Wal-Mart and Academia
Via Instapundit, I find this piece by James Joyner. I think Joyner gets confused part way through the argument, and the thread about academia just terminates without any conclusion or payoff. The main argument seems to be for the conclusion that low-paying jobs without benefits are good because they beat no jobs at all and serve as entry-level work. I've never really known what to make of such arguments, though I know enough about economics to know that I should keep my trap shut about this.
But the stuff about academia seems pointless. A mere jab at academia, a favorite target of the right.
But what Joyner should have said is this: adjunct work in academia is in many ways worse than stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. One can plausibly argue that shelf-stocking is an entry-level job. Adjuncting is a dead end. Adjuncting is what happens to people who are not lucky enough (or in some cases not talented enough) to land full-time academic positions. At the University of Infinite Evil, where I teach, adjuncts get paid $1,850 per course for a 15-week course. ($2,000 per course if they've got their Ph.D.) If they can keep their out-of-class work time down to 2 hours for every in-class hour, that doesn't look too bad, but that's pretty optimistic. They don't have to publish or do committee work, but they get no benefits and absolutely no job security. Most of them don't know until the week before the semester starts whether they'll be teaching. Most of them teach several courses, and many of them drive vast distances to teach adjunct at other universities, sometimes for even less money. A little adjuncting while you are finishing your degree is usually considered acceptable, but more than a little bit is the kiss of academic death.
A single tenure-track job in philosophy will get (at a university like mine) about 200 applications. 199 of those people will have to find work elsewhere. Many of them won't. Many of them will take an adjunct position or two to make ends meet and "keep a foot in the door" of academia. (It's also the kiss of death to take a job outside of academia and try to get back in. You can't adjunct, but you can't work elsewhere either. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.) Many of these people will still be adjuncting years later, as their dreams of a teaching career slowly die.
While this happens, departments and universities will happily exploit them as cheap labor. Some universities, I've heard, staff 40% of their courses with adjuncts. My department used to staff 25% of its courses with adjuncts. We complain about this a good bit, and I and other have made some attempts to change things, but the fact is that there's little we can do. We can't run the university without adjuncts, and if we make too much noise about it, the university is likely to punish our department for it--and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference.
By American standards, I don't make that much, but I'd be willing to make less in order to rectify this problem. On the other hand, we're already underpaid by almost any reasonable standard you can think of. People do this job primarily because they love it and not really for the money...but drop the salaries much lower and many of the most qualified would have to leave.
At any rate, what Joyner should have said was, roughly, physician heal thyself. Those academic types who revile Wal-Mart may be right, but there's a similar problem closer to home they might ought to think about, too.
Via Instapundit, I find this piece by James Joyner. I think Joyner gets confused part way through the argument, and the thread about academia just terminates without any conclusion or payoff. The main argument seems to be for the conclusion that low-paying jobs without benefits are good because they beat no jobs at all and serve as entry-level work. I've never really known what to make of such arguments, though I know enough about economics to know that I should keep my trap shut about this.
But the stuff about academia seems pointless. A mere jab at academia, a favorite target of the right.
But what Joyner should have said is this: adjunct work in academia is in many ways worse than stocking shelves at Wal-Mart. One can plausibly argue that shelf-stocking is an entry-level job. Adjuncting is a dead end. Adjuncting is what happens to people who are not lucky enough (or in some cases not talented enough) to land full-time academic positions. At the University of Infinite Evil, where I teach, adjuncts get paid $1,850 per course for a 15-week course. ($2,000 per course if they've got their Ph.D.) If they can keep their out-of-class work time down to 2 hours for every in-class hour, that doesn't look too bad, but that's pretty optimistic. They don't have to publish or do committee work, but they get no benefits and absolutely no job security. Most of them don't know until the week before the semester starts whether they'll be teaching. Most of them teach several courses, and many of them drive vast distances to teach adjunct at other universities, sometimes for even less money. A little adjuncting while you are finishing your degree is usually considered acceptable, but more than a little bit is the kiss of academic death.
A single tenure-track job in philosophy will get (at a university like mine) about 200 applications. 199 of those people will have to find work elsewhere. Many of them won't. Many of them will take an adjunct position or two to make ends meet and "keep a foot in the door" of academia. (It's also the kiss of death to take a job outside of academia and try to get back in. You can't adjunct, but you can't work elsewhere either. You're damned if you do, damned if you don't.) Many of these people will still be adjuncting years later, as their dreams of a teaching career slowly die.
While this happens, departments and universities will happily exploit them as cheap labor. Some universities, I've heard, staff 40% of their courses with adjuncts. My department used to staff 25% of its courses with adjuncts. We complain about this a good bit, and I and other have made some attempts to change things, but the fact is that there's little we can do. We can't run the university without adjuncts, and if we make too much noise about it, the university is likely to punish our department for it--and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference.
By American standards, I don't make that much, but I'd be willing to make less in order to rectify this problem. On the other hand, we're already underpaid by almost any reasonable standard you can think of. People do this job primarily because they love it and not really for the money...but drop the salaries much lower and many of the most qualified would have to leave.
At any rate, what Joyner should have said was, roughly, physician heal thyself. Those academic types who revile Wal-Mart may be right, but there's a similar problem closer to home they might ought to think about, too.
posted by Winston Smith at
2:47 PM
6 Comments:
The salient fact of the global economy is labor exploitation (and I don't mean that in the non-normative economics sense).
Academics have been facing the downslope for a while. It will only get worse because the technology now exists to start scaling universities to change the current market of many atomic sellers into an oligopoly of a few national universities that can finally exploit economies of scale in distance learning. Think the adjunct life is bad? Imagine life as a teaching assistant or grader (until that is automated by crude application of existing writing rubrics, for example - badly automated of course).
Print journalism faces the same forces. Even though reporters and editors are poorly paid, they're too expensive for their remaining markets, and media corporations have found that getting eyeballs onto ads - their real goal - can be accomplished without high quality copy. There will be a few national newspapers, quite a number of regional papers that supplement one of the nationals, and lots of local weeklies, most of which will be useless. Content will be very thin. Think USA Today.
The software business is hollowing out in the classic way - headed overseas, as everyone is aware. Now we understand what auto and textile workers have been complaining about.
Where to go from here? Entertainment is my guess. Shame I don't speak Hindi or Chinese. I should have listened to a friend who told me five years ago that the killings to be made on the Internet were in pornography and gambling, neither of which requires a lot of pesky words.
"By American standards, I don't make that much, but I'd be willing to make less in order to rectify this problem. On the other hand, we're already underpaid by almost any reasonable standard you can think of."
- American standards are, I fear, unreasonable, being way, way out of line with any morally defensible distribution of resources among 6+ billion citizens of the world. The only way I can envision this situation being rectified in a morally acceptable manner is for individuals of conscience to voluntarily reduce their consumption of resources. I also acknowledge that this can be difficult, and admit to being a hypocrite.
Bob,
Yup. Well, dunno whether that's the ONLY way, but it's a way. It'd be stupid to say "reduce my salary," of course, b/c the money would just end up getting wasted. Buying less and giving more to worthy charities seems to be the thing to do. Weird...though I'm not particularly materialistic, I still don't do this as much as I should...not by any stretch of the imagination.
LL,
Yeah, one of my collegues and I were offered significant money (by our standards) to create a "distance learning" reasoning course, but declined in part b/c we think that this heralds the fall of Western civilization. Wouldn't surprise me if, in the future, there are like 100 philosophy professors lecturing on tv, while everyone else is a grader/discussion leader.
Of course, I'm not sure how much worse that would really be for most of my students. They're just going through the motions anyway, and might be happier to watch tv... For the good students, tho, it would be disastrous.
Distance learning, at least in some situations, is not only not a bad thing, but a very good thing.
My university, WVU, has integrated a lot of distance learning One purpose of distance learning here is to allow students in rural areas to get a degree without the hellish commute. In my program--Public Health--I've had classmates from all over the state. With web based and "televised" courses, students don't have to drive long distances to attend classes, which means that students in rural areas can get advanced degrees while remaining in their communities.
Additionally, they have an e-learning program for non-traditional students, that allows older students to take classes on-line and get the degree they might not have been able to get otherwise.
Mind you, West Virgnia is in many ways far different from the rest of the country, but for us and other rural states, e-learning and distance learning may be the only way that for some to get advanced degrees. The commutes are simply too much of an obstacle for a traditional program.
Just my two cents. :)
Golly, where do I begin on a topic to which I am so bitterly attached... I few somewhat rational thoughts I hope:
First, the situation of the academic TA/grader/adjunct is somewhat similar to that of actors, directors, journalists, and others whose initial labour can be endlessly and easilty reproduced. Millions really can enjoy the benefits 'learning from Peter Singer', if by that we mean watching him lecture or reading his books. In that sense, a student would seem a fool pay an apprentice philosopher to go over the same arguments, just as it would be dumb to pay me five dollars to act out the plot of 'The Shining' when you can see Jack do it much better for only a little more. Another way in which academia is similar to these industries is the way wannabes are willing to not only suffer huge degrees of exploitation (porn, subsistence ghost writing, adjucnt work) in the slim hope of joining the elect, but are even willing to do such work for free. See for instance the number of magazines that are able to fill their pages with plenty of free not-half-bad copy merely by offering the promise of exposure or a token prize. (More dismayingly, see those bottom-feeding writing 'seminars' where wannabes actually pay to presnent their material, and then pay again to get the small run volume in which the stuff is printed.) This situation, thousands of pretty talented people scratching and biting to bocome like the few selected by telent and luck, is psychologically pretty hard to get through. First, not many of those who have made it are ever willing to admit the role chance plays in their rise, though we all know it does, leaving the failed wannabe - most all of them - to feel that they have only their lack of talent to blaim. Second, years worth of behaving like a grade A sucker while ghosting, adjuncting, or blowing producers tends to slowly make one feel like the love of the activity itself is the liabilty that allows others to take such advantage. The adjunct feels increasingly like a idiot for loving teaching and philosophy, comes to regard it as a personal weakness akin to alchohol addiction. Given that philosophy, and acting, and wrting, &c. are in fact all good things, and that a love of them is truely admirable, the bitterness produced by the current economic arangements against the crafts themselves is to me the saddest facet of all this.
But here's one key way in which the academic wannabe is especially positioned to explode in frustration: While the wannabe actor might be suffering all sorts of poor working conditions and crappy pay, they are not performing exactly the same service that the elect actors are. A talented but unlucky actor ding a hemroid comercial is still doing something different from what Dustin Hoffman does. The adjunct however is getting paid the 1.7k per class to do exactly what a full time professor does, teach classes of a particular level at at the same standeards of quality, but at - if the tenure track position is a relatively crappy 4/4 at 40k - four tenths what the tenure track professor gets. (By the way, no comments about how the tenure track professor has to publish to keep her job, since the adjuncts only hope of getting a job is to publish, so they are both doing that work. And don't even think about suggesting that admin work justifies the more than two fold increase in pay.) The adjunct would like to be full time, but the university has not need to hire full time people to teach precisely because the adjunct is already doing it. The university need only hire enough full time professors to keep the students (well, the students' parents) convinced of the quality of the education, whcih it turns out is not very many. And - I do feel bad about the cynicism here - to keep alive the possibilty of real employment for adjunct, since it is only his sliver of hope that makes him willing to work for so little. This be-your-own-scab system is fairly unique to academia, which to my mind makes it extra odious on these matters, and extra extra odious given the self-rightousness on economic and social matters displayed by academia's winners of the career lottery.
Last point, I swear. Another key difference between many of the other broken-heart-for-every-light industries: The same forces killing the local papers - technology mostly - also help to erode the comparative advantages of the big ones. See, for instance, this blog, or, even better, some of the blogs that have gone professional on selling ad space. There some hope that similar forces will make it easier and easier to produce and distribute our own albums, movies, novels, and the like. Yet the same technologies confer no advanted on the well trainede but unemployed academic. Why is this? I don't doubt my base is big enough to teach any number of classes at the introductory level. If I were to charge just 200$ per student - about half what my state charges for a comunity college course at the in-state level - and take 20 students, I would already be making more than twice what Winston's U pays adjuncts. (I could get more out of this if I were as clever as the typical university and got the book publishers to sell me the texts at a discount for me to mark up, or just send me a kickback.) Space and material are not an issue, since in my field, and many of the other liberal arts, all that is needed is 20 chairs and a chalk board. So why not do this? Well of course my course would not be part of the curriculum of an acredited university, the student could not put it on her resume, and I - or I and my bitter, over educated friends - cannot grant a degree. We cannot do any of these, even if we were to teach the students everything a university does. And the reason we cannot do any of these things is because state mandated barriers to entry make it impossible to do so without a huge amount of money that is, in point of fact, extraneous to imparting knowledge and skills to students. In this regard, academia looks to me most similar to gambling - oh sorry, gaming - industry. Any one with a book and little talent for odds can take bets and make a profitable buisiness of it. Anyone with a pair of dice can set up a craps game. The one and only reason there is enourmous profit in sucgh things is that its not possible for all but a select few corporations and states to offer them. Gaming is an industry that exists almost entirely as a form of rent-seeking, and, I'm sorry to say, much of the current structure of higher ed, especially the shabby way the wannabes are treated, is thanks to rent-seeking too.
I don't mean this last point to sound some kind of dribbling libertarian note. My point is not that the state should remove all barriers to entry everyewhere, just that the sorry mixture of private enterprise that depends on regulation for its advantage has most of the bad and almost none of the good features of both capitalism and socialism.
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