BY CAPRICE LAWLESS
The back of my adjunct office—with its file drawer, bookshelves, snack drawer, and AAUP stash—got a little extra love for Campus Equity Week, October 21–25, 2019.
Dirty Laundry Week. Tuition Scam Week. Fraud on the Public Week. Tuition Lies Week. Perhaps if national Campus Equity Week had a more descriptive title, it might get the attention of journalists and lawmakers. As it is, October 21–25, 2019 will pass as another week for the nation’s 5,300 wealthy college administrators to un-recognize and un-celebrate their faculty majority. It will be another week for them to un-reveal that their careers and the colleges they administer are largely built on the backs of 800,000+ adjunct faculty, many of whom are homeless, on food stamps, and otherwise impoverished. These adjuncts comprise 70 percent of all college teachers. Less than 30 percent of America’s collegiate faculty have tenure, and those with it are fast retiring.
What students and taxpayers don’t realize is how effectively academia’s 1 percent of six-figure and seven-figure-earning administrators have hollowed out budgets to line their pockets and to leave empty those of devoted teachers. A tiny fraction of the thousands students and parents pay for tuition will go to their college teachers. Administrators chosen overwhelmingly to shred shared governance with faculty, to threaten faculty’s academic freedom, and to turn the professoriate into a gig job pool. Many choose to answer, instead, to their pet Chambers of Commerce and corporate partners who have vested interests in a dumbed-down and easily controlled populace.
This week, those facts will be buried, as they are year-round, by college communications departments and the expensive lobbyists colleges employ to do it. All the more reason, this week, to stand up and speak out about adjunct-ification where you are, however you can, with what you have.
To help you, I’ve created ten posters for colleagues to use to call attention to Campus Equity Week 2019. You can download them, print them, post them to office doors and bulletin boards, or share them on social media. The first five feature the words and photos of authors. The last five are from The Adjunct Coloring Book, for people to use as-is, or to print out and color in with a friend over coffee or as an AAUP chapter activity.
I’d like to see a source (and maybe some statistics) for the statement that “MANY of whom are homeless, on food stamps, and otherwise impoverished.” Although I’ve read of an occasional homeless adjunct, the use of the word “many” seems like an exaggeration to me.
I must have urged people on this site not to exaggerate a ZILLION TIMES! 🙂
The MIT Living Wage Calculator https://livingwage.mit.edu/
is useful for answering questions like these. Scroll down to your state, your county, and then subtract the average wage your college pays adjuncts from MIT”s calculation of the minimum living wage for one person for your county. To break it down further, this piece from the New York Times a few months ago explains how no one can live on MIT’s minimum living wage:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/smarter-living/what-a-living-wage-actually-means.html
I’m sorry but the links do not provide specific statistics that show that ““MANY [adjuncts] are homeless, on food stamps, and otherwise impoverished,” which was your original claim.
Information on the poverty line in general do not provide any useful information about contingent faculty. Besides, SOME adjuncts may have a working spouse, social security or other payments, pension payouts, savings to draw on, or cheap rent (maybe they live with parents or other relatives).
My point is not to make light of the difficulties of adjunct life. I just object to EXAGGERATION and apple vs. oranges arguments.
Now, how about those stats about HOMELESS Adjuncts?