Adjunct Abuse?
Higher education relies heavily on part-time teachers, but these faculty members get paid little and don’t usually get health insurance.
By Emily Rutherford
July 22, 2009
Part-time professor Melinda Marie Jette, left, sits in on a discussion with her class at Western Oregon University in Monmouth. The numbers of adjuncts are on the rise nearly everywhere, as state universities search for ways to keep costs and tuition down, against a backdrop of falling state support. (AP Photo/Don Ryan)If you were to compile a list of professions that would benefit particularly from health care reform legislation, college and university faculty probably wouldn’t be anywhere near the top. The common perception is that professors—with their cushy jobs secured by tenure, summers off, and great benefits—are living the good life. But the majority of those who teach at community colleges, colleges, and universities don’t have such a generous life.
According to data collected by the American Federation of Teachers, approximately two-thirds of college and university instructors are not tenure or tenure-track faculty; many of them—especially at community colleges—are adjuncts. Adjuncts have earned a reputation as the second-class citizens of higher education. Often piecing together a low salary from a heavy courseload spread across multiple institutions, adjuncts teach with no job security or benefits. For example, while an assistant professor at the University of Maryland would have an average annual salary of $83,000, an adjunct instructor with the same level of education teaching in Maryland community colleges could make $24,000—if he or she were lucky enough to be employed full-time, according to American Association of University Professors data. In some areas of the country, such as Michigan, New York, and the District of Columbia, adjuncts have been able to unionize and agitate for better treatment, but standards are inconsistent from state to state and even from institution to institution, making the issue of employer-based health insurance for colleges and universities a tricky one.
Devon Smith, an adjunct at Palomar College and the University of California–San Diego, noted that the benefits situation for adjuncts is complicated. "Palomar doesn’t offer health care to adjunct instructors … the reason I qualified for benefits at UCSD this past winter and spring was because I was teaching a certain number of classes there. In the fall I will only be teaching one class, so I won’t be eligible,” Smith says. “You can imagine this is even more troubling if one has dependents. Obviously, a national health care system that did not tie one’s access to benefits to their employment would help tremendously."
Sara Safdie, an adjunct who has taught at various institutions in San Diego and in Seattle, has had similar experiences, but her complaints allude to larger systemic problems. She calls the adjunct state of affairs "truly a no-win situation." She explained that she was eligible for health care benefits at her job in Seattle, but "in [California] it’s a totally different story … Theoretically, an adjunct can, I believe, get benefits, if s/he teaches over 50 percent of the time, but the administrators make sure that no one goes above this level."
If there is anything consistent about non-tenure-track benefits, it’s that there is no consistency. Adjuncts at the University of North Texas and the University of Massachusetts reported that they had limited, but adequate, benefits, but the complicated situation that Smith and Safdie have experienced in California is a big problem—in part created by a state with a huge, decentralized state university and community college system that, in the throes of its current budget crisis, has made huge cuts to higher education. While both Smith and Safdie can receive health insurance through their partners’ employers, that’s hardly a fix for a broken system. According to a recent study reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, two-thirds of adjuncts are supporting dependents.
But even if federal health care legislation resolves this particular issue, whether through a public option or a more affordable individual market, adjuncts’ troubles will be far from over. As Safdie put it, "If college professors are underpaid, then adjuncts are seriously abused. They are the backbone of higher education, but they easily make half of what full-timers do and get the grunt-work classes." Smith also observed, "Many campuses are using adjuncts instead of hiring fulltime faculty because they can pay them so much less and not give them benefits—this makes it much harder to secure full-time employment.
But when budgets get tight, adjuncts are the first employees that see cuts to save departmental funds. In addition, the Chronicle study found that of the participants, "Almost half teach three or more courses—one is teaching 12. Almost a third also work as adjuncts at other colleges … About a third report a climate of threatened job loss if they object to work outside their contract that is assigned or ‘encouraged’ by immediate supervisors or other administrators." This long list of problems indicates that the entire system of instructors in higher education is due for an overhaul.
But it’s unclear how such an overhaul should proceed. For most adjuncts, their part-time, multiple-institution status makes organizing unions difficult, and administrators who want to keep their cheap source of instructional labor have also blocked unionization efforts. In the current economic climate, when sharp decreases in state funding mean that community colleges and public universities can barely retain enough instructors to occupy classrooms, shifting the emphasis back to tenure and tenure-track faculty might seem impossible. The current trends in higher education suggest that the number of second-class adjuncts will only continue to rise, permanently changing the instructional model of higher education.
What higher ed needs is a strong message that paying part-time instructors next to nothing and not giving them benefits is not the way to foster a good educational experience for students—in addition to a financial model that makes investing in tenure-track faculty sustainable in this economy. Perhaps, if Congress passes a strong form of health care legislation, benefits will no longer need to be an expensive side-effect of hiring permanent teaching faculty. Perhaps, then, college and university administrations will be freer to examine just what the trend toward adjunct positions means for higher education.
Emily Rutherford is an editorial intern and staff writer at Campus Progress. She is a sophomore at Princeton University. Follow her on Twitter.
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