BY JANE S. GABIN
Everyone agrees: college will never be the same.
Even before the pandemic, rapid change had become the pattern. Remember when college applications were handwritten? It wasn’t so long ago.
Over the past three decades, colleges have become more like businesses and the process of applying for admission to them has become, paradoxically, more accessible yet also more competitive. More students than ever are applying for higher education. That’s the good part.
At the same time—and recently, in particular—this competition has enabled big business to exert its influence in education. As magazine rankings took on increasing importance, colleges tried to outdo one another in their offerings, not all of which were academic. Sports programs grew unsustainably, offering immense salaries to some athletic directors and coaches. Corporations became involved in funding, and naming rights on campus buildings proved there was a price tag on everything. Salaries for top-level administrators got cushier and cushier.
Many good things have come from this competition: stronger coursework, a higher profile for some programs, and more marketability for some degrees. But despite the huge influx of money, there was one group consistently overlooked—and overlooked on purpose. That group consists of the contingent faculty—the adjuncts, the “precariat”—whose low pay makes a campus profitable. Profitable for some, that is.
Now, with the current crisis bringing everything to a grinding halt, this group is about to be bypassed again. As Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming” over a century ago, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” No one knows what will happen immediately, but a very top-heavy machine has just lurched to a stop. The cost, in dollars and cents alone, is going to be phenomenal.
Therefore, some schools say they are going to institute drastic financial measures to cut costs and protect students from incurring more debt. Administrators are terrified at the prospect of shutting down. Students, their counselors, directors of admission, professors—all are frightened.
Announcements that some administrators are taking pay cuts—for example, a 20 percent reduction in salary for the president of Stanford—are a solid first step. These sacrifices sound good but seem less magnanimous under closer examination. The president of Stanford University, for example, earns about $1,325,000. Twenty per cent of that is $265,000. But even with that cut, over a million still remains. At Ohio State, presidential compensation is $1,206,751. Over sixty US college presidents at both public and private schools make over a million dollars a year. Another fifty make between $700,000 and a million. Add to that the salaries of vice-presidents, deans, and athletic directors, and a lot of money is spent before even one class is taught.
Is it any wonder that college education costs so much in the United States? That tuition costs have risen far higher than the cost of living?
And another thing: my recent study (available to anyone who requests it) of over five hundred institutions compared the number of full-time faculty with the number of part-time, adjunct faculty. The adjunct numbers were high but not a shock to those who have been studying the precariat for a long time. In many cases, they equaled or exceeded the numbers of full-time faculty. But adjunct faculty are paid less and often have no benefits. Their ranks are growing. Colleges prefer them because they are cheaper to hire. Colleges also prefer to give full-time hires temporary jobs, one-year gigs, so they won’t be committed to them and can hire ever cheaper instructors. Now, with online classes, colleges can save even more—and students will get even less.
Is this how we value those who have given their time and energy to teaching? Is this how we reward students who have worked hard to get into college?
- At Ohio State, where the president makes $1,206,751, those who teach the introductory courses in math and writing were referred to (by an administrator, to me) as “off the street” faculty.
- At Marquette University, where the president is paid $968,349, there are 674 full-time instructors and almost as many—520—part-time instructors.
- Duquesne University made national headlines in 2013, when an adjunct faculty member, who had not had her teaching contract renewed after having taught there for over twenty years, died, ill and without health insurance. Its president makes $433,812. Duquesne has 494 full-time teachers and almost as many—476—part-time.
These numbers are not secret. All the statistics are available to the public. Employment figures appear in each school’s Common Data Set, published yearly. Salaries are posted in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
When colleges reopen, they cannot return to “business as usual.” They cannot continue to pay unconscionably high salaries at one end and starvation wages at the other. Running a university is a tremendous responsibility and should be well compensated. But it is possible to live decently on less than a million. Administrators should no longer be smug about having so many adjuncts at their beck and call. Colleges can no longer play “bait and switch,” asking students to pay full tuition while having them taught by poorly paid part-timers.
Hamlet introduced a phrase when he spoke of having the designer of an explosion “hoist by his own petard”—that is, killed by his own machinations. The same is true of academia, grown huge and often cruel. It has deserted many of its original principles. Unless it returns to these we will truly witness the death of higher education in this country. To save our colleges and universities, administration should be limited and huge salaries cut; teachers should no longer be exploited. This country would welcome a return to solid education at a decent price, with opportunities for those who seek them, giving the world to young people.
Guest blogger Jane S. Gabin received a PhD in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and has taught high school and college classes and published four books. A member of NACAC and SACAC, she worked for ten years in undergraduate admissions at UNC-Chapel Hill and for more than a decade in college counseling in the NYC metro area, most recently at the United Nations International School (UNIS).
In a more market-industrial setting, such current external (economic) and internal (cost) conditions in higher education, would result in a hostile takeover. Universities may be more “corporate” but they are not like true commercial, for-profit institutions subject to shareholder ownership, public disclosure, competitive take-over or accountability to an ownership class. They are masquerading as corporate-like structures with Boards of Trustees, Regents, Fellows or other governance that come largely from business, and bring with them many of the methods, practices and culture of business organizations, but merely in form, and not in actual operational content. Universities are much more like government agencies (the post office, State Department, Pentagon, DHS, and dozens of others) but with a commercial compensation component “bolted” on for the administrative class.
In that regard it is utterly disingenuous if not fraudulent, especially when the Federal student loan market has been milked to $2.0 Trillion dollars, and 50% of that amount is in some form of default, arrears or forbearance. Students and their parents should withhold all tuition payment, and bring class action litigation against individual universities and their officers and Board. It is one of the biggest financial frauds in the history of American institutionalism.
Universities must consolidate, completely re-set costs and be restructured into effective co-operatives funded by long-term bonding and public finance under strict control standards. If university administration want to “play CEO” and get wealthy, let them work for it in the private sector, rather than play both sides in a protected state-backed and unionized NFP.
Current conditions also underscore the additional question as to whether there is any such thing as a true “private” university (right now the CDC has become the de facto DOE, and higher education has been captured by the State defense, intelligence and security complex for processing, testing, tracing and cognitive conditioning). Interestingly, the so-called Ivy+ R1 league is at the center of the current narratology and security conversion. In that regard, things are not different at all, they are same: universities are all hosting a “grand opening” carnival show of new classes, seminars, programs, institutions, centers and high-gloss marketing of the brave new world of covid opportunism. Indeed, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” Regards, UChicago, ’96
It is really unconscionable the way in which administrators and athletics personnel are paid and in which trustees or regents can use board service as a business development opportunity, or as a way to see that their pet projects are funded, and completely disregard the core functions of a university.
That is the one thing I would add to this piece; it is not just the precarity that is being passed over, the faculty generally have been under assault for some time at all but the top universities.
Yes, you’re quite right. Take the University of Chicago for example. Its Trustee Chairman Neubauer and Pritzker family Board members, are among the single largest private investors in Israel weapons corporations (in public filings). And what do you know, lo and behold, who would have guessed, university President Zimmer who was “itching to do a deal with Israel,” flew to Tel Aviv in first-class all expenses paid luxury travel with a contingent of university and City staff to sign a deal with Ben-Gurion U. and other institutions, to conduct, and finance, advanced engineering projects with weapons applications (all in the public domain) including military science and technology development in the Negev research zone. Zimmer and Neubauer and other Trustees, Committee members and senior admin, have turned UChicago into an effective ideological and public relations US base camp for the Likud Party (including IDF and Mossad officers literally teaching classes in the College; see related campus protesting news articles in The Maroon) with active US-Israel technology transfer operations, along with broad support for the Middle East Transformation project creating a Pan-Israel. This is just the tip of the iceberg of course in how the modern university is a special interest, State research and “whitewashing” corporation (as Harvard Law’s Larry Lessig calls it) with a multi-million dollar administrative-executive CEO class, subsidized by student tuition and increasingly, by the gradual shrinking of academy tenure costs, replaced by the adjunct sector and now, with a deep commitment and backing for AI knowledge and delivery methods to bypass labor costs more generally, while capturing terabytes of monetizable data. So, yes, some big changes on the university campus, but otherwise it’s “business as usual.”
I’m no fan of the high percentage of “contingent” faculty (adjuncts) used in higher ed. However, our cause is ill-served by fake math: “There are 674 full-time instructors and almost as many—520—part-time instructors.”
What does “almost” mean in this case? 520 is “almost” exactly 80% of 674, according to my calculator.
As the old saying goes “Close doesn’t matter except in horseshoes and hand grenades.”
That is a weird criticism to make Frank when she provided the exact number. I would say 80% qualifies for “almost” as many.
I’m sorry. I started out as a Chemistry major before switching to Philosophical Logic. In both disciplines, there was an emphasis on accuracy in numbers and language. I’d say that 95% is more like “almost” than a mere 80%. For instance, playing Russian Roulette with a 6-chamber pistol would give you “about” an 83.33% chance of surviving the game. Would you take that chance?
I also remember a final exam in Chemistry, in which we needed to calculate the number of molecules of NaCl (table salt) in a test tube. One student got it wrong by a few thousand molecules. He complained to the professor that he should get partial credit. “After all,” he argued, “what’s a few grains of salt between friends.” 🙂
Dr. Gabin, I enjoyed your essay. Adding to this dialogue, it’s important that people understand that many “Adjunct Faculty,” teaching faculty, work full time as well. The administrative “Limbo” designed to misrepresent teaching workloads are myriad. Teaching a 3 credit class well is more than a 15 hour a week responsibility; teaching two classes, 30+ hours, should qualify for benefits. And @ which colleges does that occur..