Why Not Adjunct Administrators Instead of Adjunct Instructors?

[Zinhead]

Seems reasonable. I know when I write a check for tuition, it is for the quality of the teachers, not the administrators.

http://thescholarpreneur.com/not-adjunct-administrators-instead-adjunct-instructors-makes-far-sense/

Most of the growth of university costs comes from administrative bloat. Non-faculty staff has grown at more than twice the rate of instructors – you know, the people who are the ostensible reason a university exists. As tenured professors retire, administrators kill those tenure lines and replace them permanently with part timers. Administrators do this so they can gorge on a higher salary while demanding more from the refugee ration-packet salary of academics. Think I am not being generous? Some administrators earn $300,000 a year to fundraise for new football stadium skyboxes. Vice Presidents at the University of Maryland saw their salaries increase by 50 percent between 1998 and 2003, as faculty positions were slashed. All the while adjuncts try to get by with the help of Medicaid or food stamps.

One way that we can rescue ourselves from this campus police state and save university budgets for professors is by making the employment situation of administrators like that of adjunct instructors. Make them fireable at will. Replace salaried employees with low-paid “adjunct administrators” to handle routine functions.

The corporate world does it all the time. They call it outsourcing. Most office work can be done through temp agencies or staffers to handle routine functions. There is no reason that this function can’t work in higher education.

[ucbalumnus]

Probably already being done with low level administrators, not high level administrators with greater political power within the organization that they use to protect their jobs and pay rates.

I.e. the situation is probably not so different from other kinds of businesses where poor performing CEOs and such get criticized for running the business into the ground and laying off many lower level employees, while taking big paychecks for themselves.

A good CEO or university president can be well worth his/her pay for having the put up with the job and doing it well, but it seems all too easy to hire poor ones who are paid just as well as or more than good ones. The same can apply to other high level business executives or university administrators.

[CCDD14]

So you propose to hire a Vice-Provost for Diversity and Inclusion as a contractor from a “staff augmentation” company and outsource this position to India?

[PurpleTitan]

I reckon that many administrators are already at-will, no?

[HRSMom]

Why outsource the position when you can automate it

[Requin]

So you propose to hire a Vice-Provost for Diversity and Inclusion as a contractor from a “staff augmentation” company and outsource this position to India?

Doing so could hardly add less value than is already being provided under the current system.

[sylvan8798]

@Zinhead

Seems reasonable. I know when I write a check for tuition, it is for the quality of the teachers, not the administrators.

How endearing to start the first line of your OP by adjunct-bashing.

[GMTplus7]

Why Not Adjunct Administrators Instead of Adjunct Instructors?

Because the administrators are the ones who make the rules.

[college_query]

Why outsource the position when you can automate it

I worked in an administrative position at a university in IT. There was talk of outsourcing IT. And also lots of suggestions to just “automate it” and make it online so we needed less staff - because automating and online happens magically, you know.

[snarlatron]

Because the administrators are the ones who make the rules.

This point, as well as a greater analysis of college “supersized bureaucracies” is well-made and supported in the 2011 book Higher Education? by Hacker & Dreifus.

[SlackerMomMD]

^^ My boss, in a unit within a state university, just went the outsource route with our IT needs. It’s not pretty. I agree people think outsourcing “cheap” and somehow magically will suit specific or unique situations. It doesn’t

[kelsmom]

The corporate world does it all the time. They call it outsourcing. Most office work can be done through temp agencies or staffers to handle routine functions. There is no reason that this function can’t work in higher education.

---

It IS done in higher education. Financial aid, admissions, enrollment call centers … these are just a few I can think of off the top of my head.

[mathyone]

I’m sure many of you have received the flood of college spam emails. Many of them are so similar to one another that I have to believe they were outsourced to some ad firm. They were also just terrible–I think a middle schooler could have run a more impressive advertising campaign. Not sure I’d want to attend any college that would have to outsource something like that. If their admissions officers can’t easily sit down and put together a great one page ad for the school, there’s probably not much great about the school.

[Hanna]

Look at the other threads where parents are distressed because their kid has a crisis and couldn’t get an appointment with a counselor for two weeks, or faced long lines at registration, or is graduating without a job in part because the career center was understaffed. Those are administrative functions, not faculty functions. Of course there may be waste in many departments, including academics, but when kids need services, parents complain about inadequate administration, not too much. It affects learning directly, too…back when professors had better secretarial support, they didn’t have to schedule their own appointments, handle routine correspondence, etc. That’s time the professors can’t spend on research or instruction.

[Zinhead]

@sylvan8798 -

How endearing to start the first line of your OP by adjunct-bashing.

I was going answer but am quite unsure what you mean. Adjuncts are usual thought of as non-tenure tract professors who teach on a contract basis with no job security or benefits. Their plight is well known:

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/12/17/459707022/low-pay-long-commutes-the-plight-of-the-adjunct-professor

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lev-raphael/how-academia-drives-adjun_b_9505806.html

The following movie illustrates the poor position adjuncts are in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbWFcqbefMs

The following story illustrates what ultimately happens to adjuncts.

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/22/224946206/adjunct-professor-dies-destitute-then-sparks-debate

The death of a long-time, part-time professor in Pittsburgh is gathering the attention of instructors nationwide. The trend of relying on part-time faculty has been in the works for decades, and Margaret Mary Vojtko’s story is seen by some as a tragic byproduct.

Last spring, months before her death, Vojtko showed up at a meeting between adjunct professors at Duquesne University and the union officials who had been trying to organize them. The professors are trying to organize a union affiliated with the United Steelworkers. Daniel Kovalik, senior counsel to the Steelworkers union, says Vojtko was distraught. “She had cancer; she had very high medical bills,” Kovalik says.

After 25 years of teaching French at Duquesne, the university had not renewed her contract. As a part-time professor, she had been earning about $10,000 a year, and had no health insurance.

“She didn’t want charity,” Kovalik says. “She thought that after working 25 years for Duquesne that she was owed a living wage and some sort of retirement and benefits.”

Vojtko died Sept. 1 after a heart attack at the age of 83, destitute and nearly homeless.

[HRSMom]

@college_query and outsourcing usually works out SO well…

Every time we do it, I count the days until they bring it back in house and make us clean up the mess!

I have a theory that, no matter what you do for a living, the big bosses see you as interchangeable cogs…Anyone can do it! Except they can’t!

[Zinhead]

@Hanna -

Look at the other threads where parents are distressed because their kid has a crisis and couldn’t get an appointment with a counselor for two weeks, or faced long lines at registration, or is graduating without a job in part because the career center was understaffed. Those are administrative functions, not faculty functions…It affects learning directly, too…back when professors had better secretarial support, they didn’t have to schedule their own appointments, handle routine correspondence, etc. That’s time the professors can’t spend on research or instruction.

The following article rebuts from 2011 rebuts your assertions.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all

Forty years ago, America’s colleges employed more professors than administrators. The efforts of 446,830 professors were supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. Over the past four decades, though, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents”—that is, slots filled by two or more part-time faculty members whose combined hours equal those of a full-timer—increased slightly more than 50 percent. That percentage is comparable to the growth in student enrollments during the same time period. But the number of administrators and administrative staffers employed by those schools increased by an astonishing 85 percent and 240 percent, respectively.

Today, administrators and staffers safely outnumber full-time faculty members on campus. In 2005, colleges and universities employed more than 675,000 fulltime faculty members or full-time equivalents. In the same year, America’s colleges and universities employed more than 190,000 individuals classified by the federal government as “executive, administrative and managerial employees.” Another 566,405 college and university employees were classified as “other professional.” This category includes IT specialists, counselors, auditors, accountants, admissions officers, development officers, alumni relations officials, human resources staffers, editors and writers for school publications, attorneys, and a slew of others. These “other professionals” are not administrators, but they work for the administration and serve as its arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouthpieces.

While some administrative posts continue to be held by senior professors on a part-time basis, their ranks are gradually dwindling as their jobs are taken over by fulltime managers. College administrations frequently tout the fiscal advantages of using part-time, “adjunct” faculty to teach courses. They fail, however, to apply the same logic to their own ranks. Over the past thirty years, the percentage of faculty members who are hired on a part-time basis has increased so dramatically that today almost half of the nation’s professors work only part-time. And yet the percentage of administrators who are part-time employees has fallen during the same time period.

[Hanna]

“The following article rebuts from 2011 rebuts your assertions.”

No, it doesn’t. I don’t claim that administrative staffs in general have shrunk. They’ve grown. But professors used to have secretaries, and now typically there’s one for a whole department. Ask anyone who’s been around a university for a few decades. Those administrators free up faculty.

How is that article supposed to rebut my assertion that a lot of CC parents want more non-academic service from colleges? They do. The threads are everywhere. Administrators aren’t evil. Waste is evil. The assumption that administrative staff = waste is pretty obviously false when it’s your kid who needs tutoring, guidance, transcripts, a room change, etc. etc.

Forty years ago, you didn’t have parents saying, “How did the college fail to notice and intervene when my kid slept 19 hours a day/had no summer job/started taking drugs/was purging in the bathroom/cut her wrists?” If you want colleges to act on things like that, well, those are administrators.

[katliamom]

@zinhead your article doesn’t rebut Hanna’s comment. It’s actually a non-sequitor. Hanna’s point is about services that were never performed by faculty – no professor would work in the career office or health center.

The article raises the issue of the growth of administration vs. faculty, but doesn’t say why that is (at least not in the piece you shared.) And the real reason is that universities today provide more services than they did 40 years ago. They’re also more entrepreneurial than 40 years ago, due to dramatic decrease in state funding. For the most part, the increase in services and the increased need to set up, and run, programs that generate profits are the real reason for the growth of administration.

That for-profit online degree program (cash cows for many schools) or fancy study abroad program (ditto) requires IT support, staffing and management. In other words, administration.

[sylvan8798]

@Zinhead

I was going answer but am quite unsure what you mean. Adjuncts are usual thought of as non-tenure tract professors who teach on a contract basis with no job security or benefits. Their plight is well known:

I am well aware of the plight of adjuncts, having been one for most of the past 20 years.

Seems reasonable. I know when I write a check for tuition, it is for the quality of the teachers, not the administrators.

How is your opening statement not saying “I want to spend my money on quality teachers (instead of poor quality adjuncts), and let the (poor quality) adjuncts be the administrators.”??