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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.
