV will finally get them in the door. I know so many graduating PhDs who would absolutely consider this “opportunity” because it might be their last and and only option to still “make it” in academia.

We like to talk about how we are “overproducing” PhDs but the truth is that we have been taking their jobs and converting them to adjunct positions, which have no benefits and are not continuous. It’s working just fine (accreditation is not actually at risk; people murmer and worry, but remember who actually does the accrediting: most site visits are stacked with administrators from other schools). Why not push it further? That’s the mindset.
posted by sockermom at 5:21 AM on April 26, 2018 [12 favorites]


I have a PhD from an R1 institution, in a program that was ranked between #1 and #3 over the years I was there. Over that time, only one graduate was able to land a tenure-track position. The rest of us went into administration or got corporate jobs. The program abruptly shifted after three retirements/deaths, aligning with the business school in a crossdisciplinary situation where quants from the econ department figure out how to monetize what can be monetized and how to casualize the graduates who aren't superstars.

Granted, the experience prepared me for the shitshow that is for-profit healthcare, so...thanks for that, I guess.
posted by catlet at 6:40 AM on April 26, 2018 [1 favorite]


This is great! If the teachers are working for free, the tuition must be free, right?
posted by miyabo at 7:08 AM on April 26, 2018 [2 favorites]


The argument about whether or not the Internet is serious competition for the U.S. University system is ground that's been trod pretty well at this point in the conversation, and it's clear: it isn't. Like most things, the answer lies in structural inequality and greed. If you look at tech boosters, who hold up the idea that "traditional school" is antiquated in the face of YouTube tutorials and MOOCs, go ahead and see how many of them will have their children forgo a top-notch university education in favor of bootstrapping themselves a degree on the Internet.

The argument that one could teach oneself a great number of subjects through networked technology isn't totally without merit, though. We could structure classes to replicate and even enhance fantastic university level learning at scale. The 200 person burn-out class at the 101 level that's taught by a begrudging research professor and his team of 20 stressed TAs could be greatly improved if the professor could offer recorded lectures with hypertext support (e.g. click on a box to get an even deeper mini-lecture on a topic you're unclear about), have meaningful networked collaborative work that mirrors industry expectations of modern workplaces, get one-on-one office hours with a staff of professional TAs across the globe to match your schedule.

We could, effectively, offer top notch education to the entire nation with accreditation for anyone willing to take the time to use it. This was the utopic promise that drove the MOOC craze in the mid-2000s. If the purpose of education is to impart skills and knowledge, then this seems like an easy solution, doesn't it?

Of course not, because the purpose of our education system is not education and knowledge transfer. I'm sure that's the goal for any professor worth their salt, but professors are intentionally not a high level part of the administration. Instead the goal of U.S. higher ed. is two-fold: 1) to generate value for contractors, and 2) to act as a broker of cultural capital.

Let's go back to that 200 person, 101 level, burn-out class. Not even getting into our utopic online course described above, why ever structure a course where nobody really likes doing it: miserable professor who resents lecturing once a week, miserable TAs who are being exploited as cheap labor, miserable students who are either overworked and confused or already know the material and bored. Why? It's a meat grinder that ensures the people who pass through are the ones with necessary cultural capital to do so. Either those who already know enough about the topic to do well at more advanced levels, or those with the dispositions to succeed in picking up new information in the domain. I'm sure that there is (likely a great deal) of good faith learning and educating going on in this situation, but the structure of the course itself is highly intentional, and designed as a sieve for the right kind of people to advance. A program can't reliably take on 200 students in each incoming class - but it certainly can do 100 or 50.

Expanding out to college as a whole there's a similar effect: being 'good' at college requires its own set of skills, and those skills tend to transfer to the business world, which allows for the minting and accreditation of a new white collar middle class. Along the way you extract value at every possible step: a private catering company for the food halls, a local construction company to build a new gym to attract undergrads, contracting work to create more 'student centered' learning, administrators at every level to mediate the process, and student loan companies gleefully sucking money from the future of each student so that they can have an idealized, and carefully craft, 4 year experience.

Melismata isn't exactly wrong: in a naive sense, the Internet does indeed present a challenge for an institution that is solely about the transfer and building of knowledge - and I would argue that for the most part educator praxis has been shifting to making face-time in classes more valuable than a simple lecture style knowledge transmission model. However that isn't really what higher education is in our country, and tasking professors with "innovating" on making the learning more relevant totally misses the point. Money, class, and selection are at the heart of the challenges for our higher ed. system, and changing economies have only exacerbated these problems. Because of the breathtaking ecosystem of graft built onto the noble mission of higher ed, these aren't problems meant to be solved.

The idea that new tenure track slots are only opened when the old professor dies should be a ridiculous notion. When we have a record number of students seeking a diploma, and when we have a massively expanding world of knowledge and research enabled by networked technology, and when we have unheard of wealth for the 1%, then one would think that we would also be expanding our stock of professors to teach, research, and maintain our ability to learn both as individuals and as a society. Instead the work is shunted off to underpaid TAs and adjuncts, or unpaid volunteer work, while the administration hires new contractors to "innovate" on learning, and builds flashy buildings custom-built for the front of a pamphlet. The fault here is not in the model of face-to-face higher education, it's in the mendacity of a society built on wealth extraction.
posted by codacorolla at 11:51 AM on April 26, 2018 [4 favorites]


If you could do it part-time, I can see doing it in a specific set of circumstances: if you're going to be in the area anyway, working some other job that leaves you a few free hours a week, you get to retain perks like library access, .edu email, IT services, free WiFi on campus, and other things that vary according to your institution. But realistically, I don't think there are that many people in that position.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 12:20 PM on April 26, 2018



Ochswar, when you're cloistered in the academic bubble it's easy to forget that people with PhDs can and do contribute outside of the academic realm. I have a PhD in the natural sciences (and did my time in the adjunct trenches back when my kids were little) and am now in industry. At my company there are an awful lot of people like me--folks with terminal degrees in roles that absolutely require that level of subject matter expertise, as experimentalists or otherwise. Management, IT, executive leadership.


Compare and contrast.


I do know that for the first few years after they graduated, many of them stuck around our university. You build a life in a place and if you don’t get work, why would you move? And lots of times, they do work for the university. They work at the library, or are hired as a grader for a class they once taught, or as a part time lab tech, or something. They still want to be in the academy and have been sold the line that having a little more experience on their CV will finally get them in the door. I know so many graduating PhDs who would absolutely consider this “opportunity” because it might be their last and and only option to still “make it” in academia.
.


This is the problem in a nutshell. People enter into PHD programs with the hope of being a university professor. That was a reasonable thing to do in the days when academia was expanding. It isn't.

Going into private industry after the Phd is fine. It's the default. It NEEDS to be the default. But it isn't what brings people into grad school. .
posted by ocschwar at 12:56 PM on April 26, 2018


That's probably true, but it seems ridiculous after spending 5 to 7 years in academia and seeing the huge shortage of labor. Research, service, and teaching are ALWAYS understaffed. Committees are always grubbing work from professors, professors are always pressed to get research done, journals are always short of reviewers, teaching is never valued properly. It's equally ridiculous when you have a huge surplus of labor that SHOULD be available to fill each of those labor gaps. The obvious idiotic irony is that the people in charge of the money don't really care about the core process - they care about the extraction on the edges.
posted by codacorolla at 1:03 PM on April 26, 2018 [7 favorites]


This is great! If the teachers are working for free, the tuition must be free, right?


You joke, but the exact reverse is being pushed by one of aforementioned Board members. The conservatives on the Board are using funding shortfalls as one of the reasons why faculty can’t get raises. But the same McGrath that has lobbied for the state to continue defunding the community colleges, is also pushing to reduce tuition.

Let’s just say that she’s not motivated by an altruistic interest in mak8ng college more affordable for students, which could be done by state funding. In fact, our tuition is still under $90 per credit hour, less than 1/6 of what it costs to take courses at the state public university. Our tuition is a screaming deal already.

No, she wants to reduce tuition rates because the resulting elimination of funds would then be used to further justify reduced salaries for faculty, and eventually usher in her stated goal of making all instructors part-timers without benefits.

So, they are creating the funding crisis themselves, and then using it as an excuse to promote their radical agenda to undermine the institution even further.
posted by darkstar at 10:09 PM on April 26, 2018 [9 favorites]


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