BY JASON PHILLIPS

Most students do not understand the hierarchy of educators in academia. What they tend to imagine when they talk about professors are tenured, full-time professors. In reality, colleges and universities are predominantly staffed by contingent and adjunct faculty members. According to a 2018 report from the AAUP, “at all US institutions combined, the percentage of instructional positions that is off the tenure track amounted to 73 percent in 2016.” These educators are hired into unstable, poorly compensated positions.

I am currently a junior at the University of Rhode Island. Over the summer of 2021, I set out to discover how much my fellow students knew about the actual conditions so many of their professors are working under. I designed this study to understand what students grasped about adjunct employment, to gauge how they felt about their working conditions after learning more about them, and to gather their ideas as to how this problem of labor inequity could be fixed. To do this, I broke the study into two parts, an online questionnaire and an interview over the phone or Zoom.

Before I get into the details of my study here, I have an important caveat to add. My study had some unexpected limitations. Because I was studying undergraduate awareness of adjunct labor during the pandemic, my ability to locate a broad population of students to survey was severely hampered. Cold-emailing students I didn’t know yielded very few responses. I ended up with more responses from students who self-selected for the survey because they already knew about the exploitation of adjunct faculty.  One of the anonymous respondents even turned out to be the nephew of my advisor!  I would like to continue this research project in the future to see what kinds of information a larger sample of students would yield.

Participants took part in a two-part questionnaire. First, the respondents answered questions relating to their initial understanding and feelings about the treatment of adjuncts.

I asked: “How would you rate your understanding of what an ‘adjunct professor’ is?” Following this question, I asked: “Describe your understanding of what an ‘adjunct professor’ is,” “How well do you think adjunct professors are treated (e.g., how much they are paid, job benefits, etc.)?” and “Do you believe adjunct professors and tenured professors should be treated equally?”

Three respondents rated the working conditions of adjuncts as a one out of five, five rated the conditions two out of five, and two rated the conditions three out of five. Half of the respondents said that adjunct professors and tenured professors should be treated equally, while the other half responded, “I don’t know.”

In the next section, students read a short, factual description of what an adjunct professor typically does, what their pay is typically, and other information about their working conditions. After reading this information, students were asked to return to the questions they had answered earlier.  My goal was to understand how their opinions changed after learning more about the lives of adjunct professors. (As I explained above, the overrepresentation of knowledgeable respondents in my sample made it difficult to gather information about how students’ opinions changed between the two parts of the questionnaire because many students were already very knowledgeable about adjunct professors.)

The final section in the questionnaire asked them to suggest how they believed conditions for adjuncts might be improved.  In this part of the survey, I asked them: “How much do you believe adjunct professors should be paid per class? What changes, if any, would you like to see to the role and/or treatment of adjunct professors?”

After they completed the questionnaire, some participants agreed to be interviewed one-on-one.  I hoped that these interviews would allow me to gain a better understanding of some of their responses and to learn more about the solutions and tactics they proposed to increase awareness among college students. Questions I asked included: How would you raise awareness of the working conditions of adjuncts? Would you be willing to have fewer amenities (for example, sports fields and gym facilities) in exchange for knowing your professors were paid well? As a student, where would you most like your tuition money to go?

All of the students who responded to the survey rated the conditions that adjunct professors work under at a 1 or 2 on a scale of 5. When I interviewed her, a sophomore at Boston University named Thalia Lauzon voiced a common view: she noted that many professors may be discouraged or unable to do their best work under their current conditions. The students surveyed pointed to three specific areas that they believed should be reformed for adjunct professors: benefits, job security, and pay structure and amount. Each participant deemed conditions obtaining in at least one of these areas to be substandard. Students posed a variety of solutions to each of these problems.

Lauzon said that, in her opinion, access to benefits was the most important problem for adjuncts. Many adjuncts work the same number of hours that full-time employees who are given benefits work, yet they are seldom offered healthcare, retirement plans, or other common benefits. (They are considered “part-time employees,” but many teach numerous courses on different campuses.)  Because of this, many professors are forced to spend part of their already small salaries on healthcare coverage and other necessities usually included in benefits.

Daniel Betensky, a junior at Brown University, emphasized the importance of job security for adjunct professors. Most adjuncts are not given a contract at all and work on a semester-by-semester basis without any assurance they will have a class to teach the next semester. He noted that because professors do not have job security, they cannot plan more than a semester or a year at a time, depending on how long they are hired for. Because of this, adjunct professors do not have many of the opportunities part-time and tenured faculty have to do research that is critical to their ever having a shot at a tenure-track job. “I think [the most important issue is] the lack of teacher job security,” Betensky said. “If [adjunct faculty] don’t know where they will be able to get a job in six months or if they need to move to a different city, that’s very destabilizing. So, the pay is not great and the lack of benefits is not great, but personally, [if I were in that position] I would prefer to have that same amount of money if I knew I would be able to stay there for a full year or two and then have to figure out a new plan for the future after that.”

Esther Reichek, a junior at Yale University, said that the wages of adjunct faculty are low and hard to live off of. On average, the average pay for adjunct faculty members teaching a three-credit course is $2,263 per section in public associate’s institutions without ranks, according to the AAUP’s 2019-2020 Annual Report on the Status of the Profession. At this pay with a 5-course workload both semesters of the year, the average adjunct professor brings home close to $22,630 a year before taxes. Reichek said that even though tenure-track professors have more responsibilities than adjuncts, those responsibilities are not enough to merit the great disparity in pay between the two classes of professors. What Reichek meant was that tenure-track faculty have to go to more meetings and have departmental and university service expected of them, as well as that they were expected to publish their research regularly.

Those interviewed offered a few solutions to increasing student awareness of this topic and some ways that students can directly affect change. By far, the most popular solution for increasing awareness was an informational campaign on social media about the working conditions of adjunct professors. Almost all of the students I spoke with agreed on this point. College-age students already use social media to both engage with others and, oftentimes, learn about important social issues. Those surveyed recommended the use of info-graphics, flyers, interviews, and some other techniques to engage students on their own terms. Groups attempting to draw the attention of the public to these conditions already exist on social media on platforms like Facebook, but they are often targeting older audiences who are already knowledgeable on the topic. To work well, a social media campaign for young people would have to focus on the platforms, styles, and interests of students, according to Reichek.

I would suggest using Instagram for this type of advocacy campaign as most college students are already on the app and consume advocacy content already. Movements like Black Lives Matter have leveraged the reach of Instagram to inform people and coordinate action. The use of Instagram is limited by its being a visual social media platform with less emphasis on text, but I believe it is still the strongest organ of social media for advocacy.

Lauzon and Betensky both noted that while social media campaigns may raise awareness, that does not necessarily mean that students will be willing to take action to make a change. Such a campaign would also need to coordinate with adjunct and contingent faculty and, where possible, their unions.  Together, these parties could recommend action for students.

The students I interviewed suggested a few specific ways students themselves could use their status as students to challenge the current configuration of academic labor. Betensky said that if enough students use the power of organizations such as student senates, they can push administrators to make real change. Students have many outlets to make changes at their universities, such as student organizations and clubs, student senates, and voicing concern to administrators, but for them to do so, they need to start a movement.  Any student movement will only succeed in making a difference if it gets a great deal of student support — and that requires that students learn what is happening in their own classrooms and how their own professors can barely afford to pay their rent.

Some of the students who responded to my survey suggested other approaches that could improve the lives of adjunct professors.  One theme included the reallocation of funds from areas that could be considered optional — such as sports amenities and equipment, gyms, and upscale dining options — and putting them towards the necessary expense of compensating those who do the crucial business of educating. Most students agreed that they would give up some of their amenities on-campus to give adjunct professors better pay and working positions.

Another change students largely agreed on was the elimination of the adjunct category altogether, or at least its minimization.  Lauzon said that it was her impression that, while some faculty may prefer not to take on the responsibilities of tenure-track professors, most professors are looking to make a lifelong profession out of educating. It would be ideal if adjunct professors had the option of moving onto something like a part-time faculty tenure track, or onto the regular tenure track.  This way, a much smaller number of professors would be adjuncts.

Universities have long been bastions of social change in society. They are where young people gain new knowledge, delve deeper into important ideas and fields, and develop passions. The current state of institutions of higher education in the US has created real hardship for many human beings who intended to contribute their talents to the pursuit and propagation of knowledge.  Academically-minded students in my generation need to understand this reality. How can students truly learn to make change for the better and move towards a more perfect society within such an exploitative system? They cannot. I want to learn from professors who are valued, in real terms, by the universities they work for. I want to learn from instructors who get as much as they give.

Jason Phillips is a junior at the University of Rhode Island studying English, writing and rhetoric, and journalism. He is currently editor-in-chief of the URI student newspaper, the Good Five Cent Cigar. After completing his studies, Jason hopes to work in the publishing industry.