The New York Times | LEARNING
Adjunct Professors Step up Their Efforts to Increase Pay
By PHYLLIS KORKKI | APRIL 5, 2018
 Andrew Behrendt
Andrew Behrendt, an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is is among a group of faculty members exploring unionization as a way to press for changes that include higher adjunct salaries. CreditRoss Mantle for The New York Times
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After Andrew Behrendt received his Ph.D. in history in 2016, he hoped to land a full-time job as a professor. But he has applied for tenure-track faculty jobs continuously with no luck.
So Dr. Behrendt, who is 34, teaches a wide variety of history classes as an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh. The pay is generally $4,000 a course. Doing that alone would make it hard to make ends meet, he said, and he earns the bulk of his income as a staff member at the University Center for International Studies. Dr. Behrendt, whose wife teaches at a charter school, said his lower salary made it hard to save for a house or start a family – especially since he is also struggling to pay off his student loan debt. |
He has considered looking for work outside academia, perhaps in government or the nonprofit sector. But he loves teaching, and “I’ve spent the last 10 years of my life training to do something relatively specific,” he said. “Trying to rebrand is an exhausting thought.”
So Dr. Behrendt is trying a different approach. He is among a group of University of Pittsburgh faculty members exploring unionization as a way to press for changes that include higher adjunct salaries. It is working with the United Steelworkers, which is also based in Pittsburgh.
The group is in the process of determining whether it has enough support among 4,000 faculty members (both tenured and nontenured) to proceed with collective bargaining. A similar effort involving graduate students is further along.
Across the nation, labor unions are stepping in to try to win better pay and job security for part-time faculty. As universities sit across the bargaining table from union groups, they may face tough decisions on reallocating their costs and giving up some flexibility in their course offerings. (Through its Media Relations department, the University of Pittsburgh administration declined to comment on the organizing effort.)
Tenure-track positions are shrinking at colleges and universities. As a result, people with advanced degrees have found themselves in lower-paying adjunct positions indefinitely. And that has led to a full-blown crisis, said Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a group that formed nearly 10 years ago to address issues faced by adjuncts and other nontenured faculty.
Over the past few decades, colleges and universities have responded to budget crises by hiring low-cost, part-time faculty to teach core curriculum courses that formerly went to full-time tenured professors, Ms. Maisto said. In some cases, adjuncts may hold full-time jobs outside academia and teach a class on the side. But for others, teaching is their main source of income.
Too many adjunct professors cannot make a living wage through teaching, Ms. Maisto said. In fact, one-quarter of part-time faculty are on public assistance, according to a 2015 report from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sometimes adjuncts are not assigned courses until days before a course begins, Ms. Maisto said, or a class may be canceled at the last minute and given to a tenured faculty member. Most adjuncts do not have health benefits. They may also lack access to professional development funds and a private space to meet with students or store their belongings, she said.
“All of these conditions affect the quality of teaching and convey the idea that adjuncts are substandard and unimportant,” she said. “It’s a very precarious employment situation on lots of different levels, and our concern is what that does to the quality of education.”
About half of the nation’s higher education faculty work part time, according to government data. That number rises to about two-thirds if other nontenured positions such as lecturers are included.
Depending on the institution, adjunct pay can range from under $2,000 a class to $6,000 and above. A full course load is considered to be three classes a semester. Some adjuncts are teaching as many six classes a semester, driving between different campuses, and taking odd jobs to make ends meet, Ms. Maisto said.
At one time several years ago, Susan Harper of Dallas was teaching five classes at four separate institutions as an adjunct, for as little as $1,900 a class and no benefits. Her income was so low that she qualified for financial assistance from a drug maker for her prescriptions. To bring in more money, she took odd jobs such as freelance editing, house sitting and reading tarot cards at parties, she said.
When she was in graduate school in the late 1990s, it was reasonable to expect that she could land a tenure track-position, Dr. Harper said. But by the time she received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 2005, that expectation had changed.
With $200,000 in student debt and no health insurance, Dr. Harper decided this year to take a full-time job, with benefits, as an editor of scholarly publications. She is still teaching a course online as an adjunct, but does not think she will return full time to academia or try for a tenure-track position.
“They know they can exploit you for $1,900 a semester,” she said, “so why would they hire you?”
At public and private institutions combined, more than 20 percent of part-time faculty are unionized, according to the most recent data available from a collective-bargaining research center at Hunter College, of the City University of New York. And that number is growing, with the most robust activity occurring at private institutions because of differing labor laws, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the center.
At the private Siena College, a recent labor agreement was an acknowledgment that “adjuncts are an important part of our community,” said Chuck Seifert, dean of the business school. He was the academic representative for the school during talks that lasted for two years. Part-time and visiting faculty were represented by the Service Employees International Union.
Adjunct faculty were making $2,500 a course per semester at Siena, a college in the Catholic and Franciscan tradition based in Albany. The labor agreement reached last year raises their salaries by 37 percent over three years. The deal also gives preferential course assignments to adjuncts who have taught regularly at the college for three years. And adjuncts now have access to professional development funds and dedicated office space.
Siena was able to raise adjunct salaries by achieving financial efficiencies in other areas, said Dr. Seifert, who is also a management professor at the school.
Overall costs must always be part of the calculus when setting faculty salaries, he said. At Siena, “we have to develop a long term sustainable financial plan,” he said. Given that some colleges in New York offer free tuition, “We don’t want to price ourselves out of the market.”
When it comes to hiring and paying adjuncts, there is a “basic economic supply and demand model in play,” Dr. Seifert said.
“If you have a Ph.D. in accounting, you can basically get a job in two weeks,” he said. But in the liberal arts it’s an entirely different story, he said. “You can receive 100 or more applicants for a single position, and that causes a problem.”
Given market realities, why don’t more adjuncts look for work outside academia “That’s a perfectly legitimate question,” Ms. Maisto said. Some hope to land a tenure-track position eventually, but this is becoming much harder to do, she said. Others can’t find jobs because, with their advanced degrees, they are considered overqualified for jobs outside academia.
Other adjuncts are deeply committed to teaching and refuse to be driven out of academia despite their low salaries, she said. This is true even as the stigma associated with being an adjunct has led to a growing divide between tenure- and nontenure-track faculty, she said.
Fortunately, she said, “there are tenured faculty who have recognized that this is a problem that affects the entire profession, and that we all need to work together as colleagues to try to address it.”
So Dr. Behrendt is trying a different approach. He is among a group of University of Pittsburgh faculty members exploring unionization as a way to press for changes that include higher adjunct salaries. It is working with the United Steelworkers, which is also based in Pittsburgh.
The group is in the process of determining whether it has enough support among 4,000 faculty members (both tenured and nontenured) to proceed with collective bargaining. A similar effort involving graduate students is further along.
Across the nation, labor unions are stepping in to try to win better pay and job security for part-time faculty. As universities sit across the bargaining table from union groups, they may face tough decisions on reallocating their costs and giving up some flexibility in their course offerings. (Through its Media Relations department, the University of Pittsburgh administration declined to comment on the organizing effort.)
Tenure-track positions are shrinking at colleges and universities. As a result, people with advanced degrees have found themselves in lower-paying adjunct positions indefinitely. And that has led to a full-blown crisis, said Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a group that formed nearly 10 years ago to address issues faced by adjuncts and other nontenured faculty.
Over the past few decades, colleges and universities have responded to budget crises by hiring low-cost, part-time faculty to teach core curriculum courses that formerly went to full-time tenured professors, Ms. Maisto said. In some cases, adjuncts may hold full-time jobs outside academia and teach a class on the side. But for others, teaching is their main source of income.
Too many adjunct professors cannot make a living wage through teaching, Ms. Maisto said. In fact, one-quarter of part-time faculty are on public assistance, according to a 2015 report from the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sometimes adjuncts are not assigned courses until days before a course begins, Ms. Maisto said, or a class may be canceled at the last minute and given to a tenured faculty member. Most adjuncts do not have health benefits. They may also lack access to professional development funds and a private space to meet with students or store their belongings, she said.
“All of these conditions affect the quality of teaching and convey the idea that adjuncts are substandard and unimportant,” she said. “It’s a very precarious employment situation on lots of different levels, and our concern is what that does to the quality of education.”
About half of the nation’s higher education faculty work part time, according to government data. That number rises to about two-thirds if other nontenured positions such as lecturers are included.
Depending on the institution, adjunct pay can range from under $2,000 a class to $6,000 and above. A full course load is considered to be three classes a semester. Some adjuncts are teaching as many six classes a semester, driving between different campuses, and taking odd jobs to make ends meet, Ms. Maisto said.
At one time several years ago, Susan Harper of Dallas was teaching five classes at four separate institutions as an adjunct, for as little as $1,900 a class and no benefits. Her income was so low that she qualified for financial assistance from a drug maker for her prescriptions. To bring in more money, she took odd jobs such as freelance editing, house sitting and reading tarot cards at parties, she said.
When she was in graduate school in the late 1990s, it was reasonable to expect that she could land a tenure track-position, Dr. Harper said. But by the time she received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 2005, that expectation had changed.
With $200,000 in student debt and no health insurance, Dr. Harper decided this year to take a full-time job, with benefits, as an editor of scholarly publications. She is still teaching a course online as an adjunct, but does not think she will return full time to academia or try for a tenure-track position.
“They know they can exploit you for $1,900 a semester,” she said, “so why would they hire you?”
At public and private institutions combined, more than 20 percent of part-time faculty are unionized, according to the most recent data available from a collective-bargaining research center at Hunter College, of the City University of New York. And that number is growing, with the most robust activity occurring at private institutions because of differing labor laws, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the center.
At the private Siena College, a recent labor agreement was an acknowledgment that “adjuncts are an important part of our community,” said Chuck Seifert, dean of the business school. He was the academic representative for the school during talks that lasted for two years. Part-time and visiting faculty were represented by the Service Employees International Union.
Adjunct faculty were making $2,500 a course per semester at Siena, a college in the Catholic and Franciscan tradition based in Albany. The labor agreement reached last year raises their salaries by 37 percent over three years. The deal also gives preferential course assignments to adjuncts who have taught regularly at the college for three years. And adjuncts now have access to professional development funds and dedicated office space.
Siena was able to raise adjunct salaries by achieving financial efficiencies in other areas, said Dr. Seifert, who is also a management professor at the school.
Overall costs must always be part of the calculus when setting faculty salaries, he said. At Siena, “we have to develop a long term sustainable financial plan,” he said. Given that some colleges in New York offer free tuition, “We don’t want to price ourselves out of the market.”
When it comes to hiring and paying adjuncts, there is a “basic economic supply and demand model in play,” Dr. Seifert said.
“If you have a Ph.D. in accounting, you can basically get a job in two weeks,” he said. But in the liberal arts it’s an entirely different story, he said. “You can receive 100 or more applicants for a single position, and that causes a problem.”
Given market realities, why don’t more adjuncts look for work outside academia “That’s a perfectly legitimate question,” Ms. Maisto said. Some hope to land a tenure-track position eventually, but this is becoming much harder to do, she said. Others can’t find jobs because, with their advanced degrees, they are considered overqualified for jobs outside academia.
Other adjuncts are deeply committed to teaching and refuse to be driven out of academia despite their low salaries, she said. This is true even as the stigma associated with being an adjunct has led to a growing divide between tenure- and nontenure-track faculty, she said.
Fortunately, she said, “there are tenured faculty who have recognized that this is a problem that affects the entire profession, and that we all need to work together as colleagues to try to address it.”
Susan Harper
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Susan Harper said that when she was in graduate school in the late 1990s, it was reasonable to expect that she could land a tenure track-position. She later found herself teaching five classes at four separate Dallas-area institutions as an adjunct, for as little as $1,900 a class and no benefits.CreditBrandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times
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United Steelworkers start drive to organize full- and part-time faculty at Pitt |
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Union of Pitt FacultyWe are the Pitt Faculty Organizing Committee, a group of faculty from all ranks and campuses at the University of Pittsburgh. We are currently in the process of talking with faculty about forming a union that will allow us to work collectively for a future where all faculty labor at Pitt is valued and protected.
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