College Caste System: Adjunct Slavery

It is shameful. It is a double standard. It uses Wal-Mart style cheapness under the guise of academic eliteness. This increasingly troubling trend in American colleges and universities is simply named: Adjunct Nation. And so it goes. Adjuncts now form the lowest level of university and college caste systems (for even college custodians get benefits while adjuncts do not). A book worth reading on this subject is Ghosts in the Classroom: Stories of College Adjunct Faculty by Michael Dubson (see image at left).

In our national urge to outsource, it is hard for universities and colleges to compete, unless we send students to faroff places for learning under less educated mentors. Since that is unworkable, American higher ed has decided to hire adjunct instructors on the cheap. This negative trend has gone so far that adjuncts now represent 45% to 60% of any university or college faculty. Yet adjuncts work the lion's share of courses (anywhere from 40% to 55%).

And this is happening here, in Chattanooga. Worse, adjuncts locally get paid a meager 35 cents or so on the dollar that full-timers receive. At Chattanooga State College, for instance, adjunct pay is one of the lowest in the country, a pay rate without any increase for over ten years.

This is not only a disgrace; this is a sin. It is morally reprehensible when university or college administrators and fulltime faculty members reject "equal pay for equal work" for their brothers and sisters doing the mule's work, passing nary a crumb along to those of us who keep their institutions open everyday. Without the adjuncts these days, no university or college would remain open. Nada.

Call this my "academic labor" dispute, but I am going to talk about it on the air today with an adjunct colleague of mine at Chattanooga State. His name is David Creel. David is an adjunct music instructor and a frequent violinist with the Chattanooga Symphony. To compensate for the absymally low adjunct pay, however, David began throwing a newspaper route.

Join me to talk with David about work and making it in America as an adjunct instructor.