For those whose kids are interested in pursuing a career as a humanities professor, read the following article and be warned. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148/
And these are the institutions that demand we pay $50,000+ a year in tuition.
Wow. What an eye opener. My experience with the business schools has been that many teachers are merely moonlighting. They were CPA’s teaching a grad school tax class or an undergrad accounting class. You had other business professionals teaching classes also. But those are business school classes.
It never occurred to me that many professors teaching the other humanities classes were poor and receiving public assistance. Wow. Almost speechless.
And yes. Totally nuts they they want us to pay $50K/year for tuition alone.
Interesting topic. I have plenty of thoughts to share on it. I will post when I am not in class.
I have mixed feelings about this. I think a fair number of adjuncts are moonlighting out of interest, and not for the pay (in fact, I’ve done it myself). I think a lot of these younger adjuncts are clinging to a remote hope that they’ll eventually get a tenure-track position somewhere, and that has gotten extremely difficult–in part, it seems, because colleges have begun to use so many adjuncts in order to save money.
Quick summary:
Obviously, this means that the job situation is good for those who manage to become insiders (tenured faculty), but poor for those stuck on the outside (everyone else, like those surviving as adjuncts).
I have a close relative who is one of these exploited adjuncts. What’s most shocking to me – and her! – is the extent that her school is complicit in this exploitation by misleading her, and others in her position. Few administrators are honest about adjuncts’ chances for either full time employment or chances for tenure-track jobs. The school creates a false sense of hope that these part-timers could either become full-time adjuncts or – even more remotely – tenure-track faculty because it RELIES on a stable of cheap workers. It’s not in schools’ interest to be honest. There’s always “talk” about so-and-so retiring or about such-and-such grant. And 99% of the time, it doesn’t pan out. And the school damn well knows it.
“Wow. What an eye opener. My experience with the business schools has been that many teachers are merely moonlighting.”
Was this recent, @MassDaD68 ? Because IME the situation has become much worse over the last 5-10 years, especially in public universities.
As a parent, it’s one of the stats you should look at when researching schools. When the %age of adjunct professors is very high, ask some questions.
Business adjuncts differ from humanities adjuncts because typically business instructors can make considerably more money working outside of academia. The business adjuncts I know who teach do it for various reasons including prestige, professional advancement, recruiting or just for the diversion. Teaching is not their primary source of income.
The ability of humanities adjuncts to get paying jobs outside of academia that are pertinent to their academic backgrounds is much more limited.
Re #1, #3, #6, #7
The difference is that the moonlighting adjuncts in business, engineering, CS, law, etc. are in a position where it is choice for them to do it out of interest or professional advancement, but they would be perfectly fine without such jobs, since they have a more favorable non academic job market to work in for their main source of income. There are far more non academic jobs for someone with a PhD in CS than for someone with a PhD in English.
It was an important piece of the puzzle for us in choosing a college,along with student-faculty ratio and other measures of academic quality.
It seems to me that PhDs in humanities are also able to work in industry if they choose. The skills that they developed critiquing literature or their research in a social science (whatever the humanities are considered to be) should also be applicable to various types of business, government, whatever. Becoming a tenured professor is a difficult level of employment to achieve, apparently, but is it more difficult than a similar level in businesses outside higher education? Could they get that better paying work with only a bachelor degree, or a master’s?
In many other types of jobs, there is a more gradual gradation of job quality, versus the huge cliff between tenured faculty members with a high degree of employment security and relatively high pay versus adjuncts who are low paid often-part-time temporary employees. To make an economic analogy, academic job quality, at least in fields where there are few non-academic job opportunities for those with PhDs in the field, has a very high Gini coefficient – i.e. much closer to winner-take-all than many other types of jobs.
It may be a difficult thing for someone who has invested a large portion of his/her life in PhD study of something to essentially abandon it and look for entry-level generic bachelor’s degree jobs.
Another thing that I find refreshing about adjunct teachers is that they bring current first hand business knowledge to the classroom. I would think the same would be true to computer teachers. Who the heck wants a tenured computer teacher? I want someone on the cutting edge of technology. Not some guy who will be teaching me some ancient computer language that is barely used anymore. Great if you got a researcher in the field, but honestly how many of them are realistically available to students?
Those currently employed in the field are the most powerful IMO. I remember taking a summer class one year that was taught by an IRS guy. It was a wonderful class that taught us the procedures as well as the tax law. My wife’s accounting classes at night were almost exclusively taught by employed CPA partners. In fact, I recall the university promoting the fact that many of the professors were local industry executives. The not too subtly point being that if your an excellent student you might get a job.
The world is changing fast and you need the classrooms to be lead by the current leaders in that industry not some ancient guy in an ivory tower.
Agreed on all points. Adjuncts have their place, but it is extremely unusual for adjuncts in the humanities to be doing it for any other reason than a desperate attempt to piece together an income after graduate school. It is highly unlikely that they will ever make it onto the tenure track.
Worth noting that the sciences have a similar but distinct problem, the “postdocalypse”. Unlike in the humanities, in the sciences you are expected to do one or more postdocs of a year or two, often moving nationally or internationally between them. The number of faculty positions is radically smaller than the number of postdoc positions.
While this may be true of courses taught by business people to upper division and grad students, it is the intro courses that are more often taught by adjuncts. And they are ore likely to be ONLY adjuncting rather than moonlighting.
I would certainly expect a tenured professor to be on top of (and doing research in) current concepts, technology, languages, whatever. And also expect that this professor have a proven track record of successfully teaching these to undergraduate students.
@MassDaD68 Tenured – or tenure-track – computer science professors are so cutting-edge their work is DECADES ahead of not just the classroom, but also the industry. They do the theory on which the practice will someday be based. If you want a TOP computer science department, you certainly don’t want adjuncts knowledgeable in computers. You want SCIENTISTS.
I think many firms are highly reluctant to hire a PhD for some job doing analysis. Overqualified is usually a quick ticket to File 13 for any applicant. Nobody wants some settler hanging around.
And have you seen the current academic jargon?? Impenetrable…
Good CS departments treat computer languages as tools, not primary subjects. So they will use whatever is suitable for the subject being taught (old or new). Students who use various computer languages as needed for the tasks at hand can easily adapt to whatever new ones they encounter in the future.
I took an online English class and one week, the professor posted an incomplete poem, that we were assigned to write about. I wrote her and asked if she could sent the rest of it.
Two weeks later, well past the paper deadline, she answered me and apologized. She told me she was an adjunct, had many many students in many classes so she could make ends meet, that she had not had time to send the rest of the poem, and that she was going on food stamps.
For students, this kind of situation affects the quality of classes, frankly. I felt sympathy for her but at the same time, it took a lot for me to scrape up the money for the class and I wanted better teaching, something not possible when the adjunct is stretched so thin just to have enough to eat.
There is no guarantee that you would have “better teaching” with a tenure-track faculty, unfortunately.