09-18-2019, 08:49 AM
Dennis S wrote:
[quote=Acer]
it's not going toward faculty as they swap tenure for adjunct wherever they can.
I was just going to say that.
That's an interesting issue that seems to be directly tied to administrative policies.
When I started my 38 year career at one institution, my college was a 1500 student, public institution with no adjuncts. The president at the time was very explicit that we were a service institution for the community and were to provide the best we could. Most of our instructors were PhD's and our class sizes were funded at 25 students. That president lasted about 10 years. The next one, at 14 years, followed the same philosophy and we grew to about 4000 students and most class sizes (except English writing-intensive classes) were funded at 35 students. By the end of that time, my department had 25 full time faculty (all PhD's) and 2 adjuncts. The next president who came in was very different. He came in to complaints from other administrative managers that they didn't have enough employees. Unfortunately, he was in the same building as were they and he was easily swayed by the most recent message he got. In the middle of the great recession, he started hiring staff. We saw the outcome in an interesting way. Our college has never had classes on Friday afternoon and so the employee parking lot was largely empty on Friday afternoons. That parking lot started to fill up on Friday afternoons. Faculty could easily keep track of how many new employees came in. Some faculty didn't get it--the money used to hire those folks came at the cost of full-time faculty. So, we started hiring more and more adjuncts. I became chair during that time and so I had to staff classes. By the time that president was forced out by the Regents (actually he was bought out, but that's a different story), I had 17 full time faculty (our department had been split) and 8 adjuncts. The current president came in 3 years ago and she has the perspective of the earlier presidents. She stopped hiring new staff and so budget increases started to come back to the academic side. I was able to transform 2 of the adjunct positions to full time positions by the time I retired in May. Both of the people hired had been adjuncts for us and were doing a great job. I presume they'll be good full time faculty.
It's obviously much cheaper to hire adjuncts. My college pays $2500 per 3 hour class for an adjunct. I don't know of any of our adjuncts who are trying to make a living doing this, driving up and down the interstate to different colleges. That pay has not changed ever at our college. Chairs typically ask retired faculty if they want to teach classes as adjuncts. Some do but I won't do it. I think it's an outrageously low price to teach and I just decided I won't participate in it.