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In his recent post at IHE, Tim Burke first suggests that "[c]olleges and universities that have chosen to underwrite growth in some areas by steadily degrading the working conditions of adjunct and non-tenured instructional staff and simultaneously relying on that staff to generate more and more of the teaching are going to have to flatly stop doing things that way," on the grounds that students will eventually rebel against the "degradation of educational quality"; then, after some queries from commenters, Tim wonders if, instead, "the ability of adjuncts to juggle multiple positions and stay barely above water economically will come to an end as whatever remaining safety nets they have will snap."  I'm not at all optimistic about his belief that students will rally for more tenured faculty, but Tim's second position bears more investigation.   How many adjuncts have shifted to online teaching, dropped certain campuses from their orbits, or given up altogether in the wake of higher gas prices?  More to the point, will administrations feel the need to make any sort of adjustments in their hiring practices, salary offers, benefits packages (like granting some...), and so forth? Or will they just discover the glories ("glories") of online instruction? (Perhaps, in the future, we'll all be delivering lectures via podcast.) I suspect that the colleges everyone ignores will be the ones who notice the effects first--that is, comprehensive colleges like mine.  We're about twenty minutes away from the next local college and only have one Ph.D.-granting U, the U of Rochester, within reasonable driving distance; to commute here for a part-time job from either SUNY Buffalo or, good heavens, Cornell would be a losing financial proposition of the first order.

Comments

[priscian]

Hi Miriam—first-time caller, long-time listener. Though the fact doesn't affect your speculation at all, RIT offers several Ph.D. programs nowadays. Or do you mean in English?

[Miriam]

Oops, good point--obviously, my thinking is always biased towards the humanities. Someone living near or teaching at RIT would have an even less enjoyable commute to my neck of the woods, methinks...

[John Thomas McGuire]

This is a major concern. Most of the adjuncts I know either have already quit or are barely hanging on. Nonetheless, I do not foresee anything changing soon in academia. Administrators will continue to hire part-time professors to teach either general education courses or to replace permanent, tenure-track faculty. Tenure will increasingly become a rarity, particularly in universities below a R1.

[Brandon]

I think the only likely cause even on the list of possibilities for an adjustment of hiring practices, salaries, benefits, etc., would be a sharp upsurge in demand: either many more students or many fewer college-level options to compete against. The modern university is really not set up to respond favorably to anything else. A genuine rally of students probably could push something or other through; but I cannot even imagine what would be required to stir up that much student concern in the problem. My outlook on the whole thing is pessimistic (at least, as pessimistic as the outlook of a person of my temperament can be): massive deterioration of our higher education system is a much more plausible future at this point than any solution on the table.

I'm not really clear what Burke has in mind in talking about "remaining safety nets". Safety nets? We still have those? :)

[Timothy Burke]

How about "remaining thin roots from plants at the edge of the cliff which are being clutched in desperate, sweaty hands"?

Mostly what I'm thinking of is adjuncts who stay in the system hoping for a longer-term contract while some other family member's income keeps them barely afloat, or adjuncts who subsidize their adjunct work with a second non-academic job of some kind. If we dive into a serious recession, both of those sources of tenuous, unsustainable short-term support may well disappear entirely.

[John Thomas McGuire]

I would tend to agree with Timothy on this point. A lot of adjuncts may simply disappear from teaching altogether. I know of one person, a fine teacher in the sciences, who just left last semester and secured a full-time job in a state office.

[Brandon]

Thanks, that clarifies things considerably.