The business of higher ed
By This piece features more juicy tidbits on the 501(c)(3) racket known as New York University, but its real target is the Educational Administrative Complex more generally.
It features a link to this very interesting –although too conspiratorial and intentionalist as opposed to structuralist — post from a blog called The Homeless Adjunct:
At latest count, we have 1.5 million university professors in this country, 1 million of whom are adjuncts. One million professors in America are hired on short-term contracts, most often for one semester at a time, with no job security whatsoever….earning, on average, $20K a year gross, with no benefits or healthcare, no unemployment insurance when they are out of work…
If you are old enough to remember when medicine was forever changed by the appearance of the ‘HMO’ model of managed medicine, you will have an idea of what has happened to academia….once Nixon secured passage of the HMO Act in 1973, the organizations went quickly from operating on a non-profit organization model, focused on high quality health care for controlled costs, to being for-profit organizations, with lots of corporate money funding them – and suddenly the idea of high-quality health care was sacrificed in favor of profits – which meant taking in higher and higher premiums and offering less and less service, more denied claims, more limitations placed on doctors, who became a “managed profession”. You see the state of healthcare in this country, and how disastrous it is. Well, during this same time, there was a similar kind of development — something akin to the HMO — let’s call it an “EMO”, Educational Management Organization, began to take hold in American academia. From the 1970s until today, as the number of full-time faculty jobs continued to shrink, the number of full-time administrative jobs began to explode. As faculty was deprofessionalized and casualized, reduced to teaching as migrant contract workers, administrative jobs now offered good, solid salaries, benefits, offices, prestige and power. In 2012, administrators now outnumber faculty on every campus across the country.
Can the numbers in the block quote be right? Are there really one million adjunct college professors in a country with an adult population of around 240 million people? The 500,000 tenure track professor number also sounds high — especially given the claim that there are more administrators outnumber faculty — but I haven’t looked at the stats for higher ed generally, as opposed to law schools.
. . . a little digging in the Census data indicates the numbers regarding total faculty are accurate (the claim regarding administrators still seems implausible, unless essentially all staff are being counted as “administrators.”) There were 1.44 million college faculty in the US in 2009, half of whom were classified as part-time, and undoubtedly a significant portion of those classified as full-time were full-time adjuncts.
Anyway, read both pieces.