From the email it seems the student just wants to see his exam, hardly an unreasonable request. He doesn't ask for a "review," of the exam, and this seems like it should take all of two seconds. He walks in, takes the exam, and leaves. If the exam can't leave your room, he walks in during office hours, looks at the exam, and returns it. I've caught multiple grading errors simply by actually collecting past exams, and would be understandably pissed off if I was given no opportunity to collect an exam I'd taken.
While the contract teaching situation seems pretty bad, this guy seems unreasonable here.
> hardly an unreasonable request. He doesn't ask for a "review," of the exam, and this seems like it should take all of two seconds
It doesn't change the context that the instructor isn't being paid to do it - he says he's already spent more time on the course than contracted. From his point of view, it's not an unreasonable request that he should not spent more of his (insufficiently remunerated) time on even small issues.
> and would be understandably pissed off if I was given no opportunity to collect an exam I'd taken.
But does that make it reasonable to blame a guy who's not paid to help you for not helping you?
I do understand the nature of your point, but I don't think any of the original argument is actually affected by the size of the task he's refusing to do.
If he holds office hours regularly (as the email seems to imply), then there is nothing extra he has to do but let the student find his exam in the pile.
So...nothing except something? This takes time and effort, even if just a little, and I suspect it adds up more than you guess. And all unpaid - an actual loss, in fact, since it distracts from whatever he's currently working on.
I do see why you argue this way, and I might agree except that I also would give weighting to the moral point he's making. Staff like this are systematically exploited, and working to contract is a classic way to try to demonstrate why they should be better supported - it's a direct attempt to make a larger point, not just a random choice to annoy a few students.
I'd agree with the broader point that this guy is making, he's being exploited by the university, and doesn't owe the school any additional work.
That being said, he does owe his students the chance to at least look at the culmination of their semester's work. I know at my university, professors are obligated to have exams available for at least a year past the date they were taken! Maybe if allowing students to look at their exams would truly take an additional 75 hours of his time as claimed, he'd have a stronger case, but that's simply not true. If the student was requesting him to explain why a problem was wrong, or engage with this exam in anyway, I'd be completely in agreement. Hell, he could just put them all in a box outside his door, or maybe leave them with the departmental secretary (this happens all the time), or come up with some sort of solution.
His broader point still stands, but this is absolutely part of the responsibilities of a teacher, and I can't get behind this guy making a point at the expense of his students.
It is possible that they only allow an exam to be seen with the professor present and then it is held onto afterwards.
The thing is, he is already well over the budgeted hours. Sure this is a small thing, but there were probably a whole heap of other little things in the previous 50 hours he put in where he made things better for students. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
Are commuters to blame for the poor working conditions in the public transport industry? No. Do commuters suffer when conductors go on strike? Yes. Does it work? Yes. Does complaining to your boss work? No. Its unfortunate but at the end of the day the only thing he can use (apart from quitting outright) as leverage is malicious compliance, which includes working the exact hours your paid and nothing more.
I feel for the student, but a workers' rights are more important to me. If I were in the students position I would be pissed, but not at the professor but at the institution. The same way I don't get mad at conductors going on strike because of poor working conditions even if I have already bought a ticket.
The 75 hours was also in reference to allowing every student to do the same (you either allow all students to have a look, or none), and I can tell from experience that it will end up taking quite a bit of time. Most students mean "could you go over the exam with me" when they ask to review their exam. Just having them glance at the red markings will generally not do them much good anyway. And putting them in a box for pick-up (while also being more unpaid work) is generally not allowed in my opinion. The university holds on to the exams for administrative purposes, meaning he would have to supply photocopies instead.
That depends on situation, it might be not that trivial. For example, in my university past exam papers (physical ones) were kept locked in an archive in different part of a city.
You have no future ... there are too many people that want to teach at universities and when the labor pool us too large for the market, prices, terms and working conditions will be depressed. We're still cranking out PhDs that have no hope of a university position, so I expect your chance of earning a living will drop.
I can't comment on employment elsewhere on the continent, but in Pennsylvania (US) there is a severe shortage of AP Physics, AP Chemistry and Calculus teachers. You could easily land a full-time job at a high-school here.
I feel for the author. I really do; we need great teachers giving their best to the students, and it won't happen unless they're not living in poverty. On a more personal level, it sucks to feel like you have to heavily compromise for your dream job.
I was on a similar path about 4 years ago- 2 years into a PhD, preparing myself for a career in academia devoted to the two intellectual loves of my life: computer science research and teaching. And then I saw my older lab mates on the verge of graduation, struggling to get a decent offer that wasn't halfway around the world. I saw post docs in my lab, who had been working hard for years for very little pay and no prospect of "tenure track" anytime soon.
What did I do? I left for startup landia, where a company was willing to pay me 3x more than I could have made as a post doc 5 years later (and many times more what I made as a grad student). Now I work in R&D at a large company, paid way more than even a tenured professor (and I'm not even considered senior yet). The research is different, but just as gratifying at the end of the day. And I get to teach by volunteering for a non profit over the weekends.
Does it suck that I had to leave academia for a comfortable life? Absolutely. I wish I could have been a professor. But you have to vote with your feet, because as long as you accept the conditions imposed by the university, well nothing's going to change- why would they? Writing blog posts and sending ranty emails to students (who probably don't give a shit) isn't going to change much at all.
If you want to have an impact, quit your job and go somewhere else. Right now universities can afford to pay professors (ie the only ones doing real work) like shit and give great bonuses to administrators because professors are okay with this. Yes, that's right: you might be writing a blog post saying how upset you are, but at the end of the day, if you're employed by them then you agree with them. Things will change if enough professors quit and universities have to offer better pays to get quality teachers; but as long as that doesn't happen, things won't change.
Exactly. Ironically, it seems many academics don't do the research to see what happens with a career in academia.
The market will pay for jobs at their replacement cost. If a stream of aspiring professors are willing to work for near poverty wages, with the occasional complaint, that is what they'll get. Why would the administration pay more?
(If a gas station starts charging $10/gallon, you get your supplies from another. Even if gas provides tremendous value to you, and you internally value it at $100/gal. Only if fuel isn't available elsewhere do you pay the higher cost.)
I think it's because the academics start off as trusting students. At my school the professors kept telling us how wonderful it is to have a math degree and that you'll do this and that no problem. They push you to go to graduate school because you show promise. Only to be paid very little and have a difficult future. Of course you don't do your due diligence at first because you trust your profs. And by the time you get to graduate school there is a sort of momentum that keeps you in.
Physics is a field that has been irresponsible about this for years, at least since the first PhD unemployment crisis of 1969. Most other fields practice "birth control", and professors in many fields are shocked when they see that fewer than 5% of physics PhD(s) stay in the field.
This guy unfortunately has a bad bargaining position because (i) there are a lot of people to replace him, and (ii) most of them come from the third world so the opportunity to live in Canada and get paid $34,000 in loonies looks great to them.
(The other area of academia that is this bad is biotech, where you can spend as long as you like in postdocs, but getting to a tenured position is unlikely)
I realized just as I started my last semester of a bachelor's degree that I was currently writing bullshit papers that I had to pay the professor to read and critique. If I followed my academic advisor's recommendations, I would eventually be paid to read and critique bullshit papers from people who would be just like I had been then, and possibly continue writing bullshit papers for an audience numbering, at most, in the hundreds, who all trade fictional reputation points to each other instead of the money they don't have. All the while, other people would be reaping immense profits from their work and consuming the greatest part of it before possibly giving a portion to the ones most directly responsible.
At this point, having just completed my Cognitive Science minor, I determined that the entire system of academia used avoidance of cognitive dissonance as one of its foundation stones. People become academics because they have already invested a colossal amount of effort into becoming an academic, and endured painful hardship in doing so. To turn their backs upon it would be to admit to themselves that they wasted a good portion of the best years of their lives on a fool's errand. Most people can't bring themselves to do that without the help of some major psychedelics.
Whenever I feel a twinge of regret, I select a random university, check their job postings and pay scales, and discover that they pay half what I currently earn for jobs with quadruple the responsibilities and equal or greater amounts of administrative hoop-jumping.
Teaching jobs pay peanuts because too many people are willing to do the work for peanuts. Do not trust your professors. They have a vested interest in creating clueless underlings who can take their place as they claw their way upwards.
If it is your passion to teach, use the extra money and leisure time you will have with a non-academic job to create a series of videos, and post them on the network.
I agree 100% - the people in PhD programs have a long track record of being the best undergrads, the best MS students. They are good, obedient students who trust their professors, even when those professors may have obtained their tenure-track jobs in the 1960s and 70s and have no understanding of (1) the opportunities outside academia and (2) how the academic job market really is. A lot of them have some vague idea of "oh well, the good grad students will always get academic jobs". The answer is, "maybe, after 2-3 postdocs, at age 38, if they are lucky".
Your comment presents an excessively gloomy view of academia. I am yet to find a productive graduate student / post doc in engineering or CS at a decent university, who hasn't been able to find a tenure track position. I think academic jobs have the advantage of almost full freedom to do what you want. In addition, there are opportunities to exercise entrepreneurial skills via grant-writing. Besides, for engineering / CS PhDs, it is fairly easy to transition out of academia since there are more than enough job openings. I think the main problem with tenure track positions is that the bar is often too high compared to the industry, and you require more 'stars aligning' than with industry jobs- your narrow field must be hot the year you are applying, you must have your strongest resume within the December / January deadlines that most job postings have, etc.
Industry R&D also has its pitfalls. The primary metric in most industry R&D labs (Microsoft, Mitsubishi ERL, etc. are the known exceptions) is $s, and there are more stakeholders in getting $s (customers, managerial caprice, etc.) than in publishing a paper or 'winning' a grant (which are usually the metrics in academia).
If it's your dream job, it's probably lots of other people's dream jobs, too. And you are competing with people who may have family support (parents or spouse) so they can self-actualize in the field, while you are trying to make ends meet.
Don't fight uphill on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Imagine what a rich idealistic kid wants to do with his life. Stay away from those professions unless you are also financially independent.
I don't understand why he doesn't attempt to leave the university and get a job as a programmer. CAD 34k is a joke and less than the stipend I received as a graduate student.
"And then we get to the “Why doesn’t he quit and get a proper job?” people. The answer is, I’m 52 years old. There aren’t that many job opportunities coming my way. Have you tried getting a job in Ottawa these days? And I can’t move elsewhere. My younger son is in a fabulous Special Needs School here in Ottawa, with wonderful teachers, we have the specialist doctors at the Children’s Hospital, and a pool of wonderfully talented therapists to work with him. He needs to be here, and so I need to be here in Ottawa. He needs round the clock attention, so I need flexible working hours, which University teaching gives me."
He is already doing job B, while on paper it still says A. (fulltime work without benefits for an hourly wage comparable to an intern). That's the problem.
I received 30k/year while working for a professor while obtaining my undergraduate degree (all I ever got) in CS. This was almost 10 years ago now, in Canada, at a University in an area with a low cost of living. I thought this was peanuts at the time as I was used to working in Northern Alberta. Looking back, it seems I was very lucky.
It's interesting that. I taught a sessional course a little further west (University of Saskatchewan) and sessionals there are unionized, whether you want to or not. One of the perks of this is that after you've taught the same course 3 times, you have right-of-first-refusal; i.e. if that course opens up to be taught by a sessional, the department offer it to you before they open it up to a general competition.
One big problem is that the union that represents contract faculty also represents graduate students and for the most part isn't taken seriously by the general public. For example, I saw an ad from the union at York University calling for the same domestic and international tuition rates. It's like they have no clue how government funding works.
Universities don't offer any more than they have to. Apparently you can pay less than $30k a year to get a hard-working instructor with a Phd to teach your students. So, that's what they do. I'm sure this guy is awesome, but the reason he's being offered a pittance is because he and the people like him will accept it. If nobody would teach classes for less than $50k, then that's what they'd get paid.
It's the flip side of the big companies complaining about a skills shortage and advocating for increased immigration. Yeah, it's hard to hire an engineer in Silicon Valley for peanuts. But there's no god given right to be able to hire cheap labour, and if you really want to hire someone, pay the market rate, or stop whining about it.
I'm also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying "I'm not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for". That wouldn't fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn't being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.
Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He's doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.
Ultimately, there's only so many teaching slots available, and there's a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms. Doubling the salary won't increase the number of teaching slots available (more likely decrease it), and it won't decrease the number of Phd grads looking to teach (it would absolutely increase it). Academia is already a lottery where the many chase the tiny number of tenure slots; does making the competition even fiercer and more Darwinian help improve the fairness?
> there's only so many teaching slots available, and there's a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms
This is another problem produced by academic exploitation. Ph.D. students are produced 10-to-1 relative to tenure track jobs. Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year.
The answer is that grad students, like adjuncts, free the professors from the most onerous aspect of teaching classes: doing all the grading. In exchange for tuition and stipend, grad students have to serve as TAs once or twice a year (in some departments they can also take positions as Research Assistants or as administrators for undergrad programs). Some grad students will get the opportunity to sole-teach their own seminars. Because professors do not want to teach, and want to focus entirely on their personal research program and publications, having an excess of grad students around to grade, guest lecture, and fill out the course offerings every semester is worth the $25-$35,000 annual stipend (about the same that the adjunct professor writing this article makes).
You're right that universities don't have to offer any more than $35,000 + shitty benefits + no job security, because the adjuncts and grad students will still take the opportunity believing that it might turn into an opportunity to move up into the professoriate if they just work hard enough or if their next publication is just a little more brilliant. Doesn't change the fact that it's still a cynical and hypocritical exploitation of the "intellectual reserve army of labor" (to paraphrase Marx). Universities are some of the most leftist institutions in North America, but the professoriate and deanery are perfectly fine with naked exploitation both on the supply side (grad students) and the demand side (adjuncts).
If departments need graders, they should hire masters students rather than admit Ph.D. students and then cynically consume 5–10 years of their life. If departments need teachers to supplement their researchers, they should create a position distinct from tenure-track professor/reader, perhaps "lecturer," but that is not "part-time"/contract work and is compensated appropriately.
This is another problem produced by academic exploitation. Ph.D. students are produced 10-to-1 relative to tenure track jobs. Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year.
In my field, no competent grad student paid tuition, and it wasn't a meaningful measure of value or cost. Nobody would have accepted an offer from a grad program that didn't provide a full ride. So tuition was basically funny money, like a "list price" that is always discounted.
My research work brought in enough grant money to pay for my stipend plus equipment and other expenses. If anybody was taking a loss, it was the National Science Foundation.
Grants are easier to come by in certain fields than in others. Natural sciences, for the most part, have it much easier than social sciences and humanities.
Tuition begins to matter when students lose funding. Then it's no longer "funny money." According to the Ph.D. completion project, between 50–60% of students that enter a Ph.D. program finish it by the 10 year mark: http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/book1_quant.asp
Most programs guarantee funding only through the first 4–6 years. Some programs make students compete against one another for quasi-guaranteed funding after a certain point.
A substantial minority of graduate students are either going to quit the program with only a masters degree to show for it or are going to end up paying tuition. Usually they can reduce the amount of tuition paid by enrolling as a "non-resident student" or something similar. But the tuition rate (and how long they will cover tuition) isn't something that can be brushed aside, either by students managing their finances, or by departments assessing their budgets.
Assuming some amount of my taxes goes towards funding these grants, I'd much rather that money goes towards funding advances in battery or materials technology than to in-depth analyses of Shakespeare. There are advancements and improvements to be made in fields like social work and law but I don't think they'll be made by writing dissertations.
Also, are you saying some PhD's take 10 years to complete, not including undergrad/masters? My understanding was a PhD on its own was typically a 3-6 year endeavour. I know it's a difficult project to manage but 10 years seems long.
That's probably averaged over all disciplines. The better-funded disciplines (CS, engineering, natural sciences, etc) have better outcomes in the sense of shorter time-to-completion. There's a lot more attrition in arts and social sciences, as I understand it.
These are some good points. I took 7 years from entering grad school, without doing a Masters along the way. I take full responsibility for how long it took -- my first thesis project was over my head. I would not have forged ahead without funding, so my Plan B was to take the Masters (i.e., pay the diploma fee after passing qualifiers) and then pick up a quick Masters in electrical engineering.
When I was applying for grad school I got a letter offering admission from some school that basically said: "we'll pay you $20k in stipend, plus tuition is $40k, so really this offer is worth $60k".
I think they may have added another couple thousand for health insurance as well.
Oh yes. It's quite wonderful, really. For the cost of a stipend and waiving tuition, they get someone who'll work almost for free, grading papers, teaching seminars, and maybe even bringing in grant money. Then as soon as they graduate, they're back, desperately applying for adjunct positions.
If you were very cynical, you could try and consider the RoI on a stipend from the point of view of the administration. It's one of the most abusive and exploitive things you'll find outside of a North Korean prison camp.
You could also look at it from the perspective of students, who have been told for nearly two decades that they should be college bound, and that they should get "the best education they can," and then finally that they should "do what they love." When you finally exit the pipeline, you realize that the best education isn't worth much outside of the school you got it from, and doing what you love doesn't pay very well.
The problem is that you learn this about 6 years too late, and transitioning to a job where you're actually valued will set you back even further.
As a grad student in the 2000's I was told by a professor that the department would take into consideration the expected attrition rate (typically ~50%) when admitting grad students. The idea being that they would have enough TA's for intro classes. Attrition would make the number of advanced students more inline with the money available to fund PhD students till they graduated. In other words, they purposefully over-admitted to get TA's, most of whom would leave with an MS as best.
This was in science departments. In departments that had few or no "general ed" courses, such as engineering, and thus little need for TA's, the graduation rate was much higher.
> Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year.
Well, largely because the PhD students don't just do the teaching work, they do the research, too! Professors are often stuck as something more like a manager these days, which means that even the "winners" of the academic rat-race don't really get what they actually wanted: to do research full-time with a secure salary.
And this is why I, a sort-of confirmed desperate academic (ok, I know how to code so not really!) finally stepped off the hamster wheel of looking for a tenure-track job: my friends who got the golden ring still had sucky jobs that involved 60 hours minimum work per week, and so much of it was NOT RESEARCH! Move across the country four times, move the family, leave my support systems, all to do a job that in the end isn't even what you thought it would be?
He's getting paid hourly and has already put in 55 free hours to teach the course properly. How many more free hours do you expect from him? I think the email he sent the students is spot on. Perhaps if they're distressed enough, they will put pressure on the university to pay their teachers what they're worth.
Yes, he might be "part of the problem" but it's not like he can choose not to be without starving. Nor can other professors. Perhaps with union help, but they don't seem to help. I don't see how blame slinging helps here at all.
Indeed. My ex-wife is a high school teacher, and it's incredible to me how many hours she has to put in outside of class, at an already low-on-paper rate. And then she cobbles together more teaching at area colleges.
It's shameful. But I'm sure we'll get the educated populace that that rate will deserve.
My wife is also a teacher. That she puts in hours outside of class seems like a pretty good deal considering the almost 15 weeks of holidays she gets a year. Like every other teacher I know, she could be earning a lot more (with much less holiday) in any number of white collar professions.
Even more than that, the class was a contract job and it's over. How much free work is it reasonable to do for a client after the job is finished and you're no longer being paid?
Apparently you can pay less than $30k a year to get a hard-working instructor with a Phd to teach your students. So, that's what they do
And the issue is well-known and has been for years. I wrote about it from the humanities side here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor... , though to be fair I didn't entirely appreciate just how bad the situation is until I began looking at the MLA jobs list.
Perhaps not surprisingly I didn't pursue academia and am primarily a grant writing consultant.
Well look, I appreciate the point that there are limited jobs and a lot of qualified people and that the market forces the wages down.
But there is a bigger context here. One is that the market pays him for 225 hours, then expects him to work 280 hours to do the core of the job, and if he wants to do his job properly he'd need to push it up even further to 300. If you want employees to appreciate the cold facts that the market doesn't value them, you should appreciate that employers accept the cold fact that they can't expect an employee to put in 30% more hours completely unpaid. That's not reasonable.
Now you could argue about that for SMEs. Your local cornerstore can't afford to give a full contract to one of its employees because it struggles? Alright. But this is a university with a $200m endowment in an industry where revenues have far, far outpaced the CPI and where class sizes have increased, too. The notion that they can't pay a highly qualified individual with 10 years of experience and excellent ratings for the 300 hours to do his job is ridiculous.
Now you can argue that he accepts a crap job and that the market keeps the wages down. That's all fine. We don't award PhDs more money than street cleaners because we respect them more, but because they're harder to get and in demand and therefore more expensive. And if this is no longer the case, I appreciate you can make the case they don't deserve $100k salaries, sure.
But it's not his argument. His argument is that he gets no worker's rights because of loopholes. No pension or unemployment protection, because the way they define his job, even though it's no different from another job title that does get those benefits. His argument is not that $30 an hour for 225 hours in a course is too little money, it's that they hire him for a 300 hour job and pay him only 225 hours. That has nothing to do with 'it's fine because it's what the market says'. That's just screwing with your employees and being able to get away with it because the market allows it. Pay him for the 300 hours that it takes to do the job right and award him the same worker's rights we have all come to expect in a civilized society that is market driven, but enforces some basic principles when the market doesn't naturally award them, like building up a pension or getting protection for when you lose your job. If that means cuts in his hourly wage to what he effectively gets now ($17 USD), that sucks but it's transparent, it's a signal to the 200 students in his classroom that says 'you're paying a shit ton and this is what the current market offers'.
That having been said, I appreciate your point on market forces and it's exactly blog posts like these that can affect them. To limit the amount of supply of new PhDs looking to get into teaching $60k jobs when they don't exist, you need communication like this. If anything let's applaud that.
As for your point on passing along the issue to those weaker than him... he he has no employment protection, combine that with the fact that he his multiple requests have already been denied, I'd say it's quite brave that he goes public with this, for one. But secondly, it's the way in which he least affects his students. i.e. if he, as you asked, decided to simply not show up to class to push his issue, that'd affect his students MUCH more in a way for which they have no real recourse and in a way that can really mess up their entire curriculum due to cascading effects. (e.g. fail a fall course because of issues with a lecturer or personal issues and you can't start your next course in the spring, and you can't redo the fall course in the spring either because it's only given in fall. So you have to wait an entire year before you're on track again. Stuff like this happened to my peers all the time in uni.)
The fact he continues teaching, continues putting in 280 h...
You seem to be arguing that it's his fault for accepting low pay for a 225 hour job, but then that he should be screwed for another 75 hours, because "that comes with the territory".
A student doesn't sign up to a professor to learn, they sign up to a school. It's the schools responsibility to ensure that the student is properly educated, not the individual professor's - they are employed by the school to achieve the school's aims.
passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.
I'm not sure we read the same article. The author talks about trying to resolve this himself several times. If the student feels short-changed, it's the school's problem, not the fixed-hours employee they hired. This is the whole problem he's trying to highlight, and he's making a stand and taking it public. The students aren't as weak as you suggest they are, not if they act together.
Doubling the salary... [won't change supply and demand]
It will, however, make the currently employed staff more willing to work extra hours to ensure their students get educated properly. The author also isn't looking for tenure, he's looking to be made an employee at something more appropriate in wage.
> the reason he's being offered a pittance is because he and the people like him will accept it.
>
Considering this situation strictly as a labour market might be too simplistic, given the importance of teachers in students' life. (e.g. an inspirational teacher that makes you want to learn more about a subject)
At 30k/year, it's a little disrespectful. (Anecdote: I recently read about a high school student who asked "why should I respect my teachers if they only make 40k?"). If tenured profs make 70k, adjunct profs should make at least 50k. The way I see it, the market price for teachers is underpriced because teaching is far from a "crap job"---quite the contrary---it's one of the best jobs in the world. In fact, we could say the 20k difference in salary between what it should be and what it is, is partially caused from a "fun job" penalty. (Think of this as the opposite of "danger pay" where you get paid more because your job is less fun that normal.)
At 30k/year, colleges get a mix bag of teaching quality. Some teachers will care, some teachers will try to get by with as little effort as possible. If universities increase adjunct salaries to 50k, they'll attract more of the teachers who care. Where do you get the extra cash to give 67% raise to each adjunct prof? Fire some administrators.
I think increasing adjunct salaries is all win for the university: better teaching, less administrators (and therefore less forms to fill out!!!), happier students, and the continuing the relevance of the in-person lecture-based teaching model (for lecture with < 50 students it becomes practical to interrupt the teacher when there is something you don't understand, how cool is that?).
This is literally the least interesting response one can make to this issue. Both parties are offering/accepting what the market will bear? Obviously! That's what makes it the market. You're stating a tautology.
The interesting issues at hand are the cultural factors of academia that cause so many highly qualified people to work for such astoundingly little money. Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of 'higher learning', not unlike a cult? Are those self-issued 'high qualifications' not actually as valuable as they are pretended to be? Those are the interesting questions rather than just going "hurr durr supply and demand".
Not like the supply-and-demand argument excuses anything, either. The entire history of labor protections is that previous practices that the market would bear were deemed socially unjust and no longer permitted, even if you could still find people desperate enough to agree to them. Saying "you took the job; don't complain" simply isn't valid.
Prof Robinson has to 'accept' the university's offer because the alternative is starvation and homelessness.
The university believes - wrongly, as it happens - that people like Prof Robinson are easy to replace. So it sees no need to treat him any better.
If he tries to argue for a fair rate, he's arguing as someone from an inferior position of power and status with 'rational actors' who don't understand the consequences of their actions.
In this case the consequences are poor teaching, and - in the medium term - the replacement of an overly greedy university system with something that offers better value for students.
I'm sure the admins are patting themselves on the back for putting Prof Robinson in his place.
They won't be so happy when everyone - including the student body - has moved elsewhere.
>Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of 'higher learning', not unlike a cult?
No, bright people are being indoctrinated in business and econ classes with the idea that you should make a fast buck however you can. Social transactions can only be valued financially. Nothing else matters.
Those are the real cult victims. As is Prof Robinson, who is one of many talented individual dealing with the consequences of that particular brand of kookiness.
This is not rhetoric. These toxic attitudes exist because they've been heavily promoted. They didn't just happen.
> The university believes - wrongly, as it happens - that people like Prof Robinson are easy to replace. So it sees no need to treat him any better.
Are you using "wrongly" in the sense of "what they're doing is wrong" or "their belief is incorrect"? Because the latter is absolutely not true. There is a near endless supply of freshly-minted PhDs willing the take the author's place.
I think the point is that, though there are plenty of other PhDs to take his place at low cost, it may be hard to find one who is able to create as much value (for students, and by extention the university) a Prof Robinson.
Considering how more interconnected the world is getting your going to see the salaries of jobs which can be done remotely decrease and teaching will be one.
However in your argument, with plenty of PhDs available the chances of finding another Prof Robinson should not be impossible. We can always find traits of teachers we like and dismiss others for similarly arbitrary reasons, the issue being how do you make this work for hiring decisions. One person's dream candidate may not even rate for another
Read some of the Chronicle of Higher Ed forums and then come back to reaffirm that statement. For fun, start here: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,168931.0.html You can also go down the rabbithole of leaving-academia stories starting with http://leavingacademia.blogspot.com/2014/03/what-you-can-do-... . Maybe academics leaving academia are objectively in a good position to transition to other jobs, but they are in general so psychologically wound up in academia that instead they are desperate and disturbed.
They're in an incredibly good position. My former boss's boss's boss has a PhD in chemistry. His boss's boss has a PhD in economics. "Tired of bossing around stupid undergrads? Get paid 5 times as much to boss around adults!" I don't even have any reports, and I'm making 5 times what I was making as an adjunct and barely scraping by, and I don't have to deal with undergrads who would rather squeak by than actually learn the material they're being certified in. I have my MBA, but I'm quite pleased to work with people who have their bachelors in philosophy. Disturbed is a good word. Certifiably insane might be a better phrase to use. The real world can actually pay the bills. If you're not being appreciated financially by academia, go where you are. If you still want to deal with undergrads after putting in an honest day's work, there's plenty of demand for adjuncts to teach night classes.
In a company he'd get paied for working outside his job schedules. And if the market could find the right price for something, capitalism wouldn't be such a fail.
But I can't resist pointing out here that we're talking about a University. It's universities that have been hotbeds of criticizing capitalism for decades. It's probably university-educated, university-created, and university-supported ideas that prompted your comment in your first place. It's universities doing everything they can to foster hatred of "capitalism" and telling you how horrible it is in every way they can.
And when you're not looking or listening, they turn right around and pay people exactly what the market will bear and pocket the difference. (At least, to your way of thinking. That's not really the best way to think of it, but for rhetorical purposes I'll accept your way for the sake of argument here.)
I feel genuinely bad for this person, who sounds very good at what is actually a very hard job that even a "mere" Physics PhD is not adequate qualification for (evidence: many of them still suck at teaching physics).
But I still can't help but read the complaints about the coldness of capitalism here with a bit of a raised eyebrow. This is a University. No excuses! If there's any entity anywhere that ought to be paying what the professor "the right price" without reference to "cold" market facts right now, with no prompting, no public campaign, just doing it, it's a University. Stop talking and show me how much better your way is than capitalism... but, oh, wait, it's apparently just raw capitalism with a wafer-thin moralistic sheen drawn over it.
And no, there's nothing even remotely exceptional about this one case. We've had a stream of articles on HN that establish how this is absolutely the norm across the board, so no escape out that hatch.
Perhaps those of you who have gotten your ideas about capitalism that ultimately source from the University system ought to reconsider whether your source is that reliable, if they can't put their own ideas into action.
This is one of the reasons I would love to see the adjunct teachers unionize and strike. The ivory-tower professors love telling how great unions are for every other industry; why should they be left out of the awesomeness?
Right. This was the case many years ago (at least in the US) but now universities are essentially for profit corporations run by MBAs who care nothing for the mission of the institution, overloaded with administrative parasites who latch on to any profitable industry and spit platitudes about 'education' and then turn around and stab it in the back. There has been a massive shift in governance of universities; if you go to any university you will see the faculty (read: the people who actually do the work of the university and are public intellectuals) have almost zero power, a token appointment or two in the puppet university governing body, not the board which makes the real decisions. This is happening for a number of reasons, partially because the short-term corporate profit agenda has infiltrated every industry no matter how noble (see: health care. Accountants decide what treatment you get, not a doctor. Businesspeople decide which doctors and nurses are doing a good job based on profits and cost-cutting, not a standard of care), which is really a result of a cut in funding. It's essentially a result of a shift in culture; towards a culture indoctrinated into the religion of economics, valuing things only for their potential profit, using economic measures even when (especially when) they are inappropriate. Defunding art, education, health care, infrastructure, safety nets, anything with intangible or even long-term tangible value in favor of things which show up in short-term metrics. It's especially prevalent among youth. Ask a college kid what's important to him; he'll say making money, period point blank. Everything else is secondary, if it even exists. Our world is a lot more cutt-throat than it was even 50 years ago, when intellectuals and professionals were respected, and there was a healthy middle class, not a quickly disappearing one, full of people trying to tread water in it or claw their way out by tooth and nail before being "middle class" means no more than barely eking out an existence for the short years you're healthy to work at maximum productivity, but only with the permission of a high ranking member of the owning class (i.e. a 'job').
>Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He's doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.
Well no. The real fault lies with the idiots in government who were somehow (coughcough lobbying coughcough university-industrial-state complex coughcough) convinced to classify all academic faculty as overtime-exempt in the labor regulations, even the part-time ones who are paid for piece-work.
With the exception of a few pernicious fields like that, society has long-since considered piece-work pay sufficiently unethical to be made illegal, requiring either fixed salaries for variable professional workloads or hourly wages that account for all hours actually worked, including overtime beyond 40 hours.
That's the standard, and there's no reason academia should be exempt.
> But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.
Quite the opposite. The problem is that there already too many assholes who make it their sole mission in life to maximize their monetary inflow. But the fact of the matter is that this world keeps running because millions are prepared to do their part for a very modest fee.
>I'm also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying "I'm not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for". That wouldn't fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn't being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.
You are wrong, then. The fiction the university maintains is that he is only being paid for the hours he does in class, plus a certain number of marking hours, which have been exhausted. What you're describing is called a "salaried position".
I'm also part of the problem. I teach one course a year. So it's far from a fulltime thing. The pay is about 100$ per hour OF LECTURE. Considering the prep time needed, and the mandatory unpaid interaction with students after hours, it probably works out to 10-15$/hour. I'm part of the problem because I don't much care about the money. I teach because it impresses my clients, which brings me more realworld consulting work.
Let's do the math for the last lecture I taught. 30 students pay about 900 each to take my class. That's 27K. But I also know half of the school's budget comes from the province (ie government support). So let's double that to say 50K, of which I take home 4 ... 8% to the instructor and the rest to the admins.
I think the real issue is the larger move towards academic admin as a separate profession from teaching. None of my four bosses have ever taught a class. Law schools are probably the last vestige of the old system whereby most admins are senior profs, not professional administrators.
It varies by province. In Ontario, the per-student funding grant hasn't increased (in absolute $) in over a decade, so it has fallen to 40-45% of overall revenue.
I've been fortunate enough to have Andrew (the author) as my Physics prof, last year.
Although I've always enjoyed and understood physics (to my own share) before, the way he taught it all of a sudden made everything much more clear. I could see the connections between each concept and the next.
To be able to teach this well, indeed requires a lot of experience; and as much hard work and passion; and Andrew does/has all of that, despite all these issues.
> I would like to give my students the very best learning experience that I possibly can.
I could't agree more. Not only is he knowledgeable, but he's also great at conveying it.
I'm writing this comment in a hurry but I really felt I had to write it. I'll write a follow up in near future; and I'll try to explain the situtation from a student's point of view too. All I can say right now is that this is not what he (and many other Contract Instructors) deserves.
If you ever read this, Andrew, I'd like to thank you again for all you've done for me, and many others. Please keep aspiring and inspiring us.
The best way to help him is by contacting the school and telling them how f-ed up the system is. The school needs to feel the pressure from every side.
Now, isn't the school simply reacting to the current fashion of Western Governments underfunding education? It is not like Universities are profitable, they operate on government funding, which is reducing year after year. He needs to take his situation to the public at large and get policy change at the national government level.
You are probably right. But let me put my "free capital markets" hat on, and I'm specially refering to:
I have tried to have my job turned into a permanent one. The University has turned me down, and told me that giving me a permanent job is against “the strategic direction of the University, Faculty of Science and the Department”. The permanent faculty in the department will not support me because I am a teacher now, not an active scientific researcher.
The University, above anything is a place to teach. Yes, research is important, but above anything a place to teach. Striking the right teaching/research balance, specially in the sciences is difficult. But in my opinion most of the university budgets should go to teaching, and research should be secondary.
If lack of public funding is really the issue for not paying teachers, in my opinion, it's then when public universities should think like private institutons. Sure you can't compete with endowments like Hardvard, MIT or Stanford, but I think that the future of higher education is by finding the right private sector partners to carry out research.
Seriously? The school in question is Carleton University. They charge CA$5,600-10,700 per semester or CA$1,000-1,800 per credit hour[1]. That's plenty to hire and pay professors properly.
Educational institutions of all levels bloat themselves with overpaid administration. If funding is an issue that is the first place they should look to cut.
In my experience in governance at A Highly Ranked Canadian Research University, where most top administrative posts were held by tenured professors, they tend to take the view of "well, I successfully negotiated the gauntlet of obtaining tenure through my research, if you can't do the same, tough luck."
Dean, department head and provostial positions are heavily weighted toward highly successful researchers who have effectively "retired" into administration and seem not to consider teaching to be one of the university's core functions.
It's easier to convince these people to hire another janitor @ $70k/year than to give a contract teacher a full-time job at the same salary since to them bringing non-researchers into the ranks of permanent faculty is equivalent to letting the barbarians into Rome.
The last paragraph from one of his follow-up articles, The Importance of Going Viral, is relevant:
"In fact the response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone, except regular faculty. Not one message of support from anyone in a tenured position, in Physics or any other department. The status quo has considerable appeal when you are in the position of privilege."
I think part of the point is that the attractiveness of a contract instructor is that the fully encumbered price is very much closer to the take home salary than for a tenured professor (or indeed, even a janitor).
And to all those people saying walk away - that's the easy thing to do. The right thing to do is stand up and say "This is wrong" - not just for me, but for lots of other University teachers.
It's the corporatization that killed learning, just like it killed healthcare. From rigid rules to unequal pay scales , there is no reason for a corporate hierarchy except to make cannon fodder. Educators should go to work at Valve to build 'Valve Academy'. The flat and free-spirited culture seems to be working there. They have revolutionized game development and distribution. They have enabled communities of people to exist and interact. The only thing lacking is to formalize the knowledge that the gamers posses. Not just winning strategies and tactics. But game design and game theory. This would require knowledge from all the subjects conceivably taught at university - after all, they are building virtual worlds, not just experiencing them.
The university system in the US (and apparently Canada) is socialism for the rich.
This guy is getting screwed, and the Canadian taxpayers are getting screwed, so that employers do not have to pay for their employees to go to college or get other training (or factor it into their salaries to cover student loan debt if they already have a degree).
While employers paying for training may work in economies were there is a high level of worker loyalty, in Canada and the States, people change jobs frequently. Thus, the employer wouldn't get to keep the benefit of the training often, because the employee would leave to work for a employer who pays high wages because it didn't pay for the training.
No one should go into teaching at any level, K-12 and up, until the existing teachers and professors start dying off, quitting and retiring.
This treatment, for this skill, commitment, experience and education, is terrible. But it's enabled by all the people who hire in. Stop doing that, you're more than capable of doing something that society values. And no, society doesn't value teaching, or they'd pay you. What they value is poverty rates.
And if schools and universities "solve" the problem by hiring whatever the educational equivalent of an H1-B is, then they're just restating their position: we don't value quality teaching, not enough to pay a fair rate.
We should have a pleasant planet in a couple decades if everyone follows this advice. /s
All of human progress up this point can be wiped out in a generation if it's not passed on to the new individuals in the world.
Seriously, how is this good advice? If anything we should be encouraging more people to teach their knowledge and to get people interested in learning. Instead of shutting everything down, how about we figure out how to make things better?
You could start by paying more and making it easier to enter the profession. If it's as valuable as you say, surely you'd be willing to pay more than he could make as a cleaner or a convenience store clerk.
We don't need to shut down universities. Just, enough aspiring professors need to find something else that pays more how they'd like. Then, there will be more demand and better conditions for those left.
I'm now 24, if I got a job stacking shelves at a local supermarket I'd get paid 14 euros an hour without needing a diploma. He effectively makes 16 euros an hour, only I build up my pension, get more time off, get benefits and protection, and he's in his 50s with over a decade of teaching experience for which he receives excellent ratings, has a PhD in Physics and work experience at a Nuclear facility.
This seems awfully silly, especially with the cost of education having outpaced CPI by a wide margin for the past what, 3-4 decades while classroom sizes ballooned to 200.
"CEO wages" have also out-paced the CPI. I'm sure the administration isn't paying themselves a pittance (and that in a budget crisis their salaries are the last on the chopping block)...
Also, don't forget how many more administrators there are than in the past after a few decades of growing at considerably higher rate than either students or faculty, and with a considerably higher median wage. That's a large group of people who have more time to focus on resisting any cuts since they don't have to spend time on the publish-or-perish cycle.
I think you're ignoring the really obvious difference in that one of those options is extremely rewarding for some people, to the point that some people volunteer to do it for free, and provides as a useful credential to get other high paying, rewarding jobs. The other option is mindless, dull, and only really serves as a gateway to other menial labor jobs. When viewed this way, the wage difference doesn't seem silly.
I am sad to say that this guy just made himself a persona non grata as an adjunct not just at his current school, but at any school. Adjuncts are perceived as a commodity, and the administrators absolutely do not care whether he is a good teacher or not.
I strongly suggest this person start looking for jobs in industry. Once a convenient opportunity comes along to stop offering him work, the admins will do so.
If he wants to continue teaching, I suggest he use one of the online services that will actually pay him well if he can teach a difficult course well.
My advice is don't participate in the broken educational institutions.
Take up a job somewhere else, and teach the way Salman Khan of Khan Academy started teaching. Just start teaching on YouTube and helping students on Skype. Your paid job should sustain you.
Using your skills, you should be able to get a 9-5 job somewhere that pays you better than what you are getting paid now, which should leave 15-20 hours for your teaching side project.
I started teaching programming to a few people in this way, while I was employed in another (non-programming) profession.
Teaching is more rewarding when you don't have to follow someone else's rules and curriculum.
And what if you're teaching something that, when done improperly, could be actively dangerous in the teaching process? Many of the sciences are like that - biology and chemistry experiments gone wrong, etc..
Or what if equipment required to perform the teaching is extremely expensive, like lab equipment, telescopes, etc.
While the DIY approach is nice if you're doing something that doesn't have many unique/expensive prerequisites (beyond internet access and a computer), there's a whole lot of stuff out there that needs real hands on instruction using expensive gear.
i used to be a college teacher for several years & my sympathies are with the author.
Advice for those considering this path in science/tech - learn to write code on the side. Pick something mainstream that will be around for a while, and which you can tap for a sideline. Develop deep expertise, spend as much time continually educating yourself as you do for others.
Contract programming parallels much of what he says about contract teaching, with the added difficulty of having to track down and find projects to work on.
"Learn to code in order to generate side income" isn't as simple as it sounds. I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.
Plentiful cheap labor, abusive bureaucratic and lethargic organisational structure, plentiful federal subsidies... why aren't we seeing more startup universities / community colleges snapping up these over-qualified and underpaid professors for themselves and offering them to the highly subsidized and eager student population?
At some levels, college is a popularity contest to get the best credential. At other levels, college really is about learning the necessary skills to enter the work force.
Is government and self-regulation of education really such an incredible barrier to entry that new entrants can't offer better deals to the best teachers and still compete?
Edit: I am seriously considering getting together with 10 other parents I know, and we can just collectively pay someone like this to teach our kids all day. He could teach a class of 10 kids for a year, earn 3x as much, and we would still be paying less than half what the private school down the street costs.
Khan's Academy, Coursera, etc. I even donate to one of them as I think it's the future of learning, free from government intervention that seems to cause so much malaise these days. But that's a long, other discussion, before anyone jumps on it.
And to tell you the truth, I've often flirted with a similar idea to the one you mentioned at the end. That, along with plain home-schooling. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a "startup" that disrupts the current teaching ecosystem. It can simply be a bunch of parents buckling-down and doing what they think is best for their children.
Hopefully they don't make home-schooling illegal, as I've noticed it occurring in a few places. That would make it impossibly to change the status-quo without breaking the law.
From Wikipedia anyway, "Since the late 1980s, the focus on the legality of homeschooling in general is no longer in serious debate but legal questions have shifted to whether homeschooling communities can access state school funds, facilities, and resources."
I think it's a very exciting model. A small private co-op of like-minded parents with 10-15 like-aged children, hiring a single truly excellent teacher, and paying them about $100k per year, while supplementing with access to public school resources in the local town to which they are entitled for extra-curricular and filler classes.
The "classroom" would float between public areas like libraries, parks, museums, and local areas of interest, and rooms made available in the parents' residences.
I think the model is particularly attractive K-8. I guess the only problem is the kids would be so far ahead by 9th grade they would have to go straight to college rather than high school. :-/
> the legality of homeschooling in general is no longer in serious debate
In the US. In some (many? most?) European countries homeschooling is illegal. They believe that anyone who wants to homeschool is an abusive parent who wants to keep/hide their child from the public, or wants to teach them strange things.
I have argued with some people from countries like this was absolutely astonished at how they defended this outrage. They absolutely refused to believe that parents might choose this because (if the parents are able to do it) academically it's clearly better.
In the US, few do. The standard homeschooling situation is exactly what they fear: Religious fundamentalists who want to shelter their children from opposing views.
People with an excess of intelligence/time/resources who choose to homeschool their children because they're dissatisfied with the rigor of their academic program are very much the exception to the rule. Read up on the experiences of such people when they try to locate a homeschooling group without religious instruction.
It is the statistical reality for most American homeschooled kids, according to the secular homeschooling parents who find themselves a minority in the homeschooling community.
Umm, looking at that Wikipedia link, it's legal in about 17 and illegal in about 7 European countries, so I'd say it's more often legal than illegal (though the definition of legal/illegal is often not so clear-cut).
It's not illegal to home-school. Although, home schooling does not entitle you to get any officially approved certification of skills. You are on your own to prove your worth and go through the hiring process without any diploma.
Hypothetical scenario:
it is not illegal to do your own electrical wiring in a house. However, the electrical company will only allow you to connect to their networks if your cabling is done by certified electrician. You can team up with some people in your area, build a power plant and happily run your own cabling. It's not illegal, so why complain?
We don't have the same definition of homeschooling then. In most of the countries where it's legal (see the wikipedia link posted), you are actually following official courses by snailmail, and you eventually get a real diploma identical to the one you would have if you had attended school.
So totally different from "just learning on your own".
It's illegal in Germany which already makes it illegal in a good chunk of Europe if you go by population.
Germany also has mandatory school until 16 and religion classes in school.
The state knows best obviously.
[this combination is something that gets me on ragetilt quickly whenever I think about it even though I think our school system is generally pretty good/underrated]
Why would you presume that a startup would offer better wages and conditions for those "below the API"? The first one might, but then the second one would start trying to drive costs down in competition.
In countries that allow such things there are plenty of private college "startups" and they are almost universally awful. There is more money to be made churning out hordes of poorly trained students than there is in properly training them.
So long as bright young students continue to ignore market realities and pursue academic careers, nothing will change.
In fact, as a taxpayer and student I would be upset if my university unilaterally chose to pay more than the market would bear. So long as highly-educated individuals will accept reaching jobs for $34,000 a year, that is precisely what we should continue to pay them—doing otherwise would be an inefficiency in operations which would drive up the already high cost of education.
You're missing the point (and are callously insensitive to the plight of another human being, in my honest opinion). He's working full time hours, with more than full time responsibilities, but the University is using technicalities and loopholes to avoid giving him the benefits that we as a society have decided all full time employees should have.
I think that sort of behaviour is abhorrent, and frankly anyone who defends that strikes me as a "fuck you, I've got mine" kind of person. I make far more than this person does, and I can make the trade-off to do contract work for higher pay. His trade off is "contract" work for lower pay than the full timers with more than full time work load, and he doesn't get to trade higher job security for lower pay like we do.
He's being exploited and has the worst of all worlds, and he's teaching the next generation of this world, and you're sitting here saying he gets what he deserves? You've got to be kidding me.
I don't think it's fair to say he's being exploited. He's a highly educated white male in a prosperous nation. He has plenty of agency and has had many options throughout his life.
If you read his follow up, he admits that he's explicitly choosing this job for personal reasons (flexible hours allow for him to provide parental care).
When there is a long queue of people who would love to take your job, I just don't see how you can call it exploitation. He's not being manipulated; he's just accepting the low pay as a tradeoff for flexible hours.
I suppose you could maybe argue that there's a positive externality to his employment which the market doesn't capture (note: this would be separate from the positive externalities of education, which is already subsidized), but I'm skeptical. There's a long queue of people who would love even his marginal academic job.
Obviously, I do feel sorry for the guy. I'd never want to be in his situation myself, but I also feel he should admit his own agency in getting himself into it (hopefully helping to tear down the glorification of academic jobs in the meantime). Moreover, most of my sympathy tends to go to people in genuinely exploitive and helpless conditions (ex. children born into poverty; women in tyranical underdeveloped countries, etc.).
You sound like a first year economics student, everythings still so black&white to you, just stop with the cliche 'market will bare' stuff at least. This theory means less and less these days. Many are realizing it's quite the opposite. In situations where the market wont bare the rich and powerful's offerings, the rich and powerful just go out of their way to force you to bare it... An example, oh well JimmySuperstore's market won't bare price hike, so they'll just make that money up by offshoring and avoiding taxes thereby sticking it to the market anyways.. Another good example, my apartment raises rent 20% in 4 years (illegally) and when caught and fined, just decided to demolition the entrie building so they could gentrify all the people who couldn't 'bare' their prices, and rebuild so they wouldn't be legally required to pay grandfathered rates to past tenants. There is no more such thing as market correction anymore, only displacement. Just a simple look at inflation adjusted year-of-year wages since the 1980's will show you recessions and market corrections disportionately effect the poor, and there is no hope or chance of regression, it's too late now, only a world financial collapse can adjust inequality at this point.
Sorry for being so Keynesian, but it's the damn truth.
Sorry, but your rambling anti-economics rant doesn't prove anything. I'm sorry for whatever an economist did to you.
> JimmySuperstore's market won't bare price hike, so they'll just make that money up by offshoring and avoiding taxes thereby sticking it to the market anyways
In an open market, reorganizing operations and increasing tax efficiencies is exactly what Economics 101 would predict.
> my apartment raises rent 20% in 4 years (illegally) and when caught and fined, just decided to demolition the entrie building so they could gentrify all the people who couldn't 'bare' their prices, and rebuild so they wouldn't be legally required to pay grandfathered rates to past tenants.
Thanks for reminding me of the inefficiencies which non-free markets (rent control) cause. Literally everything in your story is explained by economics 101.
> Just a simple look at inflation adjusted year-of-year wages since the 1980's will show you recessions and market corrections disportionately effect the poor
Again, economics 101 is fully in accordance with that. Changes happen at the margins, so of course those who are marginally employed (ie. the poor) experience the majority of recessionary setbacks.
> a world financial collapse can adjust inequality at this point
A world financial collapse would indeed adjust inequality, but only in the sense that we'd all become poor. I hope (but increasingly doubt) that we can reach political compromises before then.
> Sorry for being so Keynesian, but it's the damn truth.
I'm a Keynesian as well... Keynes didn't reject economics, he just added to it.
> doing otherwise would be an inefficiency in operations which would drive up the already high cost of education.
The biggest source of inefficiency is the bloated administration. In his most recent article, Accountability in the Ontario Ivory Towers, he does some estimates on how much the teaching budget (which is a tiny few percent of the total budget) would change if lecturers got fair pay.
> The biggest source of inefficiency is the bloated administration.
I agree that the administration is probably unnecessarily bloated, but it's also important to remember that incentives and economic preferences are also the cause of that.
I don't see anything in the article to suggest this is exploitation (see my response to girvo). He is choosing to work in a low wage job because it offers him flexible hours.
I hold public institutions to the same standard of efficiency in accomplishing their goals a private ones (mainly, not paying people extra for no reason). The only difference is that their goals are public, not private.
The University already has permanent positions (lecturer/instructor) defined in their salary structure. Which are relatively well paid and have the same workload that I do now. But they are pretending that my job is a rolling "temp" position, because it's cheap and they can get away with it. That's the bottom line. And they have to be stopped getting away with it. That's why I wrote the article. And I have overwhelming support from present and former students too.
Paying above market wages doesn't make magic flow to the employee.
First, if the market wage is 30K and you pay 50K, that's handing 20K of surplus to the person who assigns jobs. Find that person, kickback 10K to him, get the job. (But we could always fix this with yet-another layer of administration, right?)
Second, if someone is paid over market and loses their job, they will be unprepared for the job market.
I work as a contact teacher for a local college (on top of my full time job) and it's sort of absurd the way they pay you. I get paid for 3 hours during lectures (60/hr), but not for any of the work I do outside of the school (marking, creating lectures, creating assignments)
I have realized that I should be payed way more and I'm having serious doubts of continuing to teach given the pay. The only reason I'm actually teaching is because it looks good on a resume and I want to improve my presentation skills.
For context, when I worked as an education consultant for a corporation, I would bill 1 week of work for preparation, 1 day for the session (if it was a day long) and then 1 day for review and reconciliation.
It's ridiculous how little educators in a UNIVERSITY get compensated. I'm glad I got out of that environment early.
My father works as an engineering consultant for major oil companies, and he has the same deal. He charges the companies for every hour he spends preparing for the presentation, so the actual presentation can be less than 10% of the invoiced amount.
If you look at what tenure track professors do, it's the same thing. They'll spend hours working on their lecture notes that they get paid for (admittedly, most TT professors work 80 hour weeks). Not paying instructors to prepare for class only guarantees that they'll under prepare.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadWhile the contract teaching situation seems pretty bad, this guy seems unreasonable here.
It doesn't change the context that the instructor isn't being paid to do it - he says he's already spent more time on the course than contracted. From his point of view, it's not an unreasonable request that he should not spent more of his (insufficiently remunerated) time on even small issues.
> and would be understandably pissed off if I was given no opportunity to collect an exam I'd taken.
But does that make it reasonable to blame a guy who's not paid to help you for not helping you?
I do understand the nature of your point, but I don't think any of the original argument is actually affected by the size of the task he's refusing to do.
I do see why you argue this way, and I might agree except that I also would give weighting to the moral point he's making. Staff like this are systematically exploited, and working to contract is a classic way to try to demonstrate why they should be better supported - it's a direct attempt to make a larger point, not just a random choice to annoy a few students.
That being said, he does owe his students the chance to at least look at the culmination of their semester's work. I know at my university, professors are obligated to have exams available for at least a year past the date they were taken! Maybe if allowing students to look at their exams would truly take an additional 75 hours of his time as claimed, he'd have a stronger case, but that's simply not true. If the student was requesting him to explain why a problem was wrong, or engage with this exam in anyway, I'd be completely in agreement. Hell, he could just put them all in a box outside his door, or maybe leave them with the departmental secretary (this happens all the time), or come up with some sort of solution.
His broader point still stands, but this is absolutely part of the responsibilities of a teacher, and I can't get behind this guy making a point at the expense of his students.
The thing is, he is already well over the budgeted hours. Sure this is a small thing, but there were probably a whole heap of other little things in the previous 50 hours he put in where he made things better for students. The line has to be drawn somewhere.
I feel for the student, but a workers' rights are more important to me. If I were in the students position I would be pissed, but not at the professor but at the institution. The same way I don't get mad at conductors going on strike because of poor working conditions even if I have already bought a ticket.
The 75 hours was also in reference to allowing every student to do the same (you either allow all students to have a look, or none), and I can tell from experience that it will end up taking quite a bit of time. Most students mean "could you go over the exam with me" when they ask to review their exam. Just having them glance at the red markings will generally not do them much good anyway. And putting them in a box for pick-up (while also being more unpaid work) is generally not allowed in my opinion. The university holds on to the exams for administrative purposes, meaning he would have to supply photocopies instead.
(Source: TAing and TAing friends)
He was unwilling to comply, not unable.
Supply and demand is a thing.
I can't comment on employment elsewhere on the continent, but in Pennsylvania (US) there is a severe shortage of AP Physics, AP Chemistry and Calculus teachers. You could easily land a full-time job at a high-school here.
I was on a similar path about 4 years ago- 2 years into a PhD, preparing myself for a career in academia devoted to the two intellectual loves of my life: computer science research and teaching. And then I saw my older lab mates on the verge of graduation, struggling to get a decent offer that wasn't halfway around the world. I saw post docs in my lab, who had been working hard for years for very little pay and no prospect of "tenure track" anytime soon.
What did I do? I left for startup landia, where a company was willing to pay me 3x more than I could have made as a post doc 5 years later (and many times more what I made as a grad student). Now I work in R&D at a large company, paid way more than even a tenured professor (and I'm not even considered senior yet). The research is different, but just as gratifying at the end of the day. And I get to teach by volunteering for a non profit over the weekends.
Does it suck that I had to leave academia for a comfortable life? Absolutely. I wish I could have been a professor. But you have to vote with your feet, because as long as you accept the conditions imposed by the university, well nothing's going to change- why would they? Writing blog posts and sending ranty emails to students (who probably don't give a shit) isn't going to change much at all.
If you want to have an impact, quit your job and go somewhere else. Right now universities can afford to pay professors (ie the only ones doing real work) like shit and give great bonuses to administrators because professors are okay with this. Yes, that's right: you might be writing a blog post saying how upset you are, but at the end of the day, if you're employed by them then you agree with them. Things will change if enough professors quit and universities have to offer better pays to get quality teachers; but as long as that doesn't happen, things won't change.
The market will pay for jobs at their replacement cost. If a stream of aspiring professors are willing to work for near poverty wages, with the occasional complaint, that is what they'll get. Why would the administration pay more?
(If a gas station starts charging $10/gallon, you get your supplies from another. Even if gas provides tremendous value to you, and you internally value it at $100/gal. Only if fuel isn't available elsewhere do you pay the higher cost.)
This guy unfortunately has a bad bargaining position because (i) there are a lot of people to replace him, and (ii) most of them come from the third world so the opportunity to live in Canada and get paid $34,000 in loonies looks great to them.
(The other area of academia that is this bad is biotech, where you can spend as long as you like in postdocs, but getting to a tenured position is unlikely)
At this point, having just completed my Cognitive Science minor, I determined that the entire system of academia used avoidance of cognitive dissonance as one of its foundation stones. People become academics because they have already invested a colossal amount of effort into becoming an academic, and endured painful hardship in doing so. To turn their backs upon it would be to admit to themselves that they wasted a good portion of the best years of their lives on a fool's errand. Most people can't bring themselves to do that without the help of some major psychedelics.
Whenever I feel a twinge of regret, I select a random university, check their job postings and pay scales, and discover that they pay half what I currently earn for jobs with quadruple the responsibilities and equal or greater amounts of administrative hoop-jumping.
Teaching jobs pay peanuts because too many people are willing to do the work for peanuts. Do not trust your professors. They have a vested interest in creating clueless underlings who can take their place as they claw their way upwards.
If it is your passion to teach, use the extra money and leisure time you will have with a non-academic job to create a series of videos, and post them on the network.
They key may be to fake hatred for your work.
Industry R&D also has its pitfalls. The primary metric in most industry R&D labs (Microsoft, Mitsubishi ERL, etc. are the known exceptions) is $s, and there are more stakeholders in getting $s (customers, managerial caprice, etc.) than in publishing a paper or 'winning' a grant (which are usually the metrics in academia).
Don't fight uphill on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Imagine what a rich idealistic kid wants to do with his life. Stay away from those professions unless you are also financially independent.
Since he doesn't, all I can assume is that he values the intangibles of teaching enough that it makes up for the incredibly low salary.
"And then we get to the “Why doesn’t he quit and get a proper job?” people. The answer is, I’m 52 years old. There aren’t that many job opportunities coming my way. Have you tried getting a job in Ottawa these days? And I can’t move elsewhere. My younger son is in a fabulous Special Needs School here in Ottawa, with wonderful teachers, we have the specialist doctors at the Children’s Hospital, and a pool of wonderfully talented therapists to work with him. He needs to be here, and so I need to be here in Ottawa. He needs round the clock attention, so I need flexible working hours, which University teaching gives me."
[0] https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to-conclusions-4044...
This isn't going to get better if you're willing to keep doing this job at that wage. You really need to walk away.
Apparently that's not the case at Carleton.
It's the flip side of the big companies complaining about a skills shortage and advocating for increased immigration. Yeah, it's hard to hire an engineer in Silicon Valley for peanuts. But there's no god given right to be able to hire cheap labour, and if you really want to hire someone, pay the market rate, or stop whining about it.
I'm also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying "I'm not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for". That wouldn't fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn't being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.
Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He's doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.
Ultimately, there's only so many teaching slots available, and there's a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms. Doubling the salary won't increase the number of teaching slots available (more likely decrease it), and it won't decrease the number of Phd grads looking to teach (it would absolutely increase it). Academia is already a lottery where the many chase the tiny number of tenure slots; does making the competition even fiercer and more Darwinian help improve the fairness?
This is another problem produced by academic exploitation. Ph.D. students are produced 10-to-1 relative to tenure track jobs. Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year.
The answer is that grad students, like adjuncts, free the professors from the most onerous aspect of teaching classes: doing all the grading. In exchange for tuition and stipend, grad students have to serve as TAs once or twice a year (in some departments they can also take positions as Research Assistants or as administrators for undergrad programs). Some grad students will get the opportunity to sole-teach their own seminars. Because professors do not want to teach, and want to focus entirely on their personal research program and publications, having an excess of grad students around to grade, guest lecture, and fill out the course offerings every semester is worth the $25-$35,000 annual stipend (about the same that the adjunct professor writing this article makes).
You're right that universities don't have to offer any more than $35,000 + shitty benefits + no job security, because the adjuncts and grad students will still take the opportunity believing that it might turn into an opportunity to move up into the professoriate if they just work hard enough or if their next publication is just a little more brilliant. Doesn't change the fact that it's still a cynical and hypocritical exploitation of the "intellectual reserve army of labor" (to paraphrase Marx). Universities are some of the most leftist institutions in North America, but the professoriate and deanery are perfectly fine with naked exploitation both on the supply side (grad students) and the demand side (adjuncts).
If departments need graders, they should hire masters students rather than admit Ph.D. students and then cynically consume 5–10 years of their life. If departments need teachers to supplement their researchers, they should create a position distinct from tenure-track professor/reader, perhaps "lecturer," but that is not "part-time"/contract work and is compensated appropriately.
In my field, no competent grad student paid tuition, and it wasn't a meaningful measure of value or cost. Nobody would have accepted an offer from a grad program that didn't provide a full ride. So tuition was basically funny money, like a "list price" that is always discounted.
My research work brought in enough grant money to pay for my stipend plus equipment and other expenses. If anybody was taking a loss, it was the National Science Foundation.
Tuition begins to matter when students lose funding. Then it's no longer "funny money." According to the Ph.D. completion project, between 50–60% of students that enter a Ph.D. program finish it by the 10 year mark: http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/book1_quant.asp
Most programs guarantee funding only through the first 4–6 years. Some programs make students compete against one another for quasi-guaranteed funding after a certain point.
A substantial minority of graduate students are either going to quit the program with only a masters degree to show for it or are going to end up paying tuition. Usually they can reduce the amount of tuition paid by enrolling as a "non-resident student" or something similar. But the tuition rate (and how long they will cover tuition) isn't something that can be brushed aside, either by students managing their finances, or by departments assessing their budgets.
Also, are you saying some PhD's take 10 years to complete, not including undergrad/masters? My understanding was a PhD on its own was typically a 3-6 year endeavour. I know it's a difficult project to manage but 10 years seems long.
When I was applying for grad school I got a letter offering admission from some school that basically said: "we'll pay you $20k in stipend, plus tuition is $40k, so really this offer is worth $60k".
I think they may have added another couple thousand for health insurance as well.
(said a fellow grad-student)
If you were very cynical, you could try and consider the RoI on a stipend from the point of view of the administration. It's one of the most abusive and exploitive things you'll find outside of a North Korean prison camp.
The problem is that you learn this about 6 years too late, and transitioning to a job where you're actually valued will set you back even further.
This was in science departments. In departments that had few or no "general ed" courses, such as engineering, and thus little need for TA's, the graduation rate was much higher.
Well, largely because the PhD students don't just do the teaching work, they do the research, too! Professors are often stuck as something more like a manager these days, which means that even the "winners" of the academic rat-race don't really get what they actually wanted: to do research full-time with a secure salary.
No.
Yes, he might be "part of the problem" but it's not like he can choose not to be without starving. Nor can other professors. Perhaps with union help, but they don't seem to help. I don't see how blame slinging helps here at all.
It's shameful. But I'm sure we'll get the educated populace that that rate will deserve.
And the issue is well-known and has been for years. I wrote about it from the humanities side here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befor... , though to be fair I didn't entirely appreciate just how bad the situation is until I began looking at the MLA jobs list.
Perhaps not surprisingly I didn't pursue academia and am primarily a grant writing consultant.
But there is a bigger context here. One is that the market pays him for 225 hours, then expects him to work 280 hours to do the core of the job, and if he wants to do his job properly he'd need to push it up even further to 300. If you want employees to appreciate the cold facts that the market doesn't value them, you should appreciate that employers accept the cold fact that they can't expect an employee to put in 30% more hours completely unpaid. That's not reasonable.
Now you could argue about that for SMEs. Your local cornerstore can't afford to give a full contract to one of its employees because it struggles? Alright. But this is a university with a $200m endowment in an industry where revenues have far, far outpaced the CPI and where class sizes have increased, too. The notion that they can't pay a highly qualified individual with 10 years of experience and excellent ratings for the 300 hours to do his job is ridiculous.
Now you can argue that he accepts a crap job and that the market keeps the wages down. That's all fine. We don't award PhDs more money than street cleaners because we respect them more, but because they're harder to get and in demand and therefore more expensive. And if this is no longer the case, I appreciate you can make the case they don't deserve $100k salaries, sure.
But it's not his argument. His argument is that he gets no worker's rights because of loopholes. No pension or unemployment protection, because the way they define his job, even though it's no different from another job title that does get those benefits. His argument is not that $30 an hour for 225 hours in a course is too little money, it's that they hire him for a 300 hour job and pay him only 225 hours. That has nothing to do with 'it's fine because it's what the market says'. That's just screwing with your employees and being able to get away with it because the market allows it. Pay him for the 300 hours that it takes to do the job right and award him the same worker's rights we have all come to expect in a civilized society that is market driven, but enforces some basic principles when the market doesn't naturally award them, like building up a pension or getting protection for when you lose your job. If that means cuts in his hourly wage to what he effectively gets now ($17 USD), that sucks but it's transparent, it's a signal to the 200 students in his classroom that says 'you're paying a shit ton and this is what the current market offers'.
That having been said, I appreciate your point on market forces and it's exactly blog posts like these that can affect them. To limit the amount of supply of new PhDs looking to get into teaching $60k jobs when they don't exist, you need communication like this. If anything let's applaud that.
As for your point on passing along the issue to those weaker than him... he he has no employment protection, combine that with the fact that he his multiple requests have already been denied, I'd say it's quite brave that he goes public with this, for one. But secondly, it's the way in which he least affects his students. i.e. if he, as you asked, decided to simply not show up to class to push his issue, that'd affect his students MUCH more in a way for which they have no real recourse and in a way that can really mess up their entire curriculum due to cascading effects. (e.g. fail a fall course because of issues with a lecturer or personal issues and you can't start your next course in the spring, and you can't redo the fall course in the spring either because it's only given in fall. So you have to wait an entire year before you're on track again. Stuff like this happened to my peers all the time in uni.)
The fact he continues teaching, continues putting in 280 h...
A student doesn't sign up to a professor to learn, they sign up to a school. It's the schools responsibility to ensure that the student is properly educated, not the individual professor's - they are employed by the school to achieve the school's aims.
passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.
I'm not sure we read the same article. The author talks about trying to resolve this himself several times. If the student feels short-changed, it's the school's problem, not the fixed-hours employee they hired. This is the whole problem he's trying to highlight, and he's making a stand and taking it public. The students aren't as weak as you suggest they are, not if they act together.
Doubling the salary... [won't change supply and demand]
It will, however, make the currently employed staff more willing to work extra hours to ensure their students get educated properly. The author also isn't looking for tenure, he's looking to be made an employee at something more appropriate in wage.
Considering this situation strictly as a labour market might be too simplistic, given the importance of teachers in students' life. (e.g. an inspirational teacher that makes you want to learn more about a subject)
At 30k/year, it's a little disrespectful. (Anecdote: I recently read about a high school student who asked "why should I respect my teachers if they only make 40k?"). If tenured profs make 70k, adjunct profs should make at least 50k. The way I see it, the market price for teachers is underpriced because teaching is far from a "crap job"---quite the contrary---it's one of the best jobs in the world. In fact, we could say the 20k difference in salary between what it should be and what it is, is partially caused from a "fun job" penalty. (Think of this as the opposite of "danger pay" where you get paid more because your job is less fun that normal.)
At 30k/year, colleges get a mix bag of teaching quality. Some teachers will care, some teachers will try to get by with as little effort as possible. If universities increase adjunct salaries to 50k, they'll attract more of the teachers who care. Where do you get the extra cash to give 67% raise to each adjunct prof? Fire some administrators.
I think increasing adjunct salaries is all win for the university: better teaching, less administrators (and therefore less forms to fill out!!!), happier students, and the continuing the relevance of the in-person lecture-based teaching model (for lecture with < 50 students it becomes practical to interrupt the teacher when there is something you don't understand, how cool is that?).
The interesting issues at hand are the cultural factors of academia that cause so many highly qualified people to work for such astoundingly little money. Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of 'higher learning', not unlike a cult? Are those self-issued 'high qualifications' not actually as valuable as they are pretended to be? Those are the interesting questions rather than just going "hurr durr supply and demand".
Not like the supply-and-demand argument excuses anything, either. The entire history of labor protections is that previous practices that the market would bear were deemed socially unjust and no longer permitted, even if you could still find people desperate enough to agree to them. Saying "you took the job; don't complain" simply isn't valid.
Prof Robinson has to 'accept' the university's offer because the alternative is starvation and homelessness.
The university believes - wrongly, as it happens - that people like Prof Robinson are easy to replace. So it sees no need to treat him any better.
If he tries to argue for a fair rate, he's arguing as someone from an inferior position of power and status with 'rational actors' who don't understand the consequences of their actions.
In this case the consequences are poor teaching, and - in the medium term - the replacement of an overly greedy university system with something that offers better value for students.
I'm sure the admins are patting themselves on the back for putting Prof Robinson in his place.
They won't be so happy when everyone - including the student body - has moved elsewhere.
>Are bright young people being indoctrinated with a sense of personal sacrifice for the cause of 'higher learning', not unlike a cult?
No, bright people are being indoctrinated in business and econ classes with the idea that you should make a fast buck however you can. Social transactions can only be valued financially. Nothing else matters.
Those are the real cult victims. As is Prof Robinson, who is one of many talented individual dealing with the consequences of that particular brand of kookiness.
This is not rhetoric. These toxic attitudes exist because they've been heavily promoted. They didn't just happen.
Are you using "wrongly" in the sense of "what they're doing is wrong" or "their belief is incorrect"? Because the latter is absolutely not true. There is a near endless supply of freshly-minted PhDs willing the take the author's place.
However in your argument, with plenty of PhDs available the chances of finding another Prof Robinson should not be impossible. We can always find traits of teachers we like and dismiss others for similarly arbitrary reasons, the issue being how do you make this work for hiring decisions. One person's dream candidate may not even rate for another
I guess we learnt this was not a human reply in the XIX century.
And when you're not looking or listening, they turn right around and pay people exactly what the market will bear and pocket the difference. (At least, to your way of thinking. That's not really the best way to think of it, but for rhetorical purposes I'll accept your way for the sake of argument here.)
I feel genuinely bad for this person, who sounds very good at what is actually a very hard job that even a "mere" Physics PhD is not adequate qualification for (evidence: many of them still suck at teaching physics).
But I still can't help but read the complaints about the coldness of capitalism here with a bit of a raised eyebrow. This is a University. No excuses! If there's any entity anywhere that ought to be paying what the professor "the right price" without reference to "cold" market facts right now, with no prompting, no public campaign, just doing it, it's a University. Stop talking and show me how much better your way is than capitalism... but, oh, wait, it's apparently just raw capitalism with a wafer-thin moralistic sheen drawn over it.
And no, there's nothing even remotely exceptional about this one case. We've had a stream of articles on HN that establish how this is absolutely the norm across the board, so no escape out that hatch.
Perhaps those of you who have gotten your ideas about capitalism that ultimately source from the University system ought to reconsider whether your source is that reliable, if they can't put their own ideas into action.
Well no. The real fault lies with the idiots in government who were somehow (coughcough lobbying coughcough university-industrial-state complex coughcough) convinced to classify all academic faculty as overtime-exempt in the labor regulations, even the part-time ones who are paid for piece-work.
With the exception of a few pernicious fields like that, society has long-since considered piece-work pay sufficiently unethical to be made illegal, requiring either fixed salaries for variable professional workloads or hourly wages that account for all hours actually worked, including overtime beyond 40 hours.
That's the standard, and there's no reason academia should be exempt.
Quite the opposite. The problem is that there already too many assholes who make it their sole mission in life to maximize their monetary inflow. But the fact of the matter is that this world keeps running because millions are prepared to do their part for a very modest fee.
You are wrong, then. The fiction the university maintains is that he is only being paid for the hours he does in class, plus a certain number of marking hours, which have been exhausted. What you're describing is called a "salaried position".
Let's do the math for the last lecture I taught. 30 students pay about 900 each to take my class. That's 27K. But I also know half of the school's budget comes from the province (ie government support). So let's double that to say 50K, of which I take home 4 ... 8% to the instructor and the rest to the admins.
I think the real issue is the larger move towards academic admin as a separate profession from teaching. None of my four bosses have ever taught a class. Law schools are probably the last vestige of the old system whereby most admins are senior profs, not professional administrators.
Are you sure it's 50%? Back when i was in university in Canada the gov't paid 80% of the tuition.
Although I've always enjoyed and understood physics (to my own share) before, the way he taught it all of a sudden made everything much more clear. I could see the connections between each concept and the next.
To be able to teach this well, indeed requires a lot of experience; and as much hard work and passion; and Andrew does/has all of that, despite all these issues.
> I would like to give my students the very best learning experience that I possibly can.
I could't agree more. Not only is he knowledgeable, but he's also great at conveying it.
I'm writing this comment in a hurry but I really felt I had to write it. I'll write a follow up in near future; and I'll try to explain the situtation from a student's point of view too. All I can say right now is that this is not what he (and many other Contract Instructors) deserves.
If you ever read this, Andrew, I'd like to thank you again for all you've done for me, and many others. Please keep aspiring and inspiring us.
I have tried to have my job turned into a permanent one. The University has turned me down, and told me that giving me a permanent job is against “the strategic direction of the University, Faculty of Science and the Department”. The permanent faculty in the department will not support me because I am a teacher now, not an active scientific researcher.
The University, above anything is a place to teach. Yes, research is important, but above anything a place to teach. Striking the right teaching/research balance, specially in the sciences is difficult. But in my opinion most of the university budgets should go to teaching, and research should be secondary.
If lack of public funding is really the issue for not paying teachers, in my opinion, it's then when public universities should think like private institutons. Sure you can't compete with endowments like Hardvard, MIT or Stanford, but I think that the future of higher education is by finding the right private sector partners to carry out research.
Educational institutions of all levels bloat themselves with overpaid administration. If funding is an issue that is the first place they should look to cut.
1: http://carleton.ca/studentaccounts/tuition-fees/fw-ug/fallwi...
Dean, department head and provostial positions are heavily weighted toward highly successful researchers who have effectively "retired" into administration and seem not to consider teaching to be one of the university's core functions.
It's easier to convince these people to hire another janitor @ $70k/year than to give a contract teacher a full-time job at the same salary since to them bringing non-researchers into the ranks of permanent faculty is equivalent to letting the barbarians into Rome.
"In fact the response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone, except regular faculty. Not one message of support from anyone in a tenured position, in Physics or any other department. The status quo has considerable appeal when you are in the position of privilege."
And to all those people saying walk away - that's the easy thing to do. The right thing to do is stand up and say "This is wrong" - not just for me, but for lots of other University teachers.
This guy is getting screwed, and the Canadian taxpayers are getting screwed, so that employers do not have to pay for their employees to go to college or get other training (or factor it into their salaries to cover student loan debt if they already have a degree).
I hope this guy shrugs and gets a better job.
This treatment, for this skill, commitment, experience and education, is terrible. But it's enabled by all the people who hire in. Stop doing that, you're more than capable of doing something that society values. And no, society doesn't value teaching, or they'd pay you. What they value is poverty rates.
And if schools and universities "solve" the problem by hiring whatever the educational equivalent of an H1-B is, then they're just restating their position: we don't value quality teaching, not enough to pay a fair rate.
Don't teach.
All of human progress up this point can be wiped out in a generation if it's not passed on to the new individuals in the world.
Seriously, how is this good advice? If anything we should be encouraging more people to teach their knowledge and to get people interested in learning. Instead of shutting everything down, how about we figure out how to make things better?
This seems awfully silly, especially with the cost of education having outpaced CPI by a wide margin for the past what, 3-4 decades while classroom sizes ballooned to 200.
"CEO wages" have also out-paced the CPI. I'm sure the administration isn't paying themselves a pittance (and that in a budget crisis their salaries are the last on the chopping block)...
I strongly suggest this person start looking for jobs in industry. Once a convenient opportunity comes along to stop offering him work, the admins will do so.
If he wants to continue teaching, I suggest he use one of the online services that will actually pay him well if he can teach a difficult course well.
Take up a job somewhere else, and teach the way Salman Khan of Khan Academy started teaching. Just start teaching on YouTube and helping students on Skype. Your paid job should sustain you.
Using your skills, you should be able to get a 9-5 job somewhere that pays you better than what you are getting paid now, which should leave 15-20 hours for your teaching side project.
I started teaching programming to a few people in this way, while I was employed in another (non-programming) profession.
Teaching is more rewarding when you don't have to follow someone else's rules and curriculum.
Or what if equipment required to perform the teaching is extremely expensive, like lab equipment, telescopes, etc.
While the DIY approach is nice if you're doing something that doesn't have many unique/expensive prerequisites (beyond internet access and a computer), there's a whole lot of stuff out there that needs real hands on instruction using expensive gear.
Advice for those considering this path in science/tech - learn to write code on the side. Pick something mainstream that will be around for a while, and which you can tap for a sideline. Develop deep expertise, spend as much time continually educating yourself as you do for others.
"Learn to code in order to generate side income" isn't as simple as it sounds. I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.
At some levels, college is a popularity contest to get the best credential. At other levels, college really is about learning the necessary skills to enter the work force.
Is government and self-regulation of education really such an incredible barrier to entry that new entrants can't offer better deals to the best teachers and still compete?
Edit: I am seriously considering getting together with 10 other parents I know, and we can just collectively pay someone like this to teach our kids all day. He could teach a class of 10 kids for a year, earn 3x as much, and we would still be paying less than half what the private school down the street costs.
And to tell you the truth, I've often flirted with a similar idea to the one you mentioned at the end. That, along with plain home-schooling. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a "startup" that disrupts the current teaching ecosystem. It can simply be a bunch of parents buckling-down and doing what they think is best for their children.
Hopefully they don't make home-schooling illegal, as I've noticed it occurring in a few places. That would make it impossibly to change the status-quo without breaking the law.
I think it's a very exciting model. A small private co-op of like-minded parents with 10-15 like-aged children, hiring a single truly excellent teacher, and paying them about $100k per year, while supplementing with access to public school resources in the local town to which they are entitled for extra-curricular and filler classes.
The "classroom" would float between public areas like libraries, parks, museums, and local areas of interest, and rooms made available in the parents' residences.
I think the model is particularly attractive K-8. I guess the only problem is the kids would be so far ahead by 9th grade they would have to go straight to college rather than high school. :-/
In the US. In some (many? most?) European countries homeschooling is illegal. They believe that anyone who wants to homeschool is an abusive parent who wants to keep/hide their child from the public, or wants to teach them strange things.
I have argued with some people from countries like this was absolutely astonished at how they defended this outrage. They absolutely refused to believe that parents might choose this because (if the parents are able to do it) academically it's clearly better.
People with an excess of intelligence/time/resources who choose to homeschool their children because they're dissatisfied with the rigor of their academic program are very much the exception to the rule. Read up on the experiences of such people when they try to locate a homeschooling group without religious instruction.
It is not however the reality, despite how much Europe wants to believe it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...
> AFAIK it's legal everywhere.
Actually it's illegal (in Europe) more often than it's legal.
Hypothetical scenario: it is not illegal to do your own electrical wiring in a house. However, the electrical company will only allow you to connect to their networks if your cabling is done by certified electrician. You can team up with some people in your area, build a power plant and happily run your own cabling. It's not illegal, so why complain?
So totally different from "just learning on your own".
http://abcnews.go.com/US/home-schooling-german-family-allowe...
Can't vouch for the linked article, it was jut the first search hit.
[this combination is something that gets me on ragetilt quickly whenever I think about it even though I think our school system is generally pretty good/underrated]
In countries that allow such things there are plenty of private college "startups" and they are almost universally awful. There is more money to be made churning out hordes of poorly trained students than there is in properly training them.
In fact, as a taxpayer and student I would be upset if my university unilaterally chose to pay more than the market would bear. So long as highly-educated individuals will accept reaching jobs for $34,000 a year, that is precisely what we should continue to pay them—doing otherwise would be an inefficiency in operations which would drive up the already high cost of education.
Unfortunately, even in his follow up he fails to acknowledge that market realities are the cause of his fate: https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to-conclusions-4044...
I think that sort of behaviour is abhorrent, and frankly anyone who defends that strikes me as a "fuck you, I've got mine" kind of person. I make far more than this person does, and I can make the trade-off to do contract work for higher pay. His trade off is "contract" work for lower pay than the full timers with more than full time work load, and he doesn't get to trade higher job security for lower pay like we do.
He's being exploited and has the worst of all worlds, and he's teaching the next generation of this world, and you're sitting here saying he gets what he deserves? You've got to be kidding me.
If you read his follow up, he admits that he's explicitly choosing this job for personal reasons (flexible hours allow for him to provide parental care).
When there is a long queue of people who would love to take your job, I just don't see how you can call it exploitation. He's not being manipulated; he's just accepting the low pay as a tradeoff for flexible hours.
I suppose you could maybe argue that there's a positive externality to his employment which the market doesn't capture (note: this would be separate from the positive externalities of education, which is already subsidized), but I'm skeptical. There's a long queue of people who would love even his marginal academic job.
Obviously, I do feel sorry for the guy. I'd never want to be in his situation myself, but I also feel he should admit his own agency in getting himself into it (hopefully helping to tear down the glorification of academic jobs in the meantime). Moreover, most of my sympathy tends to go to people in genuinely exploitive and helpless conditions (ex. children born into poverty; women in tyranical underdeveloped countries, etc.).
Sorry for being so Keynesian, but it's the damn truth.
> JimmySuperstore's market won't bare price hike, so they'll just make that money up by offshoring and avoiding taxes thereby sticking it to the market anyways
In an open market, reorganizing operations and increasing tax efficiencies is exactly what Economics 101 would predict.
> my apartment raises rent 20% in 4 years (illegally) and when caught and fined, just decided to demolition the entrie building so they could gentrify all the people who couldn't 'bare' their prices, and rebuild so they wouldn't be legally required to pay grandfathered rates to past tenants.
Thanks for reminding me of the inefficiencies which non-free markets (rent control) cause. Literally everything in your story is explained by economics 101.
> Just a simple look at inflation adjusted year-of-year wages since the 1980's will show you recessions and market corrections disportionately effect the poor
Again, economics 101 is fully in accordance with that. Changes happen at the margins, so of course those who are marginally employed (ie. the poor) experience the majority of recessionary setbacks.
> a world financial collapse can adjust inequality at this point
A world financial collapse would indeed adjust inequality, but only in the sense that we'd all become poor. I hope (but increasingly doubt) that we can reach political compromises before then.
> Sorry for being so Keynesian, but it's the damn truth.
I'm a Keynesian as well... Keynes didn't reject economics, he just added to it.
The biggest source of inefficiency is the bloated administration. In his most recent article, Accountability in the Ontario Ivory Towers, he does some estimates on how much the teaching budget (which is a tiny few percent of the total budget) would change if lecturers got fair pay.
I agree that the administration is probably unnecessarily bloated, but it's also important to remember that incentives and economic preferences are also the cause of that.
Why would you be upset that a public institution decided to behave humanely rather than exploitatively?
I hold public institutions to the same standard of efficiency in accomplishing their goals a private ones (mainly, not paying people extra for no reason). The only difference is that their goals are public, not private.
First, if the market wage is 30K and you pay 50K, that's handing 20K of surplus to the person who assigns jobs. Find that person, kickback 10K to him, get the job. (But we could always fix this with yet-another layer of administration, right?)
Second, if someone is paid over market and loses their job, they will be unprepared for the job market.
I have realized that I should be payed way more and I'm having serious doubts of continuing to teach given the pay. The only reason I'm actually teaching is because it looks good on a resume and I want to improve my presentation skills.
Note:
I also teach in Canada.
It's ridiculous how little educators in a UNIVERSITY get compensated. I'm glad I got out of that environment early.
If you look at what tenure track professors do, it's the same thing. They'll spend hours working on their lecture notes that they get paid for (admittedly, most TT professors work 80 hour weeks). Not paying instructors to prepare for class only guarantees that they'll under prepare.