Professor Casey Moore works in an off-white office on the seventh floor of the Welsh Humanities Building that is more-or-less the size of your average parking space.
Most of that is taken up by a great, white L-shaped desk on which sits a blocky Dell monitor and little else. There are no posters, no bookshelves and no window.
The only reason anyone passing in the hall would suspect that the office was in use is Moore’s physical presence in the room. Were she to leave, the blank walls would leave no trace that she, or anyone else, had ever worked there.
The nameplate beside her office door is vacant.
The reason? Moore is an adjunct professor. That is to say, she’s the kind of professor that spends 50 hours a week devoted to teaching, is similarly qualified to tenure-track professors and holds office hours, but has zero job security, pay that puts her only slightly above the poverty line and no guarantee of securing adequate health care.
Her nameplate is vacant because if she isn’t rehired by the university next semester, they won’t even have to bother to change it.
I feel the need to italicize here: being an adjunct is more-and-more the default state of affairs for professors in public universities. As of 2013, 75 percent of all professors are adjuncts in public universities. In 1969, that number was 22 percent. (OK, the italics are over.)
What it amounts to is almost unthinkable state of affairs: a sprawling erudite underclass of “contingent” academics teaching at respected learning establishments who have trouble keeping their head above poverty level.
Let’s start with the pay: adjuncts are compensated per class taught, and are usually barred from teaching more than a certain number of classes. At USC, that number is four (a staggering workload, by any standard.)
A 2012 study by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce came up with the median salary for each course taught: $2,700.
Put these particularly depressing pieces of information together, and we get an even more depressing reality: an adjunct lucky enough to teach four classes in both the fall and spring semesters will make $21,600 a year on average at any public university.
When I asked Moore about whether or not a full load of four classes is enough to live on, she answered quickly, “No. Absolutely not. What I make a year, I couldn’t afford your basic living expenses.”
She is able to afford being a professor only because her husband makes enough money to supplement her professors' income.
Former USC Provost Michael Amiridis, who was in charge of faculty pay, agreed that something was wrong: “Say, OK, somebody’s teaching three courses at $5,000 per course. Three courses a semester, 15 and 15, that’s $30,000, right? Is this appropriate compensation for someone with a doctoral degree? The answer is no.”
The reason for this state of affairs? “This is where the market is right now," he said. "We try to stay ahead of the market, but this is where the market is for some of these folks.”
In other words: the market has spoken. Nothing substantial can be done.
As for adjunct’s healthcare, the situation is as bad as you might think. Until the Affordable Care Act, universities had no obligation to give adjuncts benefits of any kind. Now, those who are able to snag the equivalent of three classes must, by law, have health coverage.
Until Jan. 1, when the ACA took effect, Moore had zero health insurance. Other adjuncts who were only able to get one or two classes, presumably, still don't.
When the majority of professors in public schools are treated as an artificial underclass, students lose out. A 2006 study by Daniel Jacoby, a professor at the University of Washington Bothell, suggested that adjuncts don't have enough time to spend with students because they often have to work second jobs.
Add that to a lack of office space and an inability to meaningfully influence scholastic policy, and you have a professor that is being forced to operate at less than his or her best.
Additionally, because adjuncts aren't on a tenure track and have no job security, they don't have the luxury of taking risks in the classroom that other older professors do. This can easily lead to a neutered syllabus, teaching style and content. (Try to imagine how intimidating those teacher evaluation forms must be to an adjunct, whose hope for future food depends, in part, on whether students bubble in "above average" instead of "average.")
So, how are we going to handle this particular shame? How do you solve a problem where three out of every four public school professors are caught up in a system that denigrates them and, by proxy, the students they educate? How are you supposed to argue with "the market says so?"
Moore seems to think that it lies in changing the paradigm from an interchangeable flow of adjuncts to solidified, if underpaid, full-time instructor positions:
“If you’re going to have people teach the bulk of the classes that [assistant professors] don’t want to teach or that aren’t beneficial for their research to teach,” Moore said. “We need to create real positions for those people.”
In my opinion, trying to bend the ear of the university system will take more than good ideas spoken clearly by a discontented few. It will take real student action.
After all, students are the main revenue source for the university, and it is the students that come out the worse in the end, taught by professors whose economic status and position in the workplace limits the scope of their teaching.
"Part of it is an ignorance problem," Moore said. "People don't know that this is going on. Tenure-track faculty obviously know about adjuncts . . . but it's really been this silent problem. Students should know where their money's going."
Students must be the most vocal and best organized contingent working on behalf of their own professors. They are the parties chiefly affected. When the university betrays its adjuncts, it also betrays its students.
Because the saddest part of all this isn't the pay or the lack of health care. It isn't even the job insecurity. It's the fact that adjunct professors are, apparently, willing to put up with all of it.
They will choose, morning after morning, to wake up before the sun, choke down a cup of dirt-bad Styrofoam coffee and drive to their off-white office with no posters, no bookshelves and no windows to prepare for an 8:30 a.m. class that most students will sleep through.
They will take being paid far less than their similarly-educated colleagues, and will smile and nod and work alongside them, all the while repressing the obvious question: "Why does her Ph.D. automatically qualify her for health insurance while mine doesn't?"
They will approach the end of every single semester in the kind of anxiety that eats through bone marrow, never certain if they will be given enough teaching hours next term to pay for food.
They will put up with it because, when put in the right classroom with the right subject and the right students, the tiring absurdity of their situation drops away and becomes, somehow, worthwhile.
They are the hyper-educated working poor and they deserve better than this.