Should Adjuncts Earn More?

NPR recently aired a piece on adjuncts in higher education and how little they make each year at colleges and universities across the country.  This story makes me nervous.  I’ll be graduating with a PhD in the next couple of years, and I worry about not being able to find work that pays a decent wage.  I hope to get a tenure-track job, but those are few and far between these days.

I realize that this issue is complicated, but I think colleges and universities need to move away from hiring term-to-term employees.  Richard Moser describes the problem clearly in an essay for The Chronicle for Higher Education:

This new labor system is firmly established in higher education and constitutes a threat to the teaching profession. If left unchecked, it will undermine the university’s status as an institution of higher learning because the overuse of adjuncts and their lowly status and compensation institutionalize disincentives to quality education, threaten academic freedom and shared governance, and disqualify the campus as an exemplar of democratic values. These developments in academic labor are the most troubling expressions of the so-called corporatization of higher education.

Can we go back, though?  Here we are with one million part-time instructors.  What can we do at this point?  How should we structure our institutions in the twenty-first century?