By Peter Galuszka
Despite the common view on this blog that college professors are lazy, closed-minded louts always out on sabbatical, the reality may be something quite different.
Cash-strapped colleges across in the country, and in Virginia, are relying increasingly on low-paid adjunct professors to close the gap, especially when they increase the number of students without adding faculty. The result: fully-trained and capable professors with PhDs teaching seven, eight or nine courses a year and pulling down subsistence-level money.
This is not exactly the version you find among many anti-intellectual conservatives who paint higher education as cesspools of waste and fraud.
According to a revealing story in the Richmond Times Dispatch, at Virginia Commonwealth University, the state’s second- largest school,only 35 percent of full-time faculty held tenure or tenure-tracked positions in 2012. In the early 2000s, the school added 8,500 students without adding faculty. Following this, the TD states, budget cuts made jobs even tighter.
The school has 31,000 students and 2,048 full-time instructional faculty and 686 administrative and professional faculty members. They are buttressed by 1,205 adjunct, part-time professors. Many race from course to course to make ends meet.
One is Jennifer Garvin Sanchez who makes a poverty-level annual income of $18,500 while teaching seven religious studies courses a year. She says maintenance workers earn more than she does.
Some adjuncts have had enough and are joining unions. In October, professors at Tufts University (my alma mater) voted to join the Service Employees International Union which has 2.1 million members and is targeting college professors. Profess at Georgetown University joined in May and American University’s adjunct faculty voted for collective bargaining last year.
So, welcome to yet another reality you don’t read about much on this blog. All you learn here is how expensive and wasteful colleges are and how professors are laggards that could be easily replaced by MOOCs.
But then, you sow what you reap. All the tight-money, anti-union types may someday have to confront the reality that a college is shut down because the part-time, pin money, adjunct professors who pull most of the freight are on strike.
As much as they talk about avoiding unions, this is exactly the way to breath new life into them.
