Our campuses are in crisis

Have you had trouble finding faculty members in their offices lately? Unfortunately, many college and university faculty no longer have offices; if they did, they couldn't afford to spend time in them. Who are these teachers and what do I mean by saying they cannot afford to hold office hours?

I am referring to the new migrant workers of the education industry - the part-timers and graduate students who now do most of the undergraduate teaching throughout the country. In the course of one generation the percentage of teaching done by parttimers has doubled. Nearly twothirds of all undergraduate teaching is done by part-time or adjunct faculty and graduate students. The lucky ones earn $3,000 a course and even get health benefits. Those "faculty" at the bottom of higher education's pay scale earn $1,000$1,500 per course and get no benefits - no health insurance, no retirement plan, no office space, and no guarantee of a job next semester.

Do the math yourself. How many $1,000 courses would you have to teach each year if you wanted to support a family? Own a house? Drive a car you could count on? Go to a movie and eat at a restaurant now and then? How many $1,000 courses would it take per year? Twenty? Thirty? It is not uncommon to find part-time faculty teaching six or seven classes each semester at three different schools. Their car trunk often has a separate cardboard box for texts and papers for each school. Their day involves rushing from campus to campus trying to piece together enough courses to earn a nearpoverty-level income. When classpreparation and grading time is calculated into their salaries, some find that they are earning less than the minimum wage. College teaching for many has become the lowest-paying legal job in America. Do these people have time to hold leisurely office hours? How much time do they owe the institutions paying their exploitation wages?

Many part-timers are highly qualified. Increasingly many have Ph.D.s; you might call them "doctor," although they aren't likely to make house calls. Moreover, unlike medical doctors, these Ph.D.s could earn a good deal more money driving a truck. Twenty years ago most part-timers were moonlighting from fulltime jobs. A lawyer or a journalist would teach a college course at night for the pleasure, the prestige, and the intellectual stimulation. That still happens, but increasingly part-time faculty depend on these unethically low salaries for their entire livelihoods. That makes for a desperate life and for a stripped-down sort of teaching. Part-timers on average give only half as much time to class preparation, grading, and office hours as do full-timers. They have no choice; they are struggling to survive.

Students could and should argue that they deserve better service for the tuition dollars they are paying. But students cannot ask more of these migrant faculty. The question is, where are your tuition dollars going? Well, check out the salary of the football coach, the dean, and the average business professor. Many top faculty in business departments earn $300,000 to $400,000 a year. The top salaries in higher education have gotten too high, and the lowest salaries have become too low. Exploited teachers and poorly served students are the victims.

But it gets worse still. Part-time faculty are incredibly vulnerable and have very little intellectual independence. They can often be fired without notice. Academic freedom is the principle which guarantees that faculty can take controversial stands and challenge their students intellectually. But part-timers do not have as much academic freedom as tenured faculty. They also often do not have enough time to stay up-todate in their academic fields. As the overall balance of teachers in higher education has shifted from full-time to part-time faculty, the quality of education at many schools has declined, and the intellectual independence and integrity of the faculty have been seriously undermined.

There is clearly a place for part-time teachers in higher education, but they are now badly overused and exploited. Part-time appointments are the single worst problem higher education faces, and they are linked to every other crisis in the industry. If you start talking about the detenuring of the faculty, you end up talking about part-time employment. Take up the risks in distance learning, and you arrive at the certainty of more parttime hires. Discuss the future of affirmative-action hiring, and you confront the way part-time employment will shape and undermine it. Talk about the quality of education, and you must talk about how part-time employment is destroying it. Discussion of the place of humanities disciplines cannot occur without confronting their takeover by part-timers. University governance? Try addressing it without discussing part-timers' role in its future. The future of graduate study? Faculty teaching loads? Funding for higher education? The dignity of teaching? The massive shift to part-time employment is at the center of everything we do in higher education.

Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author most recently of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical (NYU, 1997) and the coauthor (with Stephen Watt) of Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education (Routledge, 1999).

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Winter 1999
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