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The Guardian writer suggests label for colleges and universities:
. " Over the last few years, I have talked to numerous adjunct professors in extreme situations: homeless, living in their cars, getting their meals from their university’s food bank, taking extra jobs to support their families, even donating plasma.""Top-tier American universities charge tens of thousands of dollars a year in tuition – yet they get away with exploiting legions of adjunct professors, underpaid and economically insecure, who work long hours and typically do not even receive health insurance. Many are living below the poverty line, while the colleges that employ them continue to operate with endowments in the many millions of dollars. A 2015 survey by Pacific Standard found that 62% of adjuncts made less than $20,000 a year."
"Andrew Marzoni has just published "Academia is a Cult" in today's Washington Post:
Marzoni got his Ph.D. in English and then secured a scarce tenure-track job at a small liberal arts college, which he promptly turned down and then left academe. He describes well the hamster-wheel that graduate school has become and the lack of rewards after one dutifully spins the wheel.
You can post comments at the end. From many of the current comments, it appears that the public still remains in the dark about what higher education has become in America."
Here are some brief excerpts: "Cults are systems of social control. They are insular but often evangelical organizations whose aims (be they money, power, sex or something else) are rooted in submission to a dogma manifested by an authority figure: a charismatic preacher or, say, a tenured professor....Exploitative labor practices occupy the ground floor of every religious movement, and adjuncts, like cult members, are usually required to work long and hard for little remuneration, toiling in support of the institution to prove their devotion to academia itself....Academics may cast themselves as hardened opponents of dominant norms and constituted power, but their rituals of entitlement and fiendish loyalty to established networks of caste and privilege undermine that critical pose. No one says it aloud, but every graduate student knows: This is the price you pay for a chance to enter the sanctum of the tenure track. Follow the leader, or prepare to teach high school."
"The Seattle Times just published our op-ed on the city's Proposition 1, which will pay for free tuition to the Seattle Colleges. Doug Collins and [Dr. Keith Hoeller] have pointed out the irony of paying tuition for high school students while the adjuncts are earning poverty-level wages. For writing letters to the editor (letters@seattletimes.com)."
"No free tuition until Seattle College teachers are paid living wages"
If Seattle is willing to tax property owners to subsidize free college tuition, it should insist the Seattle Colleges abandon their two-tiered salary structure and adopt a career-friendly faculty pay system.
Given the growing economic inequality in our country, it is understandable that the idea of free college tuition is catching on. Both Tennessee and New York have enacted it, and now Seattle’s Families, Education, Preschool and Promise Levy will, if passed on Nov. 6, offer free tuition at all four Seattle College campuses, to offer better professional career opportunities for our high school graduates. Washington state may follow suit.
Unfortunately, our state’s community and technical colleges have created a tenuous career system for their own professors. The select few tenure-track professors (4,000) have modest base salaries, averaging $62,000 an academic year (Fall, Winter and Spring quarters), with many earning more by teaching overtime or “moonlight” courses.
Eastern Washington University Athletics Run into 5 Million Dollar Hole. Aug. 10,2 018
Yet another terrible example of how athletics programs do not make money. Athletics are wonderful programs, but should not dominate academics, nor take funds away from professional faculty, who are chipped to "adjunct" to balance budgets.
"EWU’s athletic budget, however, has been as dry as the old Alamo landscape, with a current deficit of more than $5 million."
Why the Supreme Court Ruling on Unions Could Be Good for Adjuncts
By Keith Hoeller June 29, 2018
"Missing from the debate have been important critiques of the union movement from the labor perspective. To regain their relevance, faculty unions at public colleges and universities will need to shed their historic approach of privileging tenure-track members over contingent faculty members, and instead embrace a new kind of organizing unit that finally deals with the needs of adjuncts and part-timers, who shoulder most of the teaching load in higher education."
"For contingent faculty members, the question about union representation has long been: Should they be coerced into paying their "fair share" when they do not receive their fair share at the bargaining table, where their numbers are not equitably represented and their voices not heeded? Under Janus, they will no longer be required to do so."
The National Labor Relations Board has made it clear that tenure-track faculty members at private colleges cannot be in the same bargaining unit as their non-tenure-track colleagues. But conflicts of interest abound in the two-tier system at public institutions, where the majority of adjuncts are represented in "mixed units" with their tenured colleagues."
AFA Editor Commentary: Adjuncts are "beat up" by Academic Unions and Associations.
While some might think that the comparison of adjunct faculty representation to On the Waterfront is harsh, many adjunct faculty who have tried to change the unions/associations' discrimination against adjuncts have come to feel just like Marlon Brando's character "Terry." After a few polite union/association rhetoric such as, "This will take a long time to fix," then the gloves come off, and adjunct activists suffer union/association officials who yell, threaten, intimidate, retaliate, ostracize, and work to fire the adjunct activists (or simply "non-renewal of temporary contracts").
Unions/associations have played important parts in labor movements, but lately in academia, these unions/associations are huge blocks, cementing pay and benefits for the few, and blocking the majority of professors from professional wages and working conditions. The adjuncts are thus metaphorically "beat up" by union/association officials.
There are many caring, concerned professors, whether classified as "full-time" or "adjunct." But they are over-ruled by bully officials. Thus, this Supreme Court ruling is just, and the unions/associations have no one to blame for this ruling but themselves, with good people in bad organizations.
Athletics are touted as bringing in revenue. But these facts show that poorly managed athletic programs, raised above academics, brings disaster. The athletics sink hole at WSU is gobbling up almost 100 million dollars. This money is going into somebody's pocket, and is bleeding state funds that should go to support the state's adjunct faculty.
SPOKANE, Wash. - Officials for Washington State University say the athletics budget will no longer be accruing annual deficits in five years, but it will take longer to pay off a budget hole estimated to grow to $85.1 million.
The school said Thursday that new Athletic Director Pat Chun and Chief Budget Officer Joan King will present the plan to the Board of Regents on Friday.
The athletics department will focus first on getting its budget balanced, then build up reserves and finally repay the accumulated deficit.
It relies on increasing revenue 27 percent while continuing to contain expenses. The debt is expected to reach $85.1 million by fiscal 2022. By 2023, the school says yearly athletic budgets would be balanced.
Much of the debt is connected to new facilities, while television revenues and donations were lower than expected.
Washington State University Athletics Department in the Hole for $67 Million; Meanwhile, Adjunct Faculty in Washington State Languish in Poor Pay and Working Conditions, a Commentary by Teresa Knudsen
While the colleges and universities in the US, and Washington State, say they don't have the money to pay full professional pay and benefits to the hardworking adjunct faculty, there appears to be money to burn on athletics. Why has this much money been unaccounted for, and why and when did this athletic department lose so much taxpayer money? Maybe athletics should return to an adjunct for colleges and universities, and place the emphasis on providing real colleges and universities, to educate our fine citizens, and pay professional wages and benefits to the instructors and professors, not to games.
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Washington State athletic department projects $67 million hole, will discuss plans to reduce debt at Board of Regents meeting
