Pictured Above: Today, around 75 percent of faculty are adjuncts or not on the tenure track, the Inside Scholar website reports.
Darnell Henderson | The Crow’s Nest
By Trevor Martindale
Universities have drastically changed their hiring practices in recent years.
In 1969, 80 percent of professors in America were tenured or on a tenure track, according to The Atlantic. Today, around 75 percent of faculty are adjuncts or not on the tenure track, the Inside Scholar website reports.
This means a higher rate of university faculty has less job security, and receives lower pay and fewer-to-no benefits.
In the ninth installment of The Crow’s Nest’s Poynter College Media Project, Green & Gold, we assessed the shifting landscape of academia and its impact on higher education, faculty and students.
Professors play an integral role in universities. From instructional needs to research, professors and students ideally work in tandem to create an environment of scholarship, education and camaraderie.
In academia, tenure is guaranteed, long-term employment at a university. Tenure-track positions grant faculty eligibility for a tenure position after several years at the institution. Like tenured faculty, those on the tenure track receive a salary, benefits and fixed job security.
There are also salaried, short-term positions, such as visiting professors. These faculty members often receive similar benefits and pay, but with a fixed departure date.
Adjuncts are temporary employees who work on a semester-to-semester basis and are paid by course. At any time, universities can choose to not rehire an adjunct.
The average annual income for adjunct faculty members around the country is between $20,000 and $25,000, according to the Inside Scholar website, while tenured and tenure-track professors, on average, make more than $80,000 annually.
Like the cost of attendance, the recent rise in university dependence on adjuncts is largely the result of the reduction in state funding for universities. From 1987 to 2015, the average state funding for American universities dropped from $9,489 per student to $7,152 per student, according to a report from The New Center.
However, many believe the recent demand for cheap instructional labor is not a benign practice that merely resulted from public funding cuts.
Bernardo Motta, a former tenure-track professor at USF St. Petersburg who now teaches at Roger Williams University, pointed to the pay disparities among university administrators and instructors. He compared higher education employees to workers on a factory line.
“Now (academia) is almost like a factory system,” said Motta, who was at USF from 2015 to 2020. “So academia has become almost (like) an Amazon. So you see all the complaints about Amazon all the time. Faculty members are doing a lot more of the administrative work for free…
“And administrators are getting more money and doing less work, which is kind of funny,” Motta said. “So you have all of these administrations making millions of dollars and not doing as much as they used to do, and faculty members doing a lot more work, and getting paid less –– especially adjuncts.”
Joshua Hostetter, a former visiting professor of political science at USF St. Petersburg, likened university hiring practices to those of businesses.
“At the end of the day this is a business –– at least you’re treating it that way,” said Hostetter, who taught at USF from 2018 to 2020. “You’re certainly treating it as an economic model if it’s not a business.”
According to an American Institutes of Research study, universities are not using instructional savings to invest in more tenure-track and tenure positions.
The study found that public four-year universities primarily use instructional savings for administrative costs, student services, admissions and athletics.
The impetus to hire cheap labor for instructional needs affects more prospective academics with advanced degrees than ever before.
Along with the shrinking market for tenure and tenure-track positions, more universities are awarding doctoral degrees. According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, universities awarded 31,000 doctoral degrees in 1980 and around 55,700 in 2019.
This means the annual output of doctoral degrees has nearly doubled as the number of tenure and tenure-track positions has dwindled.
Hostetter said that because of this, universities are expecting more from graduates with doctoral degrees.
“It’s no longer just get a Ph.D. –– it’s publish while you’re in (graduate school), it’s teach while you’re in there, it’s do service while you’re in there,” Hostetter said. “It’s not just show up and write a dissertation anymore.”
Hostetter noted that the overabundance of doctoral degrees likely bolsters the general demand for cheap labor.
“If you’re going to think about it in terms of an economic model, it is going to drive down their price because now it’s a race to the bottom,” he said. “They could always find someone like me who’s willing to do it online for a few thousand bucks.”
Hostetter, who recently accepted a tenure-track position at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina, experienced the unpromising job market in academia first-hand. After his visiting professor position at USF ended, he was unemployed for a couple of months while he applied for several tenure-track positions around the country.
“If somebody offers you a tenure-track position in academia, you take it – and I don’t care where it is,” he said. “They don’t exist anymore – it’s a unicorn.”
Motta, who has worked in three tenure-track positions throughout his career, acknowledged that academia is a tumultuous field to enter.
“It’s tough; it’s not a very good environment right now,” Motta said. “I’ve been very lucky to get three positions at three institutions that I really like.”
Although USF dependence on adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty is below the national average, 56 percent of its faculty members are non-tenure track –– and half of them are adjuncts, according to the USF Office of Division Support.
Catherine Cardwell, the regional associate vice chancellor of academic affairs in St. Petersburg, said that USF adjuncts are “generally hired to meet the changing instructional needs of a department” and that adjuncts who teach full-time usually take on four classes per semester.
According to a USF adjunct hiring process update, the University believes that “adjuncts are part-time and should be limited in the number of courses and credit hours they are assigned so as to remain consistent with that principle.”
However, USF does not limit the number of credit hours adjunct faculty can teach, and rather allows departments to make hiring decisions in accordance with the “needs and resources” of the respective departments.
At USF, tenured and tenure-track faculty focus more on research and other assignments than teaching.
“Tenured or tenure-track faculty can teach one, two or three classes a semester depending on their research and service assignments, which is determined by the chair of their department,” Cardwell said in an email to The Crow’s Nest.
USF’s relationship with its adjunct faculty has been tumultuous in recent years.
In May 2017, USF adjuncts filed a petition for an adjunct union election, citing poor pay and benefits.
However, unionization efforts were not welcomed with open arms. The USF administration strongly opposed the union filing with the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission and attacked the union in emails to adjuncts.
USF also invited labor lawyer Katie Lev to discuss the union effort with the adjuncts. Some accused Lev of trying to dissuade them from voting to form the union, and for months the administration refused to say how much Lev was paid.
In early 2018, USF adjuncts voted to form a union 326 to 92.
Hostetter said he is not surprised that universities oppose unionization.
“It comes down to money,” Hostetter said. “I think adjuncts are grossly underpaid. What is the purpose of unionizing? To have more pay, to have a little bit more job security, to have more money… to have more rights as an employee.”
Motta expressed disappointment with the administration’s opposition to the union.
“Now the whole system has become a research-intensive university, which means they need to count on cheap labor,” Motta said. “But an adjunct faculty union goes against that. So it’s just terrible –– I don’t have any other word to describe that, it’s just a really bad deal for everybody.”
Motta said he still believes that the formation of the union was a step in the right direction.
“But, of course, I think the union is important,” he said. “I don’t know how much power that union can have in a situation like that where all the power is on one side. But at least it gives them some voice, some organized effort not to be just run over by the university.”
The USF Board of Trustees approved the adjunct union contract in September 2020. The contract established minimum pay standards, a fee for adjuncts when their courses are canceled at the last minute, union representation for employment grievances and annual meetings between adjuncts and department heads.
Now, in accordance with the adjunct union’s collective bargaining agreement, USF pays adjuncts $2,400 to $3,500 per class. This means that a full-time adjunct who teaches four three-credit-hour courses in the spring and fall semesters would make $19,200 to $28,000 annually, depending on the college they teach in.
USF President Steve Currall has an annual compensation package worth up to $977,000. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year he is taking a 15 percent cut in his annual base salary of $575,000.
Disparities in university faculties are not only concerning advocates for fair treatment of adjuncts. Many are concerned that the treatment of adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty has a negative impact on students.
Motta contended that low adjunct pay forces adjuncts to take on several classes to earn a liveable salary. He said he believes this likely diminishes the quality of each course, since adjuncts are overwhelmed by significant course loads.
“Imagine you’re teaching a small class of 20 students and you want to dedicate time to each student to see how they’re working on learning the process and everything else,” he said. “That takes many hours a week. So, imagine that now you have to teach five classes and you have 100 students in each class…. How do you do that?”
Hostetter said he believes the constant turnover for non-tenured and adjunct faculty diminishes institutional knowledge and, in turn, the academic experience.
“If you are going to constantly turn and burn professors, those professors are losing the institutional knowledge within your system, within your school,” he said. “They’re also building relationships ––– when you think about a college degree, that’s typically going to be four years… That means from the very beginning, I can mentor students from year one … all the way through senior year to graduation. You can build those relationships with students. Students grow just like professors do.
“It’s deeper than just, ‘Hey kid, write this paper.’ It becomes more of ‘Let me help you go and be successful in life.’”
When Hostetter was positioned to leave USF, his lack of job security affected him.
“When I have to teach an entire semester knowing that I was done, that I had to be on the job market… Did I do the best that I could? Yes, I did… but it weighed on me,” he said. “It was always on my mind. Every time I was on campus, every time I was in the classroom it weighed on me that –– look, this is it.
“So my mind was not focused 100 percent on students, it was focused on, ‘Where is my next paycheck going to come from?’ That’s with every single adjunct there is. That’s the beauty of having a tenure position.”
Sophie Ojdanic contributed to this report.
