The plight of the adjuncts
Its cause and solution
The recent furor over academic freedom at Minnesota’s Hamline University, where an adjunct professor was terminated following her showing of a portrait of Muhammad in an art history class, highlighted the precariousness of adjunct faculty at American colleges and universities. This theme is a familiar one, and it evokes familiar laments that higher education in this country rests on the backs of an underclass of underpaid and insecure instructors. “They really have no idea about how we live and how we survive or how much we’re being exploited,” said an adjunct who split his time among American University, Georgetown University and George Washington University. An adjunct instructor at Duke University inferred that the low pay and disrespect she endured were by design. “It keeps you nice and disposable,” she said.
The tone of the coverage is consistently commiserative. “Low Pay, Long Commutes: The Plight of the Adjunct Professor” is the headline of a typical NPR piece. The Atlantic pronounced, “There is No Excuse for How Universities Treat Adjuncts.” PBS reported, “Homeless Professor Protests Conditions of Adjuncts.” A documentary called “Professors in Poverty” features an adjunct professor who says, “I have the highest level of learning and I am literally on welfare.”
One can’t help sympathizing with people who work hard and still struggle to keep head above water. Yet one has to wonder where common sense has gone in this discussion. Numerous articles point to the growing number of courses taught by adjunct faculty, compared with the number taught by permanent instructors. Plausible estimates indicate that courses taught by adjuncts outnumber courses taught by permanent faculty three to one in in America as a whole, whereas the ratio was just the opposite fifty years ago.
What explains the flip? In a word: Oversupply. In the four and a half decades after 1970, the number of PhDs conferred by American universities doubled. Student enrollments doubled during that time as well, which might have suggested that the job market would absorb all the new PhDs. But larger classes can be accommodated by existing faculty; a professor can lecture to two hundred students as easily as to one hundred.
Indeed, those larger classes became a factor in the overproduction of PhDs. That lone professor was often aided by teaching assistants drawn from the ranks of graduate students. The larger the classes, the more incentive for the universities to expand their graduate programs.
The upshot was that by the 1980s the number of doctorates conferred regularly outstripped the number of permanent—tenured or tenure-track—jobs available, especially in the humanities and social sciences. In history, for instance, new PhDs in the mid-2010s were twice the number of permanent jobs.
Few of those who didn’t land the jobs were pleased to write off the time and resources they had invested in graduate training. Many were willing to take adjunct jobs in the hope something better would turn up. For most, it didn’t. They found themselves stuck in the endless loop of semester-to-semester employment. Trained to reason and write, they could and did plead their case articulately.
But this didn’t mean their complaints were justified—at least not to where anyone else should do anything about them. Nobody is compelling the adjuncts accept the jobs they are offered. If they don’t find the terms satisfactory, they should look elsewhere for employment. After all, they have an advantage over most of the rest of the population in that they are (very) well educated.
To be sure, other jobs aren’t the ones they had hoped for, but nobody is guaranteed the job of his or her dreams. And it’s not as though the shortfall of jobs took anyone by surprise—not in this century, at any rate.
Arguably the graduate programs that admitted the students bear some responsibility. They knew the job odds better than the applicants to their programs, and some understood their departments’ ulterior motives in accepting more students than their disciplines could employ at the other end.
But the people who accepted the admission offers were all adults, consenting and reasonably intelligent. And many were counseled against unrealistic hopes by members of the very programs they entered. (Here I speak as one who has done such counseling for decades. I know I am not alone.)
The message is sinking in, finally. The number of PhDs awarded fell 5.4 percent between 2020 and 2021. May the trend continue. One day, perhaps, the sellers of labor rather than the purchasers will have the edge in higher ed.
I largely endorse this advice to adjuncts and grad students (as well as postdocs) as a STEM PhD that transitioned to the tech industry when I graduated in 2013.
As you’ve stated, the supply for PhDs has greatly exceeded the demand—particularly tenure track demand—for decades, and the problem only grows worse every year. This is even true for many STEM fields with associated industries; the one exception being certain fields of computer science.
One challenge that I’ve encountered in offering alternative career paths to friends and colleagues is an immediate visceral discomfort in even considering such a transition. I imagine some of that is loss aversion; not wanting to squander the time and effort already spent on the path to becoming a professor. There may also be some fear of the unknown as well as concerns of failing; at least the agony and failure modes of being an adjunct or postdoc are already well known.
I believe that publicizing alternative paths for PhD students and graduates would be of great assistance to these individuals. I personally benefited from the boom in demand for data scientists in the early 2010’s, in that the tech industry put many resources into publicity and outreach. There may be similar opportunities in other fields.
Further, PhD programs shouldn’t feel threatened by these alternative paths and may actually benefit from them. Even before tech started hunting for STEM PhDs, the finance industry had established academic connections and dedicated recruiting resources to poach these individuals. Students like myself who were aware of these opportunities at the time of application found them a valuable hedge in de-risking the time and effort we were preparing to invest.
Finally, institutional changes in PhD programs would also help. The low odds of tenure for all but the most elite programs should be clearly communicated to applicants alongside alternative career paths. The programs should foster connections with firms in applicable industries and host career fairs.
The plight of adjunct teachers in higher education is one of many problems confronting colleges and universities. The economics of the issue may in time resolve some of the difficulties. But there is much more here. Their difficulties are often viewed as necessary form those who head these institutions, or are seen by many as workers exploited in terms of the poor working condition and terrible salaries. The central problem with the excessive use of adjuncts is that these institutions seem to have lost sight of the importance of educating students. This should be their primary mission. Adjuncts and the quality of the education are compromised in a number of ways. This teacher so often has a teaching load far greater than any tenured faculty and are paid for piece work with each course taught. This is done for money that is far short of what they deserve.
There is also a lot of talk about the savings and yet the quality of the offerings will suffer. These schools generate millions of dollars in putting out massive athletic teams and also continue to raise tuition fees each year. The argument continues that budgets have to be balanced and they must remain competitive with other schools. Adjuncts are almost powerless in bringing these problems to the public's attention.
Adjuncts are compromised too in their pursuit of academic freedom. They are beholden to an increasing and demanding student population and administrations looking out for signs of objectionable discussions they perceive as a threat to their schools or a student's ideological preferences. A adjunct's freedom of expression is bound to be sacrificed.
There are so easy solutions to this predicament, and over time the economic supply and demand may resolve some of the difficulties. But let's start to pay these partners in learning a decent wage and to teach with the integrity for which they have giving many years of study.