Full-time faculty cuts reverberate at UMass

The decline in permanent, full-time professors at UMass-Amherst, accompanied by increased numbers of temporary and part-time teachers, echoes a national trend on college campuses. Nationwide, the number of full-time, temporary faculty grew by one-third from 1998 to 2001, and almost half of all college faculty are now part-time or "contingent" teachers, according to the American Association of University Professors.

A cost-saving measure -- temporary professors earn lower pay, work year to year, and often shuttle between campuses -- the hiring shift has been widely criticized for diminishing research and student-teacher interaction while creating an academic underclass with no office hours, benefits, or job security.

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We, the adjuncts, who also have degrees, cannot find jobs. All that is left is the temporary professorship -- a boon to higher education.

Very low wages, no benefits. Yes, we do have office hours. NO, we do not have a contract or security.

As one of my students put it: it's a doggy dog world.

that drive is undoubtedly matched by a desire for a viable career.

At the college where I teach, the number of adjuncts is at or approaching 50%. We have no senate voice. Most of us teach classes at hours scattered across the day and week. We rarely see each other. I've never met most of the regular faculty, let alone the other adjuncts.

The use of adjuncts will keep tuition down, supposedly, and that will fuel continued cutting of permanent positions.

I love teaching. I am happy to have a position doing what I love, but if I had to make a living, I'd be working two other jobs.

... at George Washington University where I'm a grad student. Adjuncts - at least in my field - get paid $1,500 to teach a semester long class, they receive no benefits of any kind, no vacation leave, no sick leave, no health insurance, no retirement benefits, nada. The faculty with whom I've spoken have frankly advised me against getting a PhD as, in their experience, it's increasingly a one way ticket to a job as a bus boy. And we wonder why our educational system is crashing. :eyes:

... are taught by untenured sessional instructors (many of whom don't have contracts extending beyond a single semester).


p.s. we're the ones who are approached when they need someone to teach a course at the last minute -- this has happened to me several times, and it's usually a couple of days before Christmas. Which means I've had to forget about taking a break, just to get lecture and lab materials ready to start right after New Year's. In addition, there is no pay adjustment for class sizes -- I taught the same number of courses last spring as a tenured prof (3) but mine were 2 large introductory and 1 pretty-big upper-level course. (Admin expanded my seminar class to 45, a week before the course started ... when the regular prof teaches it, he caps it at 20.) By comparison, the tenure-track hiree across the hall from me also does 3 courses, but 2 of them are upper-level classes and 1 is for grad students only ... her class size doesn't exceed 40.

The sessionals at my campus have organized a union, and while we've managed to negotiate a pay hike and "right of refusal" for courses, there are a lot of issues which we can't do anything about.

and in the meantime the rich get richer---pardon the language but ain't it grand--unfettered capitalism at its best

My wife just got a tenure-track job; but the place where she was a post-doc almost revoked the tenure-trackedness of some of the non-tenured faculty. The dean wanted to keep the possibility of disposing of the dept., but backed down.

I think it's a complex problem, with lecturers being the most obvious solution to problems posed by state legislatures, trustees, and the students themselves.

"Relevance" and freeing up the required curriculum means that students suddenly can pick and choose how to fulfill their requirements. As student interests change, deans need to make sure there are people to teach the wanted courses. Tenured faculty aren't flexible, lecturers = flexibility. Students demand flexibility.

When there are budget cuts, you can can lectureres and keep the tenured people you want; otherwise, you have to get the senior, prestigious people, to retire. At that point, what the dean wants his/her fiefdom to be doesn't matter; the bean counters must be satisfied. Canning lecturers is easy.

At the same time, many tenured faculty stop teaching well. And it doesn't matter to them, just to their students. They can't be fired. This makes tenure a tough sell to some people. So it could be better, at least in principle, for the students to have lecturers that need to teach to keep their jobs.

On the other hand, great lecturers can strike deals. The UCLA Slavic dept. had a lecturer (whatever her official title was; she has no PhD)manage the Russian language program. Her 6 year maximum was coming to an end, and UCLA couldn't renew her contract (go for that 7th year and you start having pretensions to tenure). The faculty pitched a fit; she's still there almost a decade later, she doesn't have tenure, but she has the equivalent--her contract can't not be renewed.

I was supposed to finish my dissertation last year. But if I did, I was facing getting locked into working full-time making $12000 a year as an adjunct and having my $35,000 in student loans come due.

So, instead of adjuncting, I applied for ANOTHER 2-3 year terminal degree program where I am eligible for better teaching assistantships which will give me $18,000 a year for PART time work.

Now I just learned that if I get the job, it will lead to an instructorship that pays a living wage. However, if I finish my dissertation I won't be eligible for the job. I might have to postpone the awarding of my Ph.D.

Seriously, I'm scared.

I have taught full time at my university since 1983, and was also a GTA here from 1972-1979. I have the education, the experience, the glowing student evaluations, the glowing departmental evaluations.

I net about $2000/month in the fall and $1000/month in the spring (averaging $1500/month over the 9-month school year), with no summer income at all. I stay for 2 reasons: 1) I am now 54 years old, and years of overwork and stress have ruined my health. I have to stay for the health insurance; 2) I love teaching. Teaching is practically my religion.

In order to supplement my income and make enough to survive the summer, I tutor, do freelance editing, sometimes babsit, and occasionally so a little ghost-writing.

My poor health and progressive deafness, plus the lack of a car (poverty makes owning a car difficult), mean I can no longer do the physically destructive factory work I used to do to survive in the summer. Now I have to save enough during the year to have the money to get through the summer months--not easy to do when my main job nets me an average of $1500/month, and that for only 9 months of the year.

And now my school tells me that after this year I will be reduced to only 3/4 time one term and 1/2 time the next each year, because now it's one of thos situations where they would have to put me up for tenure if I taught even one more full-time semester.

That means that I will look back on $1500/month for a 9-month year as a time of luxury. My maximum pay henceforth will be $1500/month in the fall and $750/month in the spring--with no pay in the summer.

So of course that means I have to pile on more tutoring and editing jobs during the school year--if I can even get them, which is never guaranteed. These jobs are very, very time-consuming. And though what I do is called "part-time" teaching, in reality I spend about 20 hrs/week in conferences with students and about 20 hrs/week grading papers. Sometimes it adds up to even more. I am so exhausted all the time that I am not even sure I am being coherent! I pull more all-nighters and near all-nighters than any college undergrad ever does.

It really shortchanges students to have teachers who are exhausted and spread so thin. I also has destroyed my health.

One "good" thing, though: my once excellent health insurance from the university has been chipped away to the point where increased copayments and reduced benefits are making me think that I won't be trapped here all that much longer, because I will soon have such lousy health insurance that it won't be worth staying in the job just to hold on to it.

This sounds absolutely higher education slavery.

Is there any chance that after all this time you can transfer to HS teaching at a private school? High school seniors might not be such a shock to the system. Your story makes me really angry at the system.

It's funny. I wanted to write fiction, that's always been my first love. But I opted for a Ph.D. in media and communications because it seemed more solid and I also love teaching. I thought that being a fiction writer was about as possible as being a Hollywood actor. But after realizing how hard it is to get a non-adjunct job, I figured I might as well go for my dream. Funny thing is, now I'm actually closer to making it as a fiction writer than landing a decent tenure-track job.

I wish you the best. And I guarantee that you have touched many many students lives, so kudos to you.

In the US you can't teach in public high schools without an education degree.

They pay a little less, but they couldn't pay less than adjuncting. Good luck. (My degrees are all in the Humanities/Communications too. If feel your pain.)

that I don't own a car. There is no way for me to take a job that I can't walk to or get to by bus. I live in an area with only one tiny private high school, and it has one English teacher (and very few students). The only option would be to leave my safety net behind and move somewhere else and hope I can find work. I can't risk it--I have no back-up at all, and as I have mentioned, I have too many health problems to be without insurance. Besides, moving costs money--and I have no money.

One good thing, though, I have learned to be very frugal. You'd be amazed at what you can learn to do without.

It is possible to teach high school without an education degree through alternative certification. Every state has some such process. And if you are in science or math, the path is easier due to a shortage of those folks. The benefits and salary are much better that those for University lecturers, or even Community College faculty in many cases.

Unfortunately there is a stigma in higher ed associated with precollege teaching. In many universities, Ph.D. students who go to teach high school are viewed as failures. These attitudes are often passed on to new Ph.D.s, who then never think about options other than higher ed positions. But those positions are tough to get, and sometimes it is just a matter of luck. I think that Ph.D.s who go to teach high school should be viewed as successes engaged in critical work, and part of a K-gray educational continuum.

Frankly, it's not the fulltime profs who are so expensive--it's the layers upon layers of new administrators who are added each year. I've seen it happen in every college I've been associated with, from my undergrad alma mater to the last place I taught.

For me, the process of getting a Ph.D. was satisfying for the intellectual challenge, the chance to live on a major university campus, the chance to live and study in another country, and the lasting friendships I made with people from all over the world.

But I would have had better job prospects with a nursing degree or an MBA.

In any case, I'm glad I got out of academia when I did (1993), because everyone I know who is still in it is very unhappy.

Academics are some of the most unhappy people I have met in any profession. Many of them are like beaten children. Last semester, I was teaching in a department where faculty members had sabotaged and physically destroyed one another's life work and were now in litigation spending up to 50K on lawyers against one another.

I felt lucky to be a temp.

tenure is not what it once was. I just retired from a "tenured" job in Wisconsin, amid continual attacks on the definition of tenure by administration. Last I heard, you can still be fired from a "tenured" job for "causing disruption in your unit or department" Face it. Academic freedom of speech and tenure are antiquated concepts these days. The push for "distance learning" over the internet is just a way of priming the jobs for outsourcing to India.

Additionally, the layers and layers of administrative positions added over the past twenty years has stripped faculty of most rights even over curriculum. Meanwhile those at the top: CEO's and administrators, get huge pay raises while the rest of us die on the vine.

I feel sorry for those entering (or even continuing) an academic profession these days. The same thing that has happened to doctors is happening to academics. It's part of the race to the economic bottom for everyone--even those who thought that all their efforts might be rewarded by the "market".

alone a MBA.

will destroy the Higher Education System that helped make the U.S. a leader in so many fields. :mad:

Accompanying the decline in FT faculty is a large increase in the number of administrators whose primary job seems to be raising money and other assorted functions which have nothing to do with the educational mission of a university. These people are drawing big salaries, generally more than most faculty. Colleges within universities such as eduction or business for example, have so many adjunct faculty members that they have to scramble when accreditation time comes around. I have been married to a unversity professor for over 35 years and spent several years as a university librarian and I have never seen things going downhill so fast. Judging by the recent spate of school levy failures and the subsequent cutbacks at local levels, things are pretty bad there too. The consequences to all of this are very frightening to anyone who cares about education. The future does not look good and I think we are all going to hell in a very large handbasket.

Just as an example: when I was an undergraduate in 1968-1972, my undergrad college had 1700 students, a faculty of about 100, a president, a half-time academic dean. two deans of students, a comptroller, and a collection of people who were essentially clerical workers. That was the administration.

When I returned as a visiting instructor a mere ten years later, the college had about the same number of students, but also four vice-presidents, each of whom earned more than ANY of the faculty members.

That is the national trend in microcosm.

at my school, a commuter campus in the midwest. The accreditation agency told us we had too many of these; so we have hired about 20 hired full-time lecturers (for 100-level math and English classes).

Tenure still means something in our system (I hold tenure, thank goodness).

In many disciplines, getting a PhD is a raw deal; many more PhDs are produced than there are openings in these disciplines. Getting tenure if you do get a tenure-track position is by no means guaranteed -- going up for tenure can be a punishing experience even if you do get it.

In my discipline (mathematics), the job market is cyclical. When I got my PhD (1986) the market was very good. In the early to mid 1990s, the market was terrible, as it was in the 1970s. Now it's OK. In the better years, most new PhDs get tenure-track positions, or at least decent postdocs.

So I would suggest that someone contemplating going for a PhD to consider the market. The news isn't always bad, regarding an academic career -- job satisfaction measures for professors are consisistently among the highest of all careers (despite the relatively low pay). In my neck of the woods, statistics and mathematics education have been consistently good places career-wise to get a PhD; as is computer science.

I've had several really good ones- and a couple of really bad ones. Sometimes they bring a lot to the table in terms of professional experience- but I'd have to say that in my experience graduate classes taught by the full time faculty are almost always preferable.

Is the adjunct's ability to form relationships within the university to the students' benefit. I work in a college library (just finished my master's and trying to get a professional level position). We are finding it increasingly hard to collaborate with the people teaching classes -- in terms of collection development, bibliographic and information literacy instruction, etc. -- because the vast majority of profs are adjuncts and perhaps only on campus for the three hours they're teaching. I am a liaison to faculty in the social sciences. I send periodic notices about new resources that are available, but most of the people doing the teaching don't get them because they're not in the college e-mail directory or listed on departmental pages. We can't talk to them about how they might work research skills into their classes, or adjust their courses to alleviate student problems that we see in students coming to ask questions at the reference desk. Meanwhile, adjuncts have no office or campus phone; there is an office somewhere with about 10 desks that is supposed to be shared by hundreds of adjuncts. Students with problems lose out because adjuncts don't have office hours.

http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2005/02/20050222_b_main.asp

University, Inc.
Aired: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 8-9PM ET

Despite soaring tuition rates, universities in the United States say they're more cash-strapped than ever. Feeling the pinch, they are increasingly turning to the private industry for financial help.

An old question is assuming new importance -- Is higher education really about intellectual inquiry or has it primarily become the vehicle for students to find well-paying jobs and universities to make big bucks doing research for private companies?

"University, Inc.," a new expose of the academic-industrial complex, documents how corporate funding that comes with strings attached is affecting every aspect of academic life to the detriment of the students it's supposed to serve.

Hear a conversation about what corporations' increased role in higher education means for students and the country.



· Jennifer Washburn, author of "University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education." On Feb 24, 2005 at 7 pm, she will speak and sign her book at the Boston University Bookstore (617-267-8484). On Feb. 25, 2005 at 3 pm, she will speak and sign her book at the Harvard Bookstore (617-661-1515).
· Mark Yudof, University of Texas system chancellor
· Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly.

I'll have to look for that.

Other interesting reading: Profscam, by Charles Sykes; Generation X Goes to College, by Peter Sacks; and Grade Inflation, A Crisis in College Education, by Valen Johnson.

There are real problems in higher education: massive grade inflation, poor student attitudes.

A lot of what went wrong in K-12 is now affecting the universities. At the K-12 level, content was replaced by process, fun activities that keep students busy and happy but don't actually teach them anything. This is called "active learning".

The authority of professors to teach -- to set curricula and hold high standards -- is threatened by attacks on tenure, but is also threatened by the move to active learning where professors are supposed to structure courses so students teach each other and themselves. You're no longer the "sage on the stage", you're merely a "guide on the side". Professors who merely give good lectures no longer receive the highest teaching ratings.

The intellectual community is under attack, in this way and directly -- via the "academic bill of rights" promulgated by the odious David Horowitz with huge funding from the hard right -- because professors with tenure are the last group of people in the country who are both well-informed and able to speak their minds freely and effectively.

Way to make it more difficult to finance an education.

Believe you me... it is NOT lining the faculty's pockets.

The states are tied to the feds as far as money goes.
Feds lose money, cut money to states.
Meanwhile, states lose money, and have to cut spending.
College is not considered necessary.
It's a "perk."
It's first on the spending cut list.
That means students have to foot the bill.

Ask Howard Dean. He's explained and produced a plan.

Tuition isn't the only thing that's been going up at triple the inflation rate. The average university budget has been going up year after year at triple the inflation rate.

So where is the dough going?

where I teach partly because of increased technology costs. We have a bunch of people who run and develop the campus web site. This didn't exist 10 years ago. Now we're going to PeopleSoft to run registration and other things. The system (eight campuses) is paying $50 million (!!) for this software, which is forcing us to change many procedures (registration, financial aid, etc). I swear the proximate cause for the collapse of western civilization will be PeopleSoft.

At many schools, tuition goes up to help the school cover financial aid for students -- other sources of financial aid are drying up. I don't think this is significant at our school, we're not very expensive (although the new community college system is undercutting us on price and our enrollments are dropping as a result).

Some colleges frankly charge more than they need to -- to look high-class. It's well-known that there's a coterie of prestigious colleges that charge practically the same amount in tuition, room and board. Years ago, attorneys general were looking into this; I don't know what came of that.

Our college is using this system and it's a nightmare. We've had trouble since Day One (I should know; that was my first day of work. Took me a month to get an ID badge, and six months to get the non-SSN ID number that I had to have to complete certain required tasks.) One day over winter break, the system suddenly stopped accepting credit card payments for tuition. But it did not stop dropping students from classes for nonpayment. I'm at a community college where 75 percent of students are not proficient in the English language. They cannot navigate this system when it's working, let alone when it's going haywire.

But apparently someone related to the company made a generous contribution to someone's campaign coffers, and here we are.