Dec 06, 2017
From 2005-2006 I worked my
last year (30th) as a technical writer making $65k — nothing to sneeze at. Then
one Friday morning I was summoned to my manager’s office and was told my
position was being eliminated. At age 54, this should have been devastating. As
I packed up, co-workers consoled and asked what I would do. Smiling, a bit
perversely, I said “write my memoirs by the pool.” I recall driving home on the
interstate, laughing like a mad fool. What gave?
I had amassed, through savings
and investing (and by being cheap some would say), a decent sum of assets along
with, most importantly, zero debt. I knew I would do early retirement in eight
years. During the intervening time what might I do? By turns good and bad the
technical writing “field” had been decent, but it been a job by default, certainly
no career or profession.
Back in 1975 I took a master’s
degree in English, with the naive hope of teaching college. There were no
teaching jobs. Had I gone on for the Ph.D. it may or may not have made a
difference. That goal of being an academic in the classroom, the discipline in
and focus on literature and writing never left me. In 2007 the local colleges
were hiring adjunct professors. And so the dream happened — sort of.
For those unfamiliar with the
term “adjunct,” it is considered a part-time supplemental teaching position,
requiring only 18 graduate credits. I had the master’s. It’s a part-time job if
you’re teaching two or three courses. More than that, you’re scraping the
40-hour ceiling, especially when reading student essays. The college deems fit
to pay you for class-time only, as if lessons and content sprout fully formed
from one’s brain.
The compensation was abysmal.
Low wages. No benefits (most important of those being a health plan). This came
out to about $16-17k a year (about what I made in 1979) and included summer
semesters. The only way I could afford to take a position was to supplement the
meager wages with $1,000 a month from my investments plus dip now and then for
large ticket items (e.g., property taxes). I rarely touch the one credit card I
own. I wasn’t saving but still, a single drink now and then from a barrel the
size of a small Fort Knox can’t hurt much.
I had become asset rich and
income poor. I was one of the fortunate adjuncts. Some taught several courses a
semester because they had to get by. I knew one who taught nine courses across
multiple campuses because he had to.
Mine is just one story. To
virtually earn somewhere between $10-13 an hour for performing college-level
instruction speaks plainly of the Walmartization of our nation’s colleges and
universities.
The implications of this
corporatized campus environment has systemic implications for our America’s
intellectual infrastructure. The delivery of higher education has become a
cheat, a hustle, and thoroughly corrupt. Most of all it is unsustainable, for
what young person in their right mind will pursue a graduate degree with the
intention of becoming a college professor?
The “race to the bottom”
continues to accelerate. It has become almost a cliché to say
education, K-12 and beyond, is broken. It is dysfunctional now; its prospects,
without sweeping reforms, are bleak at best.
A Frontline documentary, Declining
by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (2005) talks about the financial
challenges but also of the lowering of standards, referred to as grade
inflation as a means of keeping students enrolled. It may be a bit dated but
the problems cited not only remain but have worsened. Any parents paying college
tuition should see this.
Parents don’t know that their
child for whom they’ve paid dear tuition may have courses taught by an adjunct
or T.A., who maybe works the night shift at a 24-hour Walmart out of financial
necessity. How can classroom performance not be compromised? The reaction has
to be more than shaking our heads and dismissing it with, “Oh well, the new
normal.”
The core of corruption is with
the “business” model colleges and universities have adopted: rake in the
tuition at all costs, reward the lifeblood of the institution, the faculty,
with diminishing compensation and status, throw six or seven figures at the
administrators and give athletic programs a virtual blank check.
When the last adjunct dies out
(they tend to be in their 60s), they will go after the regular faculty. This is
treated in a novel by Alex Kudera (an adjunct) at Clemson University, probably
the only novel written whose protagonist is an adjunct.
(I have reviewed Professor Kudera’s novel, if you are interested.)
It is a sad irony that the
adjunct is no lifetime indentured servant, but rather an endangered species, as
institutions of higher learning contemplate “satellite hookups and TVs in every
classroom... with the finest Indian universities teaching virtual classes
long-distance... the $15,000-a-year they were paying the graduate student [or
adjunct] has become $1,500 for a hungrier South Asian.” (Fight for Your Long
Day, pages 207-208)
Physical classrooms will
disappear, academic rigor all but eliminated, and the MOOCs will be taught by
uncredentialed “instructors,” as attrition claims live professors who must
leave for more viable economic positions or simply retire. The public generally
thinks that a liberal arts education is a waste of time, but the math and
science adjuncts are paid the same, at least at my former school.
Shockingly, there is no public
policy debate or discussion on this problem: certainly not in circles where
power exists to effect change.
Chris Hedges has written:
“We’ve bought into the idea
that education is about training and “success,” defined monetarily, rather than
learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the
true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does
not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes
management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of
a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns
itself to death.” (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and Triumph of
Spectacle).
There’s a public perception
that a college education is the path to a good-paying job and at least a
middle-class lifestyle. This is no longer the case.
No comments:
Post a Comment