83 year old Adjunct Professor dies in abject poverty due to stinginess of her school.

Parents Forum
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<p>@Quant,</p>

<p>Duquesne is first and foremost a UNIVERSITY. Its reason for being is to educate students. Its priority for scheduling its courses is to enable students to get all their degree requirements in time to graduate in 4 years. It’s infeasible for a university to schedule courses primarily to maximize income for part-time faculty. </p>

<p>A university, Catholic-affiliated or not, that cannot schedule its courses properly to graduate its students in a timely fashion will be a university that will cease to exist.</p>

<p>How many sections of French Lit does Duquense really need per section? Are you insisting that the university offer the course more times per semester, regardless of demand, just to pay the prof more?</p>

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<p>Sorry, I think I am not being clear. Here is the minimal obligation that I think Duquesne has, if it wants to remain in the Catholic tradition: Take the instructor’s wage. Divide by the number of hours Duquesne realistically anticipates that the adjunct must work, in order to meet her teaching responsibilities. Now multiply by 2000 (roughly the number of working hours per year). Is that a reasonable wage? Somewhat above poverty level for one person?</p>

<p>If a university department realizes that it has a faculty member who is working and being paid for very few hours, and this is an ongoing situation (for 3 to 5 years, let alone 25), the faculty members might stop and think about the impact of that, if the adjunct does not have a different, full-time job. Is it better to keep multiple people employed as adjuncts below subsistence level, or might several jobs be combined into a single job, that pays reasonably? For example, the university certainly does not need to add more sections of French, but it might have introductory writing courses that are taught by adjuncts, too. Perhaps the adjunct professor in question could have taught some of those, as well as French. (Maybe she could not have done so at 83, but she probably could have done it at 58.) </p>

<p>There could be a good reason to prefer paying multiple people minimal amounts, rather than consolidating the work into a full-time or near full-time position, and letting other very fractional time employees find other work. Avoiding paying for health and retirement benefits would not be a good reason, in my opinion.</p>

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Could NOT NEEDING a full-time faculty teaching French Lit have anything to do with it?</p>

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I don’t understand this. Can u please provide an example w some actual numbers?</p>

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<p>Ok, say the adjunct makes $3000 for teaching one course (rounded down a bit). I think she was teaching intro French, as opposed to French lit. At many schools, the introductory courses meet every day. So the adjunct is in the classroom for 5 hours a week, with one course. How much time is needed for class prep and grading? Are there daily written assignments? Say there are 25 students per section, and it takes only 5 minutes to grade each student’s written homework assignment (that would be an underestimate in many cases). Suppose that written homework is assigned 3 times per week. That would be 6.25 hours per week of grading so far. Is the homework just exercises from the text, or does the professor prepare questions? How many midterms are there, and how long does it take to prepare them? What about the final? Conservatively, I’d estimate 7 hours per week of grading on average, considering tests and quizzes as well as homework. This is purely an estimate, because I don’t know how often written homework is assigned, nor how long test prep and grading takes. Then there is class prep separately from that. Perhaps the professor teaches directly from the book and can totally wing it. (That doesn’t happen in a science class, and I don’t really think that intro language teachers are just winging it.) What do you think is reasonable for class prep in this case? If it is only 18 minutes per class, then that adds 1.5 hours per week to the total. Then most faculty are required to hold one office hour per class hour per week. Suppose that students don’t show up for office hours too often, so it really requires only 2.5 hours per week. </p>

<p>At this point, we have a commitment of 5 + 7 + 1.5 + 2.5 hours per week = 16 hours per week. Suppose there are 15 weeks in the semester. That would give 240 hours actually worked, roughly. At $3000 per course, the adjunct faculty member is making $12.50 per hour. Now multiply by 2000 hours of work per year, to find the equivalent full-time salary. That is $25,000 per year as the corresponding full-time salary. </p>

<p>Duquesne probably passes (at a minimal level), although the corresponding full-time salary is lower than the full-time starting salary for high school teachers in most districts. $25,000 is also lower than the actual take-home pay for our graduate teaching assistants, and their jobs are considered to be half-time.</p>

<p>But maybe the course only meets 3 hours per week. Maybe there is no written homework at all (unlikely). Maybe there are essays after the first few weeks, and they take considerably more than 5 minutes per student to grade. Maybe there is just one midterm exam, but perhaps there are three. Are there quizzes? What about help sessions ahead of the final? Duquesne probably has the syllabus for the course on file (perhaps on the web), so they could easily find out these things, though I don’t plan to look them up.</p>

<p>Re the other point, GMTplus7: I have also suggested that perhaps the woman could have been offered intro writing sections (which our English faculty will not teach), or a full-time staff support position–it wouldn’t need to be more French.</p>

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<p>Well, by “actual take-home pay” for our grad students, I really mean salary after tuition–so it’s not all taken home, strictly speaking.</p>

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<p>Crap. Where to you pull these numbers from? No standardization at all?</p>

<p>I dont think you like the average of 9hrs/week or 135-150 per semester because the fact is, $3500 for that works out to the rate 40k or more. I’ll use 3k for ease. 3000/150= $20/hour. 20 x 40 hours would be $800/week. </p>

<p>No she doesn’t work 40 hours or 50 weeks per year. That’s an equivalent. Instead you would pay her what??? 20k for one class? Forget hiding behind fancy formulae. Tell us a number. Not living wage or Catholic whatever. A number you can stand behind.</p>

<p>Not maybe this or maybe that. Not I think they should hire her as a writing asst or golly we have extra this or that at my U or we need that, so her U…</p>

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<p>Right, she doesn’t work 40 hours, nor 50 weeks per year. I am not suggesting that the adjunct should be paid $20,000 for one class. I am saying that I believe that her rate of pay works out to $12.50 per hour, which is equivalent to $25,000 if she were employed full time. Assessing $25,000 as a full-time salary, it seems passable to me, at a minimal level, though not very good–since our half-time grad students earn that much money (flat out, no conversion to full time, that is their salary for half-time work, and it is after their tuition is paid, so tuition does not have to come out of the $25,000).</p>

<p>I have listed all of the suppositions that go into my figure of the number of hours per week. I am guessing, based on my experiences in a totally different subject area. </p>

<p>Perhaps there are some classes that can be taught on 9 hours per week. There could be economies of scale operating. For example, if someone teaches 5 sections of introductory calculus, which all meet 5 times per week, the university is not going to require 5 x 5 office hours per week on top of that. The homework can be the same for all of the classes, and the preparation can be close to the same, although one would need to keep track of the specific difficulties that students are having in different sections, and address those. When one is devising a mid-term, one probably would have to have different midterms for the different sections; but the final exam might be scheduled at the same time for all of the calculus classes, so you need only one.</p>

<p>I don’t think you can standardize “the time it takes to teach one class.” It must be quite variable from course to course, department to department, and university to university. Actually, it’s also variable from instructor to instructor, if all of those are the same.</p>

<p>You are welcome to break down the time in the way that you think is right, lookingforward. I doubt that you will come up with less than 5 minutes to grade each student’s written homework assignment.</p>

<p>The guy across the hall from me grades problem sets much faster than I do. When he sees things that aren’t correct, he just puts a giant x through them–which may cover 3/4 of the page. He doesn’t put any explanation on the students’ problem sets, just a point total. If my students have gone off track, I try to locate where the errors started, what they were doing wrong, and put an explanation of the error and what’s right, which winds up being specific to each student. Perhaps the IRS will tell me to stop doing this so I can cut the time to 9 hours per week per course, or assign far fewer problem sets per semester.</p>

<p>I put the “maybe’s” because I don’t know about the specific time demands of this case–but Duquesne does.</p>

<p>Why are you apparently hostile to my suggestion that the woman could also have taught introductory writing sections, lookingforward?</p>

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<p>I apologize for going on a side trek here as the discussion is an interesting one to me. However, I’m approaching it from a different direction.</p>

<p>After WWII, with the GI bill, the number of college students increased dramatically and a college education was available to many who would not otherwise have had a chance at one. As the number of students increased, more faculty were hired. As more faculty were needed more students entered PhD programs. PhD programs opened up to individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds than ever before. PhD programs opened up to women and minorities. This changed higher education. (Thanks to QM for making me think about this a very long time ago on another thread)</p>

<p>Since WWII the number of students entering college has continued to rise till this day. And tuition has increased significantly, even adjusted for inflation. In the 60s, it wasn’t unusual for middle class families living on one income to buy a home and send their children to college. I don’t see how this is a possibility today.</p>

<p>Today some universities have more students who want to take specific classes than classes available. As far as I can tell, the university should have more resources than ever before to spend on students. There are more students than ever before, paying higher tuitions than ever before. The best solution in my opinion would be to hire more full time faculty. Instead, when tenured faculty die, retire, or leave for other jobs, it is increasingly the case that the position is cut entirely. So at a time when there are increasing numbers of students at universities, paying higher tuitions than ever before, there are decreasing numbers of tenured faculty. </p>

<p>Another solution would be to have full-time faculty teach more courses. This is already happening at many universities. There is a limit to how many classes an individual can teach effectively. We can disagree on the number but probably have to agree such a number does exist. At a certain point, the number of classes a teacher has to cover will negatively impact students. Yet another solution is to increase number of students in the class. That is also happening and definitely changes classroom experience, and negatively impacts students. And yet another solution is to just not offer enough classes, resulting in difficulties for students graduating in four years. </p>

<p>The solution to this problem has been to hire adjuncts. I don’t think this is a good solution at all. I don’t understand why this is the preferred solution, given that more students = more money. Why is the university cost-cutting in this way?</p>

<p>Maybe my understanding of the situation is completely wrong. It will not hurt my feelings when someone points that out.</p>

<h1>68 NJSue:

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<p>This sums it up for me.</p>

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<p>Are you suggesting that someone with a PhD in French is automatically qualified to teach introductory writing/first-year comp?</p>

<p>There are actually many, many people with vastly more relevant qualifications and teaching experience (PhDs in composition and rhetoric) who are working as adjuncts teaching intro writing courses. The same problem of market saturation exists in this discipline as well.</p>

<p>The assumption that anyone who has a PhD in anything can teach first-year comp is interesting and somewhat depressing.</p>

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Right now I have the equivalent of 15 credits at two different universities. I’m pretty well maxed out. Hell, let’s face it - I’m past maxed out.</p>

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<p>I understand that it does take specialized skill to teach introductory writing at the college level.</p>

<p>On the other hand, if someone sub-divided my job into 10 different components (say, at $3000 per year apiece), I don’t think that I would be the very best qualified person for every one of the 10 components. It’s different when viewed as a whole job.</p>

<p>If a university has an adjunct or non-tenure track faculty member who is teaching 5 sections of introductory writing per semester, and the university is paying a full-time salary, I still think that’s exploitative, and I think it’s too many sections for the instructor to provide good written feedback on all of the assignments. But it at least makes sense to me.</p>

<p>It does not make sense to me–except economically–for a university to hire 5 different people to teach the 5 different sections of introductory writing. Is there a good reason for that?</p>

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<p>I went back to look at NJSue’s post #68, quoted by alh. I can agree emphatically with that.</p>

<p>When I went back to it, I also noticed lookingforward’s post #70, which included the comment

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<p>Actually, I am in neither of those camps. What I am calling for is appointments that actually make sense. In most cases, this would entail full-time work. </p>

<p>If a person has a full-time job elsewhere, and wants to teach a single course at a relatively low salary, and this enriches the student experience, I think that’s great. However, in a lot of cases, the adjuncts do not have other professional employment and are employed by a university only fractionally, at salaries that do not correspond to the compensation of full-time faculty in their fields. I think that the fraction of adjuncts who are female is higher than the fraction of tenure-track Assistant Professors who are female, and much, much higher than the fraction of Full Professors who are female. This is probably not a statistical fluke.</p>

<p>Is there a career track that runs from adjunct teaching one or two courses per semester to an actual tenure-track position? In my field, there is not. We do have post-docs, who are employed full time and are paid $40,000-$45,000 per year typically. (Yes, it’s a bit out of whack with what we pay the grad students.) However, adjuncts might be able to move up to tenure-track positions in some fields. I am not sure that this makes the period of working as an adjunct less exploitative.</p>

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<p>No, except that it saves the university huge money. At my employer, adjuncts may teach no more than 6 credits (2 classes) per semester at $2500 per class. To staff 5 classes would cost the university 12,500. To hire a full-time temporary instructor for one semester with a one-course overload (4 is the standard load) at $24,000 plus benefits (which are mandated by the union for f/t faculty of any rank), the university would have to shell out close to $40,000 to staff those five courses.</p>

<p>Adjunct hires also allow flexibility to not run any more classes than the university is making money on. If a class is underfilled, the university can cut it before the first day of class and dump the students into other sections. My employer does not pay adjuncts until 2 weeks into the semester for that reason.</p>

<p>It’s all about money and convenience for the university administration.</p>

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<p>Thanks, NJSue, your post #253 provides a more factual detail about the economics of the situation. It is consistent with my view that hiring adjuncts is basically a money-saving strategy for the university . . . which brings me back to the question of whether it is <em>right</em>, and whether it is right in the context of a university that is supposed to follow certain principles.</p>

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<p>Institutions must exist in this world. There is always an accommodation between what is perfect and what is pretty good. Universities will always need to rely on adjuncts to some extent, either to offer certain courses or to adjust to changing enrollments. My problem is that they have begun to rely on adjuncts to staff ongoing core programs. This strategy is chronic short-termism at its worst. It hollows out loyalty and long-term investment in the institution and its students. If you are a student and most of your faculty is here this semester, gone the next, it’s not good for the quality of your education.</p>

<p>What families need to ask themselves is whether they are content with their students being taught by an army of immiserated itinerant faculty. The problem is not that this individual person , Mary Margaret Vojtko, was not paid enough for her work at Duquesne. The problem is that there are too many PhDs chasing too few f/t positions. This creates a labor glut that universities are exploiting to the full, as long as they can.</p>

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<p>NJSue: Thank you for writing that</p>

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<p>If universities stopped the practice of relying heavily on adjuncts and created more f/t jobs, it would help; but the real problem is oversupply of qualified people looking for such employment. One could argue that the research university is a Ponzi scheme for aspiring academics; our universities are accepting too many people into programs and not offering them the jobs that are implicitly promised. </p>

<p>Tenured faculty at departments at research institutions are complicit in this dynamic. They want to grow their own programs so they can teach what they want. They would rather train future professors than teach undergraduates needing to satisfy a distribution requirement. You won’t hear them say, “We have too many people in our program. Let’s accept fewer.”</p>

<p>Of course, if universities did replace adjuncts with full-timers, half the adjuncts out there would be out of a job entirely. There is simply not enough demand for that many college teachers.</p>

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<p>^another really clear explanation. </p>

<p>I have heard proposed that standards for tenure approval are out of whack with the basic needs of most universities and that full-time teaching faculty who didn’t publish would be very useful. What do you think about that idea?</p>

<p>adding:</p>

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<p>I hear a few people question whether it is unethical and/or immoral to continue to graduate PhDs who can’t get jobs.</p>

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<p>It’s a lot less expensive for a university to hire adjunct professors. Many of such professors do not teach for the money alone, but for the love of teaching, and the desire to be affiliated with a university. There is a huge pool of very well qualified people who are glad to do this. So the supply is quite good. You get people who just want that little extra, those who are at home with kids and one or two courses suit them just fine, etc, etc. When I was at Duquesne (I was on a board there), a lot of the Pittsburgh Symphony orchestra were lined up to serve as adjunct profs for the school of music and those profs were much sought after by students and it added pizazz to the department. So getting a full time music position there is a tough go, as there aren’t many such positions. So, yes, there are the “celebrity” and specialty profs that serve as adjuncts too. </p>

<p>So it’s cheaper for the university, gives them more flexibility, allows them to get celebrity and specialty profs on board, and there is a good supply of candidates. So why not go with adjuncts? Also it gives more people jobs. Yes, the pay is lousy, but throw it on top of another job, and it makes for nice little extra. My DH has taught and it is nice to get that extra check each term. Not enough for anyone to live on, but it’s a nice hunk of change, and he loved doing it. Would have done it for even less. </p>

<p>But there has to be a frame of full time professors to keep the departments cohesive and everyone on one page. That is something savvy parents looking at expensive colleges look at when assessing a school. You don’t want a bunch of vagrant professors teaching your kids. But spicing up the regulars with some well placed top guns in certain fields is looked upon favaorably.</p>

<p>In the case of this octogenerian, she apparently did well enough in teaching her course or courses that she was able to keep the job for a very long time. For her this was part of a fragile patchwork that kept her afloat financially, barely. Not what a part time adjunct positions is supposed to do. For many, it is a toe in the door for hopefully more work, full time, but it hardly happens that one gets from that one job to a tenure possible position. I don’t know what unions could do when these postions do tend to be part time.</p>

<p>The ACA is getting a lot of flak for those companies and institutions cutting part time hours to make sure they don’t get full time entitlements, but I worked in benefits 40 years ago for a long time and that was always the case. Over 1000 hours of work a year, and there were certain full time things that came into play. So a lot of these companies are just using this as an excuse. Health care premiums have been rising and even without ACA in the picture, some business owners I know where seriously looking at getting rid of health insurance and just giving employees a set amount to get their own.</p>

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<p>The needs of the university have changed because many colleges are now either glorified vocational schools or credential factories. The difference between a high school teacher and a college professor was always the research component. It’s probably true that many “universities” as we now define them, with their scads of remedial classes and gen ed requirements to assure that graduates are not completely culturally illiterate, don’t need as many teacher-scholars. </p>

<p>I see a two-tier system emerging, with some tenured faculty who publish and hold academic administrative positions, and more term-contract full-timers teaching 100-200 level classes. Personally I would not bother getting a PhD if the second type of job were what was available to me. I would try to teach high school instead. I’ve done both, and being a tenured high school teacher in a nice district is better than being a college non-tenure-track instructor.</p>