This is a really interesting and thought-provoking essay that I think anyone concerned about the state of higher education should read. Riederer makes a complex argument. Here are some excerpts:
The rise of adjunct labor in universities is also a student issue. Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. And when the average graduate of the class of 2014 leaves school with over $30,000 of debt (nearly twice what the average was twenty years ago, adjusted for inflation), it’s an important consumer issue, too. Students deserve to know how their universities are spending their money, and how they’re contracting with their teachers, especially those teachers who have the most student contact. Courses like composition—a universal requirement at most colleges, and given in small groups—are taught almost exclusively by adjuncts. For such courses, many colleges employ “small armies of adjuncts,” and at large universities where large classes are divided into smaller discussion sections, those are often taught by grad students. Yet students are often unaware of the way their colleges contract with their teachers—after all, who would tell them?
When Andrew Scott, a composition instructor in Indianapolis, explained adjuncting to some of his students, he wound up being called into his supervisor’s office for a scolding. A group of his students at the private university where he was adjuncting (he also had a full-time position at Ball State) had arrived early for class, and were talking in the hallway. When one student mentioned a history teacher who seemed eager to get the students to like her, and whose class didn’t have a lot of work, Scott explained how her work situation was involved: “I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students that she was an adjunct, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.” Adjuncts are often evaluated solely based on student evaluations. As Rebecca Schuman put it in her Slate article “Confessions of a Grade Inflator,” “popularity is the only thing keeping them employed.”
Scott had this conversation with his students outside of class, because the students had brought it up, and because he considered it “a teachable moment.” But it still got him into trouble, probably because of this comparison: “I said that the university pays the janitor who scrapes the gum off their desks more per year than me and most of the people who teach their first-year classes. My private university students couldn’t believe that, but it was true. Even a low estimate shows how that’s true. Ten bucks per hour for forty hours a week equals an annual salary of $20,800.” One year Scott taught seven courses at that college, and made under $15,000 for that work.
Ten days later, Scott’s supervisor called him into her office because she’d heard about a “classroom incident” in which he had “ranted” about adjunct faculty pay and working conditions. “The director was especially worked up about my janitor comparison. She wanted to know if I’d really said that, and how I could possibly say that,” Scott recalls. The situation worked out for Scott—his other job made it possible for him to leave Marian, and he told his supervisor during the meeting that it would be his last semester. But not all adjuncts would be in such a position. And this dynamic is one of the reasons that adjunct conditions remain obscured from students: for workers without job security, the line between scolded and fired is uncomfortably thin.
***
Last fall, Karen Gregory was teaching a labor studies course in the City University of New York system when she found herself the object of media scrutiny because she included in her syllabus a short text describing the adjunctification of CUNY, and what it means for students:
“To ensure that we remain conscious of the adjunctification of CUNY, we ask that you do not call us ‘Professor.’ We are hired as adjunct lecturers and it is important that you remember that. You deserve to be taught by properly compensated professors whose full attention is to teaching and scholarship.”
The text, which was developed by the CUNY Adjunct Project and distributed for teachers to include in their syllabi, briefly describes the history of CUNY’s increased reliance on adjuncts. It explains how adjuncts are paid and what that means for students:
“Adjuncts are not regular members of the faculty; we are paid an hourly rate for time spent in the classroom. We are not paid to advise students, grade papers, or prepare materials or lectures for class. We are paid for one office hour per week for all of the classes we teach. We are not paid to communicate with students outside of class or write letters of recommendation. Out of dedication to our students, adjuncts regularly perform such tasks, but it is essentially volunteer labor.”
***
Another exchange in the IHE comment thread handily brought up a problematic rhetorical strategy that arises often in the discussion of the adjunct bubble: the comparison to fast-food workers. One commenter wrote, “You know what’s demeaning? Earning a PhD and making less money than a manager at McDonald’s.” And another replied, “You know what’s demeaning? A PhD who thinks she’s better than a manager at McDonald’s.” This exemplifies a serious problem in the ways that advocates for better working conditions for adjuncts make their argument. (A related problem is that adjunct advocates sometimes dramatize their argument by using phrases like “slave wages,” “slave labor”). Yes, college-level teachers should make more than cashiers at McDonald’s. Not because they hold advanced degrees—to pay someone for merely holding a degree is naked credentialism; to believe you deserve more money because of your credential itself rather than what you do with it is to misunderstand the value of work—but because as a culture, we value the dissemination of knowledge more than the distribution of hamburgers. Or at least we say we do.
***
American universities are on a dangerous trajectory of “corporatization,” operating from the view that students are consumers and instructors are just one more cost of doing business. It used to be common for administrators to be professors who took a break from teaching to perform administrative duties for a short period of time, or took on admin duties in addition to their classes; they were people whose first commitment was to research or teaching. In his book The Fall of the Faculty, Johns Hopkins professor of political science Benjamin Ginsburg writes that “Forty years ago, America’s colleges actually employed more professors than administrators.” But while the faculty-to-student ratios have remained constant (with both groups growing at around the same rate), the administrator-to-student ratio has increased dramatically. And Ginsburg notes that though administrators often extol the virtues of using part-time contingent labor for teaching, “they fail to apply the same logic to their own ranks.” In 2005, 48 percent of college faculty were part time, compared to only 3 percent of administrators.
But to talk about these structural issues is to deviate from the idea that work is sacred, and that—especially in this economy—to have a job at all is a gift. Advocating for better pay and conditions is not just impolite, it’s ungrateful. This dynamic applies to any group of workers that speaks out on its own behalf, but there’s a special factor at work in the way that people critique adjuncts who want better conditions. Teaching college is a white-collar job. It is not dangerous or degrading; it happens on college campuses, which often are pleasant and have trees and sometimes inspirational phrases about learning carved into stone buildings; it is—except for the low pay and lack of benefits and constant uncertainty about the future—a good job. Gregory calls this a “cruel double standard: you’ve made this choice to go into a bad career that has high social status.” Many of the comments directed at her, and others who raise the adjunct issue, are concerned with protecting the sanctity of teaching. A professor should not be so vulgar as to talk about the material reality of her life.
***
When I was adjuncting at Columbia, I remember calculating the maximum number of hours I could spend on my class before I reduced my pay rate to under $15/hour. It was less time than I would have liked to spend, but I couldn’t work for less than that. So I taught differently: I assigned fewer drafts, I held shorter and less frequent conferences, I read student essays faster and homework assignments hardly at all. When I realized I was not going to be able to do right by my students, I stopped classroom teaching. In part, this anecdote is just that—a little story about me. It depends on the particulars of my financial situation and personality. I didn’t want to have a job in which my time was so undervalued that I felt I was either doing a poor job or giving my time away as a gift. But it’s also not just about me. Others have written about how the circumstances of adjuncting force them into grade inflation, or into designing easier courses so that they’ll get better student evaluations.
***
Will you forgive me a moment of English-teacher pedantry? I may not be a professor but I am certainly an English teacher. Throughout this piece I’ve been taking the liberty of using adjunct as a job title and even as a verb. The term actually means “a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.” If teaching is a supplementary rather than essential part of college [remember, we’re talking about the people who do most of the teaching on college campuses across the nation], why go?
Go read the whole thing.
This is where the trustees of these institutions need to take them in hand – and, for public institutions, where the trustees themselves need to be accountable. My guess is that the trustees spend a lot more time with the administrators than the faculty….
The problem, Ron, is that the trustees, whether at private or public institutions, are often complicit in, if not the actual drivers of this trend.
I’m a full-time lecturer, which isn’t as bad as being an adjunct, but still not great, either. I’m trying to find a new job, but it’s tough — a lot of the job ads specifically say they prefer new Ph.D.s, and there are several hundred applicants for each job. If I can’t find something this year, then I’m going to start looking outside academia — I love teaching, but I just can’t stay with this for another year.
This situation is part of a bigger picture, that is, the generally sorry state of college education in the US (and to some extent elsewhere as well). A college degree costs way too much and has become at the same time an inferior product.
Universities were originally not intended for most people. They existed originally to train clerics, and later, doctors, lawyers and of course college professors. It was not the idea that “everyone” should obtain or be required to obtain a college degree. In the UK until recently university education was paid for by tax money, and was free to those few who qualified for one of these few professions. Under these standards the vast majority of people who now show up on college campuses have no business being there in the first place, which many of them acknowledge by drinking too much and generally not learning much. To process this horde costs huge sums. The real teaching staff is only barely paid as this article demonstrates.
I believe that a wholesale restructure is needed. Students who will end up as middle managers, entrepreneurs or technical people should not be at university at all (which Bill Gates acknowledged by dropping out of Harvard). Most students now at university belong at institutions which will teach them something useful. The few who are left could be accommodated at reasonable cost, and will become physicians, attorneys, scholars and of course college professors (who should be handsomely paid) to keep this much smaller ball rolling.
The sciences need a different focus than the traditional university. Most of these people,who will become the research scientists of the future, are already being trained within the university as it now exists. Because the people who are qualified to teach them have very attractive alternatives elsewhere, they tend to be better paid.
The current system of requiring college students to shoulder huge debts before they graduate cannot be sustained in the long run, and the sooner it crashes the better for all concerned.
There are plenty of adjunct jobs that pay almost nothing in the sciences. I know several people working them.
I do think we push too hard to send too many people to college, but I’m also leery of ideas that boil down to “universities are nothing more than job prep.”
Imagine you create a class of “teaching professors.”
They have a heavy course load; no sabbaticals; minimal research opportunities; and no expectations for publishing. They get 2-3 weeks off every year. They get paid, say, $60k. They have fluctuating work weeks but probably average 45-50 hours/week They have rolling contracts-automatically renewing with a minimum of six months’ notice for termination.
This would be a non-exploitative job. It would also put the vast majority of adjuncts out of business entirely. No more teaching one or two courses; no more picking it up as a stopgap. With real full time employees on the rolls, the gaps in education are going to be filled by the existing “teaching professors” at the school, in most cases. If you can cover 20 classes/year by hiring two folks to teach 4 classes/semester and 2 in the summer, and you can make them occasionally pick up a 5th (or 3rd) class if you’re really stuck, that’s what you’ll do.
If Tom and Mary each teach 2-3 courses in the spring; Wally and Martha each cover 2-3 in the fall; Victoria takes 3 over summer…. well, if you hire Victoria full time with a 5 course load and a long contract, then four of them are going to end up jobless–and without any future job expectations.
What do you think Tom, Mary, Wally, and Martha are going to do? They won’t go manage a Gap because they could do that right now–and they don’t. Instead they’ll try to get their preferred job using their only bargaining chip: willingness to work for lower wages. And then the cycle will begin again.
The article is a good one. But the arguments sometimes remind me of a local affordable housing group: they are always arguing that we should build nicer houses (which would be good!) but they don’t always seem to acknowledge that it would also require us to build fewer houses.
What makes you think people pushing for better jobs for adjuncts aren’t aware of the fact that it would mean fewer overall positions? Part of the reason people object to them is that young scholars get strung along in adjuncting jobs with the carrot of a permanent position next year held out in front of them that never appears. (And yes: there’s perennial discussion–and occasional implementation–of reducing the number of people accepted to Ph.D. programs, because of this surfeit of labor.)
Some people would be happy to work for less than minimum wage, but we don’t allow that. Likewise, universities could choose not to hire adjuncts at what is effectively at or below minimum wage, even if people would be willing to work for that (as they obviously are).
Also, teaching professors already exist, at least in some R1 universities–I used to have an office next door to one. I’m amused you think such a position would be worth $60k, though. (And 45-50 hr/week is probably lowballing it too.) But of course that varies with location, which might be why your intuition is wrong about it.
My job is as a full-time lecturer, which is pretty similar to the teaching professor job that you describe. I get paid significantly less than $60,000.
I’ve seen a few ads for jobs like that which pay in the $60,000 range, but all of them have been in places like NYC with really high costs of living. The vast majority of them, more like $45,000.
Nitpick for Susan @ #4: My impression is that there are good students who are also drinking heavily.
Fair enough Nancy. Drinking too much has been a part of university life, so far as we can tell, as long as there have been universities, all the way back to medieval Paris.
I think this varies so much from field to field in academia, but in my field – I’m on the faculty of the Biology Dept at an R2/comprehensive state university – it’s common to use both lecturers/instructors/teaching professors/whatever-term-you-prefer for full-time work plus adjunct faculty to fill in during sabbaticals, medical leaves, or whatever other situation comes up where a temp teaching job is needed. We have multiple non-tenure-track instructors in our department who’ve been here a decade or more; in fact the (I think) second-most senior member of our faculty is an instructor who’s been here more than 30 years. The more senior instructors get paid well over $60,000 based on cost-of-living and merit-based pay increases over their time here, but they definitely start significantly lower in salary than tenure track faculty.
Well, in all seriousness I’ve read a lot of pleas but can’t ever recall seeing it mentioned. Much less seeing it centered: “Hey everyone, let’s create jobs for 20% of the people and tell the remaining 80% to pound sand.”
I guess that people “know” it, but it isn’t entirely clear that it has really broken through. I mean, the bottom 50% of folks should “know” that they are in the bottom 50%, right? And that they probably won’t get a job? And that if the union “succeeds” they’ll probably be in the out group?
And yet they have not left the profession to work elsewhere, even though it is probably rational for them and hugely beneficial for everyone else.
Certainly I’d support eliminating any position where someone works for less than minimum wage. In Mass. it’s $8/hour.
I’m a Boston guy. Everything is insanely expensive here.
I don’t know if I think it’s “worth” $60k or not, frankly. It depends on your comparators.
I’m not sure if you noticed that this was a full time job and NOT a “teaching schedule” job (i.e. the school gives you a pile of work all summer, and over all school vacations, other than 2-3 weeks per year. There’s no “going on vacation over March break;” instead you man the phones in admissions.) Without knowing salaries all that well, 60k for a 50 hour/week, 50 weeks/year PhD-level person (especially with the occasional 60 hour “cover here” summer or semester thrown in there) isn’t insane, though I agree it’s not low.
But I figure that if that became the “thing to do,” eventually schools would treat adjuncts like other corporations treat their salaried staff: pay a bit more but compensate by sticking a shitload of responsibilities and high hours onto them. SOMEONE has to come in all summer, on vacations, etc.
Well, to begin with: for the most part, the people that you want teaching are NOT the same people that you want answering phones. Really. I’m seriously tempted to present this proposal to the administrative staff in my department, just to see how long it takes them to stop laughing.
Also, many of us do teach during the summers. I haven’t for the past few years, for various reasons, but if I had, then it still wouldn’t get my salary anywhere near your proposed $60,000.
And I don’t know how well you know teaching schedules, but in one of your posts, I think you mentioned 5 classes a semester. Unless these are all two-day classes, this would be close to impossible. At my university, the standard for full-time instructors is three courses per semester, and each class meets four times a week. Some of us have had to do four classes for one semester, and it’s an enormous amount of time and energy. Just in terms of physical energy, according to the activity tracker I’ve been wearing, on a typical teaching day, I walk a minimum of three miles. And that’s WITH a disability accommodation that says that all my classes are in the same building. It would be more like 4-5 for a more typical schedule.
Also, as for the overall number of jobs, a lot of people who adjunct are teaching at several universities. In Boston or NYC, you can do that — teach at NYU in the morning, take the subway uptown and teach at Columbia in the afternoon, hop on the subway again to teach at Fordham at night. Having full-time teaching positions would eliminate the need for this. (I strongly suspect that one of the reasons my university doesn’t really have many adjuncts is that, since we’re in a really rural area without any other universities nearby, people couldn’t do stuff like that, and no one really lives out here unless they’re already affiliated with the university in some way, so there’s no way that anyone would actually move out here just for an adjunct job.)
This conversation has turned away from the main point of the essay I linked to, which is that better pay, etc. for adjuncts is also—and perhaps should be primarily—about better serving students because poorly paid adjuncts translate into relatively less-than-adequate teaching.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/02/06/adjunct-professors-get-poverty-level-wages-should-their-pay-quintuple/
On topic.
Very true. The people teaching at three different schools, on three different schedules, won’t have much time for grading or meeting with students or anything like that. I know that, once in a while, when I’ve been writing a quiz, and I have a particularly busy week, I’ve thought of a question that would be a really good question to ask, but would take a really long time to grade, and decided against it — the “I don’t have time to read through 150 answers to this question” won against “They really should try to answer this question, and need to see where their answers fall short.” I haven’t done that often, but if I had more of a time crunch, it certainly would happen more often.
Similarly, for support for research and attending conferences — there’s a LOT of research going on that concerns teaching and learning. I’ve learned a lot of things at conferences that made me a much better teacher, and I’ve presented some things that other instructors have told me they’ve found really helpful. All of this goes toward making us better teachers, but for many of us, it’s on our own dime — the schools only give support to tenure-track faculty.
In my experience, business who have staff that they consider “overpaid” tend to find things for the staff to do, worthwhile or not. But anyway:
Not well in the last few years, i admit.
I didn’t mean 5 classes which each met 5 days plus labs ;) I was including some lower-time classes or seminars. But that said, the “close to impossible” part was basically the point I was trying to make.
But that’s not what the article is really saying, I don’t think. It’s not focused on students. It’s more about props for adjuncts. The costs to students are just some ancillary evidence which is stuck out there anecdotally to support the “we want more money” claim. supported by a “this feels wrong” claims like
I often wonder: do economics professors who work as adjuncts also claim the same set of problems? It’s at least somewhat hard to get around the “we’re worth more because we say we’re worth more, and because we assert we’re worth more, even though we have other alternatives and even though we can’t find a single person with money who agrees with us about our worth” angle. because when she says
This is compelling? This is something unique to adjuncts? Shit, if I had more time for less work my work quality would go up too. In fact, I don’t know ANYONE who would not produce better work if they had more support, more professional development, not having to hustle, and so on.
Things are changing. People are generally better educated; more educated people are living longer; information is more readily available; learning is simpler; lots of teaching and knowledge is free.
If you believe in objective worth (as the author seems to), the objective worth of being a “smart person who wants to teach” is the same as it has always been. But the market worth has gone down. Way, way, down.
This has happened to a lot of folks. Lawyers, for example. But it is what it is. Some folks change their strategy and go to a different career. Some folks market outside their field–I advise businesses sometimes, though that isn’t “legal” precisely.
Some folks start their own competing things: if you want to know whether students want “all full time professors, no sports or fancy dorms; all your money goes straight to education!” or “for the same price as going to a private college, we will provide you one-on-one lectures in the comfort of your own home!” you can have there is nothing preventing you from taking that bet.
But… shit. I don’t pretend that it doesn’t suck. It sucks right now for lawyers, too; there are law schools going under left and right due to the vast number of unemployed JDs. I know it sucks. I just remain shocked at the degree to which adjuncts seem to insist that it is really Someone Else’s Obligation To Provide The Money For The Solution. Christ, if she doesn’t like the chancellor getting an $18k/month apartment, one might ask “why didn’t you try to be a chancellor?”
Thanks for that G&W. $15,000 per course is certainly a provocative position to take, especially as a minimum. I doubt that they think they will get it, but it’s a way to start a conversation.
G&W:
Depends. If they are adjuncting, truly, on the side, meaning for supplemental income, the honest answer is I don’t know. If they are adjuncting, as is increasingly the case across all disciplines, to make a living? Hell yes. They certainly do at my school.
Part of the problem, as Riederer says in her piece, is that the true nature of adjuncting is invisible to most people, including those who are paying for the services that, increasingly, adjuncts, much more than full-timers, are employed to provide. And I do think it makes a difference that we are talking about education and not some other industry, since education, especially public education, is supposed to be something other than a private business; it is supposed to be something that the people providing it, including administrators, are doing for the public good.
I think you are misreading the article, or at least projecting more of your own set of concerns onto the article than is actually there. The entire section on Karen Gregory is framed by Riederer’s accurate assertion that people are not willing to talk about the harm that ajdunctification does to student education; and that harm is the focus of Riederer’s conclusion. For me, she is trying to open a conversation, but this difference in our readings doesn’t really surprise me.
You and I, I think, have had this conversation before, but this characterization woefully misrepresents the reality of the students graduating high school throughout the country, not to mention that it elides the entire discussion of what the purpose of a liberal arts education is supposed to be.
Well, no. What adjuncts are asking for is fair compensation and access to the kinds of resources that will allow them to do their jobs well. That is part of what an employer is supposed to do, no?
Nancy & Susan @ 11 & 12: My part in the opera I was in last year was a drunk student. One of 4 students, all drunk, in an opera set in Denmark in the 1720’s. it seems to be pretty much a given.
OTOH, if that was the way the job market were structured, how many people who TRY to be adjuncts, instead of looking for another job.
I would argue against that. I happen to think that a degree that combined an introduction to business with a grounding in the classical liberal arts (e.g., “Intro to Western Civ”) would be excellent preparation for such a career. And remember that the classical liberal arts includes the sciences (e.g., chemistry, physics, biology) and mathematics. If someone is planning to advance past middle management they can go for an MBA. But the classical liberal arts should give them an understanding of the culture that the economic system they’ll be working with comes from and how to read, comprehend, analyze and communicate about many different kinds of things. And that, in my opinion formed of working in the corporate world for some 30+ years, is all too rare in Corporate America.
Not really, no.
This reminds me of some advice I got early in my career, when I was doing legal scut work instead of writing appeals: “do the job you were hired to do, not the job you wanted to be hired to do.”
Employers are supposed to define the job and the pay, and accept the tradeoffs that they will get as a result. If an employer wants to say “I want you in particular to do this as best as you can; it needs to get done; tell me what pay and support you need” then they can say that. Sometimes I have said that to my employees; sometimes I have heard that from my employers/clients.
If an employer wants to say “this is the job; this is the pay; this is the support; go do your best; if you don’t like those terms then this is not the job for you” then they can say that, too. Sometimes I have said that to my employees; sometimes I have heard that from my employers/clients.
In any case: It seems pretty clear (at least to me) that adjuncts need to convince more people of the rightness of their cause. If it’s as right as you claim, for everyone**, then it should not be all that hard to do. I fully support the attempt, since open discussion can only benefit everyone. National Adjunct Walkout Day was held only last week; we’ll see what happens.
Tenured faculty will be crucially important. If your cause can’t get the support of the vast majority of tenured faculty, it will call into question the soundness of the cause, especially the “it’s all about students, and professors are best suited to know what students need” arguments.
So I’d be curious to know what %age of tenured folks are on your side, both facially and in practice. What %age actually use their great administrative support and office hours and salary to provide outstanding student support and teaching, as you suggest would happen for adjuncts? How many of them speak to students about adjuncts in support of your cause, demonstrating how the things they offer are better than adjuncts? How many of them are, having obtained long contracts and good support and higher salary, actually better than adjuncts (you would assume “most of them,” since they have all the things you say are needed to be good teachers, right?) How many of them walked out with you?
I don’t generally support the quasi-religious nature of your arguments:that there’s something secretive and special about teaching which can only be known to an illustrious few in the field, and isn’t comprehensible by “normal” folks. And also, that a lack of comprehension is demonstrated by disagreement, which… well… But conveniently we don’t even need to go there if you can’t convince almost all of your fellow teachers, right?
Students: In the end, they’re the ones who pay your bills. If the student body considers highly-paid adjuncts to be a valuable investment (“if I’m paying $55,000 to go here, maybe it makes no sense to get taught poorly”) then it should be possible to get direct action. Persuade every student to pay an extra $500/year to a grant fund, and voila, there’s another $10k/year to every full time adjunct, assuming a 1:20 adjunct ratio. Raise $1000 and adjuncts can be rolling in dough, relatively speaking.
That’s not so much money for lots of people. Hell, most students spend more than that on beer and coffee. Can you convince them that they should spend it on an education, instead? Can you convince their parents?
Seems to me that the answers should be available. Clearly you think that higher pay and such are well justified. Do you agree that there comes a point at which the disconnect of “we claim we are valuable” and “we can’t find anyone willing to pay us” becomes a problem?
Again: the market is your friend here. Can it seriously be that the entire group of adjunct unionizers cannot find a single school who is willing to radically take a chance on how they pay and hire adjuncts, and who is willing to test that chance in the marketplace?
One school. Can’t you get one single school? You’ll know a hell of a lot after four years, both with respect to “how outcomes change” and “whether people value what you’re selling.”
At most research universities, the tenure track faculty aren’t really hired to teach. And they frequently don’t teach any introductory level classes.
G&W:
It’s not that I think there’s something secretive and special about teaching or about teachers—though, in my experience, the overwhelming majority of people who have never set foot in classroom but nonetheless think they know what goes on in a classroom day in day out get it wrong every time.
I do, however, believe there is something different about education, its purpose and its goals—or at least what they should be, how they ought to be prioritized, how success ought to be measured, and so on. Do I think teachers are the only ones who have anything useful/meaningful to say about those questions? No. And I am often on the “wrong” side of discussions with my colleagues because of that. But I am often appalled at how easily people are willing to sideline teachers in these policy, etc. discussions—as if because we have both a personal stake (it’s our job after all) and a professional stake (we are teachers because we are in the business of education) and what I will call for not being able to think right now of a better word an altruistic stake (we really do care about whether or not our students get the education we are supposed to help them claim), as if because of all that we can’t possibly have anything to contribute to a conversation about how education in this country ought to be accomplished.
And regarding your question about full-time faculty buy-in: It’s happening; it is a process, but it’s happening.
Don’t have time for much more right now.
And there’s usually a generational problem in play. The tenured folk have in large part been there for several decades, and have been insulated enough from the radical changes in the academic job market that they still believe “if you work hard, you’ll get a good job.” Ergo, those without good jobs must not be working hard. The only person who’s really in touch with how many classes are covered by adjuncts is the program chair who’s in charge of scheduling them. Most faculty don’t see adjuncts, they don’t know adjuncts, they have no idea what their lives are like. They can literally afford not to know. They have no need to look at adjuncts and think “that could happen to me.”
This is not that different from the generation gap out in the world at large. Those of us in Gen X are constantly dealing with parents who are asking “why don’t you just save up and buy a house? Why don’t you just ask them to hire you a secretary if you have so much work that you can’t do it all? Why don’t you just….” etc. etc.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-95-of-grandfathers-got-job-by-walking-right,35621/
http://www.theonion.com/articles/parents-with-more-vacation-time-financial-resource,37103/
https://www.facebook.com/TheOnion/posts/10152027796574497
But of course, those of us still waiting for the promised die-off are still waiting.
In seriousness, I can barely get the majority of full-time faculty at my school (which doesn’t have tenure, just rolling contracts), most of whom have been here for over two decades, to acknowledge that there might be some concerns specific to those of us who’ve been hired in the past year, never mind concerns for our many adjuncts. They’re just… impervious.
I mean, as an example, I chuckled when you said above:
I’m sure they exist, but I know zero college teachers who actually do no work over spring break. My parents are both college teachers at a teaching-focused (not research-focused) university; we once went to a family reunion over spring break, but the rest of the years they were catching up on the grading and lecture prep that they hadn’t had time to do during the first half of the semester. They might work from home rather than their offices, but there was a giant pile of to-be-graded papers on the dining room table for the whole week. Meanwhile, at the research-focused universities where I’ve always been employed, the journal clubs and research group meetings continue right through spring break (and the summer) because almost everyone is not just in town, but in the office; but as Ruchama says research-focused faculty are slightly different beasts in this sense.
But this is a common thing: no matter how many times teachers say it, lots of people have trouble believing that a lot of the job happens outside the hours spent physically in the classroom. So when you say “lack of comprehension is demonstrated by disagreement”–no. Lack of comprehension is demonstrated by how people usually disagree. It’s not “quasi-religious” to explain what you do and then have people disbelieve you.
Now, I agree with you that
is the way things are supposed to work. I’d say that this is often not the way it works in academia, and that’s a problem (for everyone, not just adjuncts), and that’s one of the things that this article is trying to highlight, in pointing out that there is an expectation of actually helping the students learn something (outcome) which cannot be met based on the hours for which the teacher is formally paid.
***
The confounding issue here is that most people who are adjuncting don’t expect it to be a permanent job, which leads to a supply and demand problem: nobody would accept an adjunct’s salary for a ten-year contract, but for a one-semester or one-year contract they often will (as they look for a better-paid permanent job), and then when they have to make that decision every year, they hang around longer than they would if somebody had asked them five years ago if they’d still be doing it now. Sunk-cost fallacy, among other things. And that leads to a huge supply and demand asymmetry, where people who could make much more money doing something they didn’t like as much are willing to get paid less for a couple of years while they try to get a well-paying job doing something they love, and the market is so glutted that wages are suppressed. And that very wage suppression makes adjuncts so cheap that universities draw a larger share of their teaching pool from adjuncts, which reduces the number of better-paying more permanent jobs, which means there are more people looking for adjunct jobs, which makes adjunct jobs cheaper…
You can fix this on the supply side and the demand side. On the supply side, you can reduce the number of Ph.D.s you produce (and in some of the hardest-hit humanities fields, some programs have started to do this), or you can convince people to drop out of academia (this is much harder, which is a problem in itself). On the demand side, you can convince universities and students/parents/donors that teachers with enough support to do all the extra teaching-related stuff are better than teachers without that support, and thus they should hire fewer but better-paid teachers to do that full time, whether that’s better-paid adjuncts with several-year contracts, teaching professors, or more traditional faculty. As you say, and as I think this article is trying to do.
***
And to go back to a thing earlier that I didn’t respond to:
I mean…generally, no? Like, the chance of ever getting a tenure-track-type job in academia if you get a Ph.D. is small–20-30% for the most successful fields, IIRC. You kind of have to have an inflated sense of how good you are in order to even try. And also, academic jobs aren’t a pure meritocracy: the very few at the top will find a job somewhere, but for the vast middle, it’s not the top 50% of candidates who will get jobs, but rather the top 50% of candidates with a specialization in random subject X that fills a teaching or research need at whichever department is hiring this year. (That matters more for long-term faculty than it does for adjuncts.)
This is the first year in a while that I won’t be working over spring break, and it’s only because I’ve been planning and organizing things for the past month or so that I’m able to do it. Usually, I’ll have grading to do, and some planning, and possibly writing an exam, and any of a bunch of other things. (One of my friends got a job in Hawaii, so I’m visiting her for spring break, and I really didn’t want to have to do work while I’m there. I probably will still be sending out job applications and working on an online course I’m taking, though.)
Even if you ignored things that people do other than “college teaching” (tutoring, teaching other classes outside school; lecturing to large groups; guest teaching; coaching; editing; etc.;) and even if you ignored the fact that lots of folks know some teachers in their immediate family and groups of friends; and there’s no reason to ignore that every college graduate has actually been in the classroom for sixteen years. (Actually, in my case, 21 years. Almost half my life. But who’s counting?) I’ve spent more time in school than I have doing anything else, including my current career.
Admittedly those years were on the other side of the podium. But seriously, the concept that non-teacher folks have no idea how the sausage is made is a bit ridiculous. Yeah, maybe, when they’re 13. Not so much, when they’re 25.
I don’t think teachers should be “sidelined” in terms of their views. That would make no sense. I think they should be treated like educated professionals with very serious interests, some of which may be conflicting or lead to biases.
When someone has that many competing interests, you begin to question them more. It has nothing to do with teachers per se; it’s the same analysis that I use for everyone else, too.
Of course you have something to contribute. It just may not be what you think. You might be very useful for data (“here is what it is like to be an adjunct”) but people might reasonably decide that you’re too biased to be relied on to come up with broader solutions, especially in a zero-sum environment.
Also, RonF, thanks for your comment @24–I was trying to figure out how to say that without it sounding like special pleading for the kind of work I do. :)
As a teacher of a lot of 25-year-olds (and 35-year-olds, and even some 55-year-olds), I can’t even begin to tell you how hilariously wrong your idea is here.
Just as a single data point (and believe me, I have dozens of conversations with students that suggest similar), this year I have a 4th-year doctoral student who ran the practice lab for my clinical skills class in the fall. This spring, I hired her as an adjunct to teach the spring half of that same class, for students who are now out in their first practicum setting.
This is a student who has around 6 years of post-high-school education, who has worked as a TA, and yet this semester, she is ASTONISHED at all the work involved with being responsible for a class every week. (We meet weekly so I can mentor her teaching and be on top of the students’ development.) When she looks at my schedule and sees all of the other things that take up my time, she is flabbergasted. She has said more than once “I had no idea.”
And this is a top-notch doctoral student, who just secured a very prestigious 5th-year internship and is one of the most hard-working and dedicated students I’ve had in my classes.
[shrug] Plenty of people I know (or am related to) are teachers; it was pretty obvious to me that teachers worked hard even before they started. When I have discussions with my friends about it, the discussions aren’t based on “they don’t do work.” When I have discussions with you folks about it, the discussions aren’t based on “they don’t do work.”
I can’t say that some folks aren’t clueless. But I don’t know how representative that is, at least for people who care.
Of course, teaching a class the first time isn’t a real indicator. When I recently taught a “40 hour” professional licensing class (which had NO homework or graded assignments), I was entirely unsurprised that it took more like 120 hours, though next time it will probably take more like 70 and after a few run throughs I’ll have the lecture prep down to closer to 50.
Richard:
gin-and-whiskey:
Elusis:
[gives detailed example which she asserts is representative of the phenomenon she says has observed many times, generally]
gin-and-whiskey:
Richard and Elusis, both professional teachers, just told you, and you simply shrug. (Also, you moved the goalposts, twice, first to people on the other side of the podium when Richard was plainly talking about people being in the class room as a teacher and not as a student, and then, second, to include only “people who care”.)
I suspect that if Richard, or Elusis, or anyone, tried to explain to you how it is in a legal office and your personal experience didn’t match, you wouldn’t have much respect for their opinions.
Why on earth should they respect yours?
Grace
“But the classical liberal arts should give them an understanding of the culture that the economic system they’ll be working with comes from and how to read, comprehend, analyze and communicate about many different kinds of things. And that, in my opinion formed of working in the corporate world for some 30+ years, is all too rare in Corporate America.”
That this intellectual mindset is now “rare” in corporate America is part of my point. I don’t disagree. It is rare. And yet almost 100% of middle managers hold at least a BA. So apparently the university is not doing its job, if its job is to confer a liberal arts education that means anything in classical terms.
Since the university is not, usually, conveying much that is practical about management and related skills either (places like Microsoft have a whole in-house curriculum for upwardly mobile managers to teach them all this stuff later), what is it exactly that the university is doing? I would contend that in too many cases it is wasting the students’ time and money, not actually teaching them much, occupying them partying and so forth, conferring a degree which is little more than a rubber stamp.
Accepting the idea that these people should not be in the labor market for those four years (?) surely we could find something more useful for them to do during that time. And hopefully something that isn’t so expensive as to saddle them with tens of thousands of dollars in debt obligations.
I do realize that any kind of wholesale restructure would eliminate most if not all adjunct jobs.
Yup.
One of my best friends in law school was (and is) a teacher; many of my friends are or were teachers; my mother, grandmother, stepgrandmother, stepsister, and cousin are or were teachers. I’ve talked with a lot of them about what their lives are like. If it comes to “believe Richard and Elusis but disregard the conclusions of everyone else” I take option 2. I don’t think they’re lying, mind you, I just don’t agree with them.
That was intentional, to illustrate what I thought was a blind spot
That was also intentional, because there’s a difference between people who actually consider something and people who never do. To use your legal example: everyone thinks all lawyers are rich lazy fat cats, but many people who spend 30 seconds of mental effort come to more complex conclusions. Same with teachers.
Actually, if they spent as much time being a client as I’ve spent being a student then their opinion would be perfectly fine. Or with even less time, since most folks don’t have all that much legal work. Some of my older and experienced clients had much more legal experience than I did, in my early career–I listened to them all the time and got some very good advice.
Laypeople can be incredibly knowledgeable about the law: the rarity isn’t because “non-lawyers can’t understand” but rather because most clients don’t deal with lawyers very much, so they don’t have time to think about it.
Perhaps they don’t. I suspect we probably value each others opinions about equally.
To the degree that they do, it’s probably because I am an example of the type of person who they will need to convince in order to get folks to give them what they want. I’m a highly educated pro-education liberal who reliably votes for school funding and has selfish reasons to want education to improve, and I still think their arguments are poor. The reason that I argue against RJN is not because I think teachers suck.
I have been all the kinds of -A at MIT: lab, floor, teaching, head teaching. I taught one semester in a high school as volunteer. My wife is a tenure track professor at one of the top 10 liberal arts colleges, my best’s friend’s wife is a tenure track professor at one of the top 10 research universities, my sister’s best friend is an adjunct professor, one of my coworkers is a former adjunct professor, and another is married to a high school teacher.
I really wonder whether I have the qualifications to actually join this conversation, given how high the bar is. I also wonder, does everyone insisting that gin-and-whiskey and Ronf have no clue, refrain from commenting on what cops, manufacturers, or soldiers should do?
I’m not an attorney. I’ve worked in a law firm for several years, and I have many relatives who are attorneys. If G&W and I are arguing as to a point of employment law, should my opinion carry as much weight as his?
—Myca
Pesho:
Well, I didn’t address Ron in this case, but I would like you to point out where I said that gin-and-whiskey should not comment.
Telling someone not to comment is a very different thing from pointing out flaws which you see in their comments.
Grace
Hell, why have conversations, then? When we discuss the police, Grace will set us straight, if only because my experience with law enforcement is not applicable in a society where accountability is more than a long word. When we discuss the military, I will graciously tell you how things are, unless someone outranks me. Too bad you banned Sebastian, or he would have been able to resolve all employment questions, now that he employs more than a dozen people.
And the point is not whose opinion carries more much weight. One could argue that people who are too involved don’t have a rational viewpoint. Another could say that those whose livelihoods could be affected by the discussion are not to be trusted, as they have a conflict of interest.
There is no mysticism to teaching, no more than there is to training a martial arts student, or a new hire, or casting a wheel, for that matter. Yes, absolutely, teaching goes way beyond the classroom, and only an idiot envies teachers for their short hours and long vacations. Yes, adjunct professors are badly exploited. So are people flipping burgers for minimum wages and so are the programmers in my department, and I wish I knew whether I’ve managed to convince the company owner to approve the raise I’ve suggested for one of them.
It is insanely presumptuous to say “You guys have no idea, your opinion carries little weight”. Hell, I’m convinced that being an adjunct sucks more than the usual, if only because I know a bunch of adjuncts that I personally like, and because the two who are married to each other keep borrowing one of our cars when one of theirs breaks. And I still want to disagree with a number of people on this thread, despite actually agreeing with them.
And by the way, tenure track professors are evaluated on their teaching when they are hired, and their student evaluations are considered when their contract is renewed, and they sometimes teach introductory courses, at least at MIT, Harvard and Caltech, and they certainly certainly take a lot of work home, both course related and research related. An awful lot. Some of them even mobilize their husbands to help, and don’t even bring us beer while we install, test and fix their experimental setups.
—-
No Grace, no one said “You can’t comment”. But I understood some people to mean “You are wrong, because you have not been a professor, and my problems are different from everyone else’s.” Probably my fault for misunderstanding. But as I said, from this discussion, I feel like disagreeing with things I think are mostly true. And as something better change, this is kind of disheartening.
The thing is, this is a whole ecosystem of jobs, of which adjuncts are only one member. It’s easy to come in and propose changes that seem sensible, but without a sense of how the whole system works, those changes may be much harder to implement than the person proposing them thinks. Which is not to say that such people should be excluded from the conversation, or barred from speaking, or that people who do understand the system are always right, or that the solution is totally untenable. But the danger is always the unknown unknowns. And, like, this is a thing I also have a tendency to do: get a surface-level understanding of a problem and think you’ve got a solution that nobody’s thought of before. And maybe you’re right, or maybe somebody’s thought of it and it didn’t work out–if you’re not as familiar with the topic, you may not know.
It’s the doubling down when somebody tries to tell such a person the background that gets really annoying.
I also feel like pointing out: RonF said a thing, RJN pointed out a thing he may not have known about; then RonF said some other things, and I gave him a thumbs up. Who’s saying he doesn’t have a clue? And, my own teaching experience is limited to 3 years of TAing, and I’m on a career path probably aiming for a staff job at a national lab rather than a university teaching position. So you can read my comments in that light.
Well, that’s not what is happening here: I’m not arguing with Ruchama about her area of expertise (which, other than “something STEM,” I don’t actually know.)
But anyway: Sure, if you and I are arguing about something more general then your opinion would be relevant of course. Certainly you could opine on “what it’s like to work in a law firm” without me suggesting otherwise. (It would still be relevant if you argued for law in my area of expertise; I’d just be much more likely to be correct. I argue law with laypeople all the time, it’s fine.) And certainly if we were arguing about anything to do with public policy, like “should we pay public defenders more” or whatnot, you’d be entitled to an opinion as well.
But how come this became all about me? It’s a bit shocking that people are focusing so heavily on trying to attack my credentials. Especially since this larger issue isn’t about “how to teach 20 students as well as possible;” it’s more about larger questions, implicating economics, labor, policy-making, and such. Which, well, if you really want to have the expertise argument here (and you’ll notice that I don’t, although I’m getting defensively annoyed) and if you take those things into consideration, I’m not sure you should be backing the poet.
This is why I was responding to Pesho’s ludicrous strawman argument rather than to you.
—Myca
I’d like to dial this back a couple of notches by acknowleding a couple of things:
1. My comments about people who have never set foot in a classroom getting it wrong was not directed at anyone in this discussion.
2. G&W is right that there is a difference between having this kind of conversation with people who are, for want of a better term, “informed laypeople” and with the kinds of people he calls “those who don’t care,” by which I assume him to mean people (like some policy makers I know) who know what they know and do not want to be confused by facts. These latter people—and they have become a type in higher ed and also in pre-K through 12 (though I know less about them there)—were the people I was reflexively thinking about when I made my comment about the people who have never set foot in a classroom.
3. Those people who are chiming in to say that this conversation is not really—or should not be realy be—about whether teachers work hard (which I also want to point out is not what I meant, or was only a small part of what I meant, when I made my “people who have never set foot in the classroom” comment, are also right. It really is a discussion about how and why we value education, what kind of education we value, and in this case higher education in particular—because even you try to boil it all down to a matter of dollars and cents, the decisions about how to do that are driven at least as much by ideology as they are by the hard realities of whatever numbers we’re talking about. The experience I have had at my school over the past five years has made this more than clear to me.
4. In this light, I also would like to thank RonF for what he said about the liberal arts up in comment 24. Public liberal arts education—and that includes K-12—has been, in my estimation, the single most powerful democratizing force in the history of this country. Without it, just as a start, there would be an awful lot of illiterate people (in all senses of that term, perhaps the most important being citizens who are not equipped to particiapte actively, critically in our public and political life) in this country.
5. This kind of education is, if not under direct attack, then certainly under siege for all kind of reasons, some of which appear to be directly related to the job market, the economy, and so on, but which really have their roots much further back in an ideological push back against the progressive bent of education. (And by progressive here I do not mean liberal as opposed to conservative; I mean progressive in the sense of making room for more and more people who were historically excluded to particiapte in public and political life—which perhaps inevitably gives this progressivism a left-tilting momentum. It’s just important to remember that this progressivism is also what made room for conservative women, Black people, gays and lesbians, etc. and so on.)
6. For me, the corporatization of higher education, of which the adjunctification of higher education is a part, threatens this progressivism, and I think everyone should have an informed opinion about it. (And, just for the record, I do not think that anyone who has been commenting here is uninformed, though I do think we have sometimes been talking at each other more than actually engaging arguments.)
I don’t know if these six points all follow logically one from the other; I just wanted to turn the coversation away from the debate about credentals and qualifications, which I unintentionally started in responding to G&W the way I did. (And, by the way, I do have experience and expertise in higher education beyond being a poet who teaches five classes a semester. Just sayin’.)
This sounds right but I’m wondering about it.
Anyone who reads the Lincoln/Douglass debates will be struck by the very high level of rhetoric and discourse displayed by both men. It certainly puts 99% of modern political speaking and writing to shame.
And yet these were stump speeches given in the wilds of Illinois, at a time when hardly anyone had been to university and most people did not attend high school. I am assuming that both men, who were wily politicians, aimed their arguments pretty accurately at their audience. Whatever democratizing force – and it was a powerful one – which operated in this place in the 1840’s did not arise from liberal arts education, which mostly had not been invented yet. I’m not sure I know where it did come from, but not from there. Also please notice that what was at issue then was “progressive” in the sense in which Richard is using the term, the urge to include the excluded (slaves) in public life.
That does not mean that liberal education cannot be now or is not presently a powerful democratizing force. Of course it can be. But formal liberal education takes too much credit to itself when it urges that only from this source can democracy arise.
Susan:
But that’s not my claim. To say that it has been “the most powerful” is not to say that it has been “the only” democratizing force, and it’s certainly not that I think democracy arises from a formal liberal arts education, but when I think about how it is that so many different kinds of people who might otherwise have been excluded from public life—whether by virtue of race, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic level—now have a good deal more than a firm foothold there, it’s hard not to credit public education with a great deal of that.
An interesting article: The Politics of Contingent Academic Labor.
In English this time, “when I think about a thing that has happened, it is hard not to credit public education with being an important cause.” ?
Not that I think it hasn’t played a part, but this isn’t much of an argument.
Susan:
No, I suppose it’s not—though I could have done without the “In English this time” snark, thank you very much—but then I guess I wasn’t really trying to make the argument. I was simply asserting, clumsily, which does sometimes happen in blog comments, a connection that seemed to me self-evident, since a great many of those fomerly excluded people would not have had access to higher education if not for public education.
My second semester at MIT I sat down in 10-250 for my first lecture for 7.01, Introduction to Biology – my major. The text, “The Molecular Biology of the Gene” was written by one James Watson, co-holder of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine of 1962 for his work in elucidating that very thing (Rosalind Franklin was cheated …). I open up to the dedication page. It was dedicated to Salvadore E. Luria. I look down at my syllabus for the course. Chief lecturer – Salvdore E. Luria. Who, it turns out, held the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1969. And who, in the spring of 1971, was teaching MIT’s most basic course in Biology. And held office hours where freshmen like me could actually walk into his office unannounced and ask questions.
You don’t get to hide from the undergraduates at MIT no matter who the fuck you are. You teach.
I just looked at this semester’s schedule for my department. Number of tenure track professors teaching single-variable calculus or lower is zero. There are three teaching multivariable or differential equations (that’s three sections out of about 50).
Pesho:
Probably. I’m not going to go back and read the whole thread right now, but I didn’t read anything that way. The argument was not “I’m a professor and you’re not so I know better”, which would be an appeal to authority. The argument was “That has not been my experience, and here is a representative example from that experience, which is extensive enough on this topic that I can generalize about it.”
No single argument is usually determinative, but in a contest between a tidy theory and actual real-world evidence which would seem to invalidate that theory, I’m inclined to give a lot of weight to evidence.
Grace
@Richard, I’m sorry for the snark. I didn’t really mean it that way. But your original statement just hung out there. One of the things I did learn in the process of getting a liberal arts degree is that one needs to muster up some support for statements like that.
I was trying, however clumsily on my part, to make a real point however, and one that has been made before in this thread. And that is that we liberally-educated people tend to make assumptions about the benefits of a liberal arts education, assumptions which may not hold up in reality. For example, as G&W has pointed out, the assumption that market forces do not apply or should not apply to this endeavor.
You are assuming a connection between a certain kind of education and democracy. You said it again. “Because this happened this other thing is the cause.” No evidence, no reasoning. And if there is a connection, if education is the most powerful democratizing force around, well then, it deserves all the funding it needs or wants, because look how important it is, it’s our whole way of life! So we’re back to how people who work in liberal education deserve to be paid more than managers at fast food restaurants, regardless of what the market has to say about that.
I tend to side with you, as one of the Educated Classes myself, but I am well aware that there is plenty of evidence, both historical and otherwise, against us. At any rate, as we have all observed, market forces in the payment of education workers are alive and well. I thought G&W’s suggestions about how to turn those forces in your favor were very interesting, and worth a shot.
This seemed relevant to this discussion: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/03/03/uw-madison-chancellor-comes-under-fire-comments-about-how-she-matches-outside
It does seem to me that things are a bit different these days. I’m not sure what caused it–perhaps a critical mass (we have a lot more colleges than we used to) combined with instant communication, courtesy of the Internet? But a lot of places which used to feel “a bit hippie” now seem a bit more, or a lot more, on the edge.
Perhaps the progressivism is the same level but it’s focused on public action and not research/writing/theory. Perhaps the new identity politics (the competition to have a ____ studies department for every group who demands one) has now hit an exponential growth phase. Perhaps it’s a result of the vast changes in many colleges’ core curricula, often in response to the aforementioned action and ___ departments; here’s a rant about the fact that, since 2011, you can get a major in English from UCLA without studying Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer. Perhaps it is other things, or all of them.
Which is to say, Yes: there’s always been a progressive bent to education and there’s always been pushback. But it seems like both the progressiveness and the resulting pushback were a lot more moderate until fairly recently. I am curious to know if you agree.
You cannot get an English major from UCLA without studying Shakespeare, Chaucer, or Milton. All they did was get rid of the requirement to take single-author courses on each of them. To get an English major, you still need to take English 10A, Literatures in English to 1700, which will surely include all of them. You also have to take one upper-level course from each of four historical periods. For the “Before 1500” period, there are three options, one of which is entirely about Chaucer and another of which includes Chaucer. (The third option is about female mystics and the late medieval church, which sounds kind of cool.) For the 1500-1700 period, there are four options: two of them are entirely Shakespeare, a third is looking at how political issues of the time were reflected in literature and includes both Milton and Shakespeare, and the fourth is about Renaissance-era translations of the classics. So yes, it’s possible to avoid all three of those authors in the upper-level courses, but only if you pick the female mystics course for the first one and the classics course for the second. http://www.english.ucla.edu/academics/undergraduate-/programs-a-courses-/51-englishmajor
To share my own personal theory just because ;)
I think it is also because the current fashion of education has moved away from “classic” civil-rights-based liberalism and equality of process into the new social justice and equality of outcomes. Unfortunately, that is a good way to make enemies.
Part of that is practical and expected. “we will do what we oppose, to our opponents,” is a requirement of an outcome based approach**, but that is inherently a much harder argument to make well. It’s relatively simple, ethically and logically, to argue “put musicians behind a curtain, so you don’t get biases from their non-musical attributes.” It’s much harder to argue for AA, much less to explain how one set of limits and rules is superior to another competing set of limits and rules. It’s relatively simple, ethically and logically, to argue “everyone should have the equal right to free speech and to say what they want.” It’s much harder to simultaneously claim to support free speech while presenting a theory of “silencing” and “hate speech.”
It can be done, and done well. It’s just hard.
And part of that is also because you quickly create enemies–or perhaps one might call them “opponents”–as interest groups compete for resources. Everyone hates the referee. Make college admissions dependent on an anonymous test and folks will grumble but concede it’s fair. Start to insist that ___% of ___ group gets in, and then you are responsible for deciding which group has to leave. Now they hate you.****
And the third part is that academia–which long used to serve as the melting pot of intellectualism–is (also in the same time frame) rapidly losing its melting pot status. Liberals can be oppressive just like everyone else. And the more liberal things get, the faster that they get more liberal. How many openly conservative professors have been at your school, lately? What do you think is more likely to interfere with getting a job offer: taking a stance that Islamic terrorists are justified on occasion, or taking a stance that gender differences are occasionally biologically mediated? There’s nothing wrong with being progressive or liberal, but it seems like things have gotten a bit more choir preachy.
**Really. If you treat everyone the same, shit don’t change. The brutal reality is that if you want to achieve correction of an imbalance based on a defining characteristic (“discriminating based on star bellies was bad and wrong and evil, those poor Sneetches!”) you need to do your OWN discriminating, in the other direction (“we can’t ignore star-bellied status right now; we need to focus on it so we can selectively benefit non-star-bellied Sneetches, which is to say that discriminating based on star-belly status is necessary and good, so long as I’m controlling it and so long as it benefits the right Sneetches.”) This is perhaps true. This is perhaps necessary. But whether or not it is true and necessary, it is not an easy argument to make.
****This is a real thing. Groups which promote outcome based college admissions based on racial characteristics are running into a problem: Asians (a nonwhite and historically maltreated population) tend to be a very disproportionately high %age of college students, with relatively good admissions criteria. Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately low, with relatively bad admissions criteria. Whites are somewhere in the middle. If you go for “admissions equality by population” you’re sticking it to the Asians, and a lot of initiatives are running into that problem, which results in the odd solution of SJ folks trying to pretty up ways to treat Asians as the oppressor class and therefore eligible to get their share taken away.
Here is a take on the explosion of administrators at colleges – and the pressure they put on faculty to get the money to pay them.