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I largely agree with this thread but this is a misrepresentation of why adjunct labor is bad for students. It's not that adjuncts don't get as much experience - many continent faculty have taught more, and better, than TT faculty. It's that continent faculty are underpaid... https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1295909956202438659
... and overworked. Many have to work at multiple institutions to make ends meet. They are not paid for office hours or extra time with students (though many if not most do these things anyway), they spend hours every week moving between institutions because...
No single institution wants them to be "full time"and legally required to receive employer-based health insurance. They have none of the job security afforded to tenured (and to a lesser extent, TT) faculty, which means they are even more beholden to "customer satisfaction"...
And the business model the original thread laments.
I agree that contingent labor is a stain on higher ed, but calling it "inexperience" is an insult to adjunct faculty who've been carrying the teaching load to cover tenure-line faculty research leave...
I agree that contingent labor is a stain on higher ed, but calling it "inexperience" is an insult to adjunct faculty who've been carrying the teaching load to cover tenure-line faculty research leave...
While also having to live under the worst conditions of the gig economy (& for many carrying loads of student loan debt that they can't discharge in part because lack of full-time status deprives them of access to relief programs designed for employees in non-profit sectors)
FWIW I know plenty of contingent faculty who care far more about their pedagogy & put far more effort into it than their TT/tenured "colleagues" (who simultaneously treat them like non-entities, despite the crucial role they play in making research a possibility for TT faculty)
I think many analyses of contingent faculty miss this really important piece: adjunct faculty are more often than not treated as if they don't even exist by the very people their work most benefits. They are frequently alienated from major department activities & refused...
intellectual engagement from their colleagues, who often act as if the failure to obtain a TT job in an academic economy that has been garbage since 2008 is a reflection of their worth as scholars rather than of the structural forces at play which have kept huge swaths of...
competent academics underemployed & ripe for exploitation for more than a decade now...
While their students love them, most don't know the conditions they labor under, & the paltry pay most are offered is poor recompense for their years of education & their expertise being dismissed by the very academy their work supports.
