adjuncts

How the AAUP bends statistics to create an adjunct crisis

Earlier this week the American Association of University Professors released its annual report on the economic status of academia. Repeating a theme from prior years, this report heavily emphasizes the position of adjunct faculty and makes a number of bold empirical claims about the alleged growth of the part time academic workforce. For example, the statement

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How many adjuncts are there in not-for-profit higher ed?

Counting adjunct faculty is a strangely politicized topic, replete with bad information and even outright false statistical claims. Media reporting of the subject routinely repeats the false claim that adjuncts make up about three fourths of the academic workforce. Adjunct activist organizations such as the “New Faculty Majority” even incorporate this claim into their name.

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Is Administrator Bloat an Adjunct Pot of Gold?

“What about university administrator bloat?” This question is commonly posed in conjunction with the adjunct activist movement, and usually identified as an “obvious” source for funding that could be reallocated to other purposes. And it might well be suitable for reallocation, though as Jason Brennan and I showed it is not obvious that adjuncts deserve

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Adjunct activists seek to codify age-discrimination against younger academics

The adjunct activist movement is currently mobilizing its forces behind a new “adjunct relief” bill in the California legislature, AB 1690. The proponents of this bill are portraying it as a much-needed “job security” measure for part time contract faculty at state-run higher ed institutions (in this case the California community college system). The bill

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An Adjunct’s Guide to Calculating Your Hourly Wage Equivalent

A few months back I ran a few basic calculations that refuted the myth of the “minimum wage adjunct” by showing that an adjunct faculty member would have to spend an absurdly high number of hours on out-of-class preparation time and grading to even approach an hourly equivalent wage that fell below the minimum wage. I revisited

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The Myth of the “Adjunctification” of Full-Time Faculty

The recent and ongoing debate about the state of the U.S. academic workforce is, unfortunately, dominated by a number of aggressively asserted myths that have little basis in empirical evidence. In previous posts, I have debunked a number of these recurring claims including the “myth of the minimum wage adjunct” and the “myth of the 76% adjunct

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What’s really behind “adjunctification” in U.S. higher ed?

In my last two posts I dissected some of the statistical trends of the U.S. higher ed job market, particularly as they pertain to the growth of part-time faculty over the past 40 years. As I noted the other day, most discussions about this topic are fraught with misconceptions and mythology, such as the claim that three

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