I don’t have a lot of time to muse on this right now– ironically, I have to worry about some teaching things and other aspects of my day job– but I thought I’d pass along this article from Inside Higher Ed from earlier this week, “Breadth of Adjunct Use and Abuse.” It offers some interesting statistics about the extent to which different areas of higher ed– community colleges, four year colleges, and research universities– use non-tenure-track/part-time instructors, aka adjuncts.
It’s interesting stuff, and, as a college professor, I very much applaud the release of this information. We should be striving to teach as many classes as possible with empowered and adequately compensated teachers as possible. Having said that, I’m not so sure that folks outside of academia would agree with me on that. Here’s a quote:
“Most people don’t know the situation,” said Lawrence N. Gold, director of higher education at the AFT [that is, the American Federation of Teachers, the group that issued this report]. He acknowledged that there will be no immediate shift from relying on adjuncts to creating tenure-track positions. But he said that, if more of the public comes to understand what has happened to public higher education, progress can be made. The AFT and other faculty groups have argued that while many adjunct instructors are great classroom teachers, their working conditions — such as lack of office hours, being cut off from curricular decisions, being forced to move from campus to campus — result in a reduced quality of education, and erode the job security vital for academic freedom.
You know, I don’t think that most folks outside of academia– taxpayers, parents of students paying the bills, students paying their own way, etc.– care as much about these things as Gold of the AFT think that they do. When I talk to my sisters and brothers-in-law, all of whom have college degrees and who are not academic-types, what they wonder about is why in the heck college is so expensive, why is it that professors can’t be fired, and how big of a deal really is this “academic freedom” thing anyway?
Don’t get me wrong– I agree with Gold, and I disagree with my relatives. But the folks in higher ed who really care about these things haven’t done as good of a job as convincing folks like my relatives about why these issues of adjuncts and such are important.
Slight Update:
“Dean Dad,” a semi-anonymous academic administrator at a community college who has a blog called Confessions of a Community College Dean,” more or less trashes this AFT report. The blog entry is here, “Some Thoughts on the AFT Report.”
