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The economy sucks. You're not sure what to do, but you really enjoyed college, especially all that great stuff you read for your English major. You're thinking you should go back to school. After all, people have been predicting for more than a decade that there is a big wave of retirements coming to the professoriate soon. Should you invest the next several years in graduate school so you can become a professor?
Um, no.
This week Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in which she details the decline of the academic job market and the quality of worklife of those who teach college and university students. An excerpt:
In an article called "Contingent Faculty and the New Academic Labor System" (2004), Gwen Bradley notes that an academic job shortage is rarely the result of some surprising lurch in supply-and-demand curves, since "the same institutions both manufacture and consume the Ph.D. product." In other words, universities know very well that they are producing far more Ph.D.s than they need. Compare this situation with the medical profession. Even if medical residents are made to work long hours under difficult conditions, the vast majority of them will get jobs as doctors. The vast majority of, say, Ph.D.s in English literature will not. Given that the typical doctoral degree takes six or seven years to complete (during prime job-training and family-forming years), there is a moral problem here. It is no great exaggeration to say, as Mr. Berkowitz does: "Many lives are ruined this way."
Those humanities Ph.D.s who fail to secure tenure-track jobs (the most-desired kind of job in academia, and the one that earns you the title "Professor") often feel they shouldn't waste their teaching skills and that they should keep themselves in the game in case a tenure-track teaching job opens up in their field. These Ph.D.s frequently pick up temporary work as adjunct instructors, and they teach a huge proportion of the university courses in the U.S. The American Association of University Professors reports
48 percent of all faculty serve in part-time appointments, and non-tenure-track positions of all types account for 68 percent of all faculty appointments in American higher education. Both part- and full-time non-tenure-track appointments are continuing to increase.
Worse, when tenured faculty do retire, their tenure-track positions are often replaced by adjunct positions. Gwen Bradley explains some of the effects of this system:
The use of contingent labor is an obvious product of the marketplace mentality: if part-time or non-tenure-track labor is cheaper, it must be better. An increasing acceptance of the idea that universities are essentially run by administrators for the convenience of consumer-students leads to the logic of mass production. Courses that are packaged once and delivered over and over by low-paid, part-time teachers are cheaper and more efficient to produce than courses designed individually by highly qualified, tenure-track professors.
The use of contingent labor also feeds the marketplace mentality's emphasis on managerial control in that the large cadres of contingent workers must be supervised by increasing numbers of managers. Tenure-track faculty, who have a stake in the institution and are able fully to participate in its decision making, are gradually replaced by temporarily employed faculty, who feel less connected to the institution and less empowered to voice their opinion about the way it is managed. Many institutions are experiencing serious budget problems these days. But the turn toward cheaper contingent labor extends further back and has been largely a matter of priorities, not of economic necessity. Many institutions invested heavily in facilities and technology over the past decade, for example, while cutting instructional budgets.
Because they tend to cobble together full-time work from teaching classes at two or more universities, it's not uncommon (in fact, it may even be the norm) for adjuncts not to qualify for insurance and other benefits from the university. In the past, I myself looked at part-time community college positions, but locally instructors are paid by the hour, and I suspect those are only in-class hours. That means that once you figure in prep time, office hours, and grading papers or exams, those instructors make far less than minimum wage. Meanwhile, they're likely trying to pay off student loan and consumer debt left over from their grad school years because hey, who can live on the take-home salary of $10,000 to $12,000 that a typical graduate student might earn over the year?
Meanwhile, during the recession, at larger universities adjunct jobs