From the New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis comes this story about the further slide of higher education into the gutter of institutions that think they are venerated but act more like prostitutes chasing billionaire donors while exploiting and abusing teaching faculty and ignoring their original purpose.
An advertisement for a job opening at UCLA recently called for “an assistant adjunct professor — required: Ph.D. in chemistry or biochemistry, a strong teaching record at the college level, and three to five letters of recommendation.” The job was “without salary basis,” a very twisted euphemism that was clarified with the statement — “Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.”
Wow. For the glory of saying that you teach at UCLA, rely on its reputation to pay living expenses instead of cash, you greedy capitalist!
Irreversibly Redefining “Faculty”
Faculty used to be categorized as tenure-track status (with titles of Assistant, Associate and the highest grade, Full Professor) or Instructors who are employees entitled to pay and benefits. Of course, in large universities with a stable of graduate students, most undergraduate courses have been taught by low-paid students called teaching associates or some such thing. Parents mortgage their homes to send their kids to “prestigious” schools with high tuition (feeding the student loan debt industry, don’t get me started!) only to have them taught by students with only slightly more experience than the undergrads themselves.
The “Contingent Faculty” movement includes all part-time adult college and university faculty, nearly 70% of all faculty. These part-timers have advanced degrees and would qualify for positions like the UCLA posting. Pay is lousy, if at all, and no benefits are included. They are not employees. They are “gig,” albeit highly educated workers. Job security is a thing of the past.
All I ever wanted to do was to be a college professor. I was a “straight through” from high school to college to graduate school to postdoctoral college teaching. Life intervened and took me away from a tenure-track future. For two decades, I was an academic nomad selling my skills to a variety of colleges and universities, teaching both graduate and undergraduate courses for state and private schools, large and small. I was either an Instructor or Adjunct Professor. Fortunately, back then, benefits came with some of the jobs.
Alas, it was our family’s encounter with workplace bullying 27 years ago that changed the audience for my teaching from kids, adults in college and military officers to bullied targets. Who knew? Life is not linear. But I’m still teaching.
From the NYT article I learned that the miserly academe has only grown worse over time. There is a union for such under- and un-compensated faculty at the University of California with 7,000 members across the system. And the list of titles has expanded. Lecturers are unionized. Adjunct faculty are not. Institutions toy with academic’s lives by employing different titles — instructor, lecturer, adjunct instructor, adjunct lecturer — furthering the distance in status between tenure-track and contingent faculty groups.
Worse still is that once a person agrees to work free, it emboldens the university to more brazenly test the limits of denigrating educators. The disrespect for those who teach has never been lower. [But I tend to forget that the pompous ass of a supervisor I had during graduate school who neither the desire to teach or do research when I knew him, devalued the teaching awards — campus and national — that I had won. Said he, “no one cares about teaching.”]
Looks like his attitude captured perfectly the practices directed against contingency faculty who tend to love to teach, sometimes for no pay.
Poor Institutions? Cry Me A River!
P.S., FYI, UCLA has an endowment of $7.4 billion. The entire University of California system has a $29.9 billion endowment. Harvard, a stand-alone institution not part of a multi-campus system, has an endowment of $53.2 billion. These institutions are NOT poor. They just don’t pay the people who carry the teaching load.
Naming rights are available to rich folks for university administrative roles. It’s akin to when corporations splash their names on sports stadiums.
At UCLA, $5 million buys a Dean’s Chair or pays the salary for a faculty person with additional funds for research (though the salary won’t be $5 million!). One million can sponsor lectureships. However, it seems the school keeps the dough and stiffs lecturers. Read here to see what millions of dollars can buy at UCLA.
Philanthropist typically pay in the tens of millions for naming rights for an entire school (business, medicine, etc.) of a university or for a campus building. David Geffen, entertainment mogul, gave UCLA $200 million to name the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Wondering if we should stop calling them campuses. Plantations seems a more apt description.
