There was an article on CNN Money today listing “College Professor” as number three on a list of the top fifty jobs in America. While, for many reasons, I couldn’t agree more with the ranking, there are also a few things about the university teaching life that aren’t widely known outside of certain relatively small circles.
For example, while anyone working at a university knows that not all faculty members are treated equally, those not working in academia, even most of the students themselves, and certainly their parents, don’t often realize that the title “professor,” which is nearly a universal address in college classrooms, is, for at least two-thirds of America’s university faculty, a sort of misnomer. Universities widely employ “adjunct faculty,” who serve in a role not so different from day laborers, standing on the street corner waiting to be picked up for the day’s (or semester’s) pay, toiling in a job that, despite popular perception, usually ends up requiring far more than the typical forty hour work week, and which most often gives the instructor no benefit coverage whatsoever, and, pretending the instructor can even get a full load at one university, which is typically defined as teaching three courses, they can expect to receive somewhere in the general ballpark of $9,000 compensation for the entire semester (and that is a generous estimate, assuming said job is at a fairly large university), which means that an entire year’s pay would be just about $18,000 before taxes. Sure you get the summer off, but on that pay scale, do you really? Can anyone actually working to support him or herself afford a summer off at $18,000 a year?
Which begs the question: when exactly are these adjunct instructors supposed to do their own work and research, which is cited in the CNN article as a necessity for the job (and job advancement). While adjunct instructors, and some low level, full-time faculty members, teach three to four classes a semester (six to eight a year), true professors, which means that they have a PhD, often teach only two classes a semester and have, or are in line for, tenure and sabbaticals, which, if nothing else, allow for a certain peace of mind.
Of course, the question of what you teach also has a large impact on the likelihood of your employment and pay scale. Teach in the technical fields and you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding a job; teach in the liberal arts and may God be with you.
This, in turn, leads to the devolution of pedagogy in some basic required classes, and it’s hard to blame adjunct instructors saddled with somewhere between 75 to 100 students a semester for the decline. Consider the typical composition instructor (composition being a course notorious for being taught by adjunct instructors), who is expected to assign between four to five essays a semester; if we assume 75 students, four essays a semester, that means 300 essays a semester to be graded and corrected line-by-line and then extensively commented upon. This, of course, does not account for all of the other work to be graded in a typical composition class, not to mention conferences, which are incredibly useful, but incredibly time-consuming, among the many other required components of the semester.
Realistically, when it comes down to it, whom would you rather have teaching you or your child: an overextended, underpaid instructor teaching at several universities at once, scraping to get by, or someone with a comfortable schedule, comfortable salary, and comfortable workload?
The problem is that students, and their parents, often don’t know the difference when registration occurs. If this issue were made widely known to all concerned parties, it would seem inevitable that some sort of backlash would follow, which would clearly be detrimental to the university strategy of turning education into the next McDonald’s workforce, where labor is cheap and the quality delivered is often questionable.
Of course, this is only to highlight one of several serious issues with university teaching. More to come later…
Check out the CNN article here.
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