“Decline of the Tenure Track Raises Concerns” in the NY Times notes that there are more adjunct than tenured professors in U.S. universities and colleges. Universities are hiring adjunct faculty due to financial pressures and their desire for more flexibility in hiring (and of course firing). Adjunct faculty are usually hired without health benefits and only with a semester or year contract. Universities are thought of as liberal bastions yet when they are asked to apply those principles to their own institutions they seem to be acting more like conservative business owners.
So, are liberals, with their inner Milton Friedman demons, more conflicted than their conservative counterparts? According to a study by Stanley Feldman and John Zaller way back in 1992 titled, “The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State,” the answer is YES. They find:
[I]t is liberals rather than conservatives who are most beset by value conflict over social welfare because they are the ones who must somehow reconcile activist government with traditional principles of economic individualism and laissez-faire.
It’s tough being a liberal!
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Adjuncts also get paid for teaching at piecework rates. When I was still in academia, a decade or so ago, an adjunct could expect maybe $1500-2000 per course.
What does GWU pay its adjuncts these days?
But what does this have to do with being conflicted? It’s the professors who give the academic world its liberal reputation, not the university presidents and provosts and boards of trustees/visitors/etc.
And if the professors had their way, there would be more tenured positions and fewer adjuncts, right? But it’s not their call: it’s the administrators who are making that decision, presumably with input from the board.
Low-tech cyclist,
I don’t know how much GW adjuncts get paid, but I’ll try to find out.
You make a good point about the administrators making the final decisions, but I believe tenured (senior) faculty have a lot of input in these decisions. For example, if all the tenured faculty demanded that adjuncts receive health care benefits, etc. I think it would happen but would tenured faculty be willing to reduce their salaries to pay for these benefits? Probably not, but I think they would at least initially be conflicted about their decision.
GW pays its adjuncts in the $2500-$3500 range, with some exceptions. In DC, the labor pool is abundant, and this rate is pretty much in line with what other schools are paying — lower than one that I know of, higher than or on the same level as the others that I know of. Not lucrative in any event. I used to tell prospective adjuncts that if they were doing it for the money, they’d be better off flipping burgers at MacDonalds. Fortunately, many of them aren’t doing it for the money. Unfortunately, many of them are.
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