Why Sanders’s College Plan Is Horrible, Part II

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Clarissa

April 26, 2016

Here is the worst part of the Sanders plan, however:

The plan Sanders proposed in Congress calls for providing “an assurance that not later than five years after the date of enactment of this act, not less than 75 percent of instruction at public institutions of higher education in the state is provided by tenured or tenure-track faculty.”

What is the meaning of tenure? Why is it needed? Tenure exists so that people who generate ideas are not punished for advancing new knowledge and demolishing old certainties. Today’s Galileos should not be persecuted for saying that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

In the past 30 years, higher education stopped being limited to the elites. Today, more and more students from non-elite backgrounds enter institutions of higher education. They haven’t attended fancy private high schools and need quite a bit of remediation before they are ready to take higher-level college courses. This is why there is an explosive growth in non-tenured and part-time educators who teach Beginners Spanish, Calculus I, English Composition 101, etc. These people do crucial work. Still, the idea of giving them tenure cannot be justified. If they are not generating new knowledge that might disturb old certainties, what is the justification for giving them tenure? There is none.

What these workers need instead is a union. They need to be unionized, get a good contract, serious benefits, decent salary, and respectable working conditions. Tenure, for them, entirely misses the point. Instead of benefits and a contract, we’d be giving them a promise that they will be protected from firing in case they anger the academic or administrative authorities with the research they don’t really do? That’s insane!

Do you know who employs research scholars and refuses to give them tenure? No, it’s not a community college or a public university like mine. Harvard and Yale do this shit. Once again, Bernie’s plan assumes that everybody is Yale and tries to cure Yale’s ills on the body of completely different schools. This is what happens when people try to micromanage fields they are not familiar with.

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5 responses to “Why Sanders’s College Plan Is Horrible, Part II”

Vic Crain

April 27, 2016

Clarissa, adjuncts at for-profit colleges are in a far worse state than are adjuncts at Ivy schools. (I have experienced both.) The adjunct at a for-profit can get as little as $100 per hour of class time, nothing for time meeting students or prep. Teaching four classes each meeting for 3 hours per week would get $1,200 per week pretax. Grad students in engineering at Princeton knock down stipends of $40,000 with a lot less in terms of required TA time.

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1. Joe
  
  June 21, 2016
  “The adjunct at a for-profit can get as little as $100 per hour of class time, nothing for time meeting students or prep. Teaching four classes each meeting for 3 hours per week would get $1,200 per week pretax.”
  
  That sounds fantastic. I had no idea adjuncts have it so well.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    June 21, 2016
    
    I don’t make anything like $1,200 per week, and I’m a tenured professor. Besides, this is barely 20 hours of work per week when I do a full work feek without any weekends or vacations.
    
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    1. Joe
      
      June 21, 2016
      
      I always hear how adjuncts are impoverished and exploited and these numbers don’t sound very exploitative.
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        June 21, 2016
        
        I don’t know about the specific case Vic is dicsussing but here are my school’s numbers. Our adjuncts make about $4,000 per course. This means they have to be in the classroom 3 times a week for 50 minutes (or twice a week for 1 hour 15 minutes). That’s 2,5 hours a week total. Let’s add, say, 2,5 hours a week for office hours and (the very minimal) prep. That’s 5 hours a week for 15 weeks. That’s 75 hours total at $53 per hour. Given that this is a unionized job with great protections (of the kind that I don’t get, for instance) + zero research and service requirements, this is quite a good level of compensation.
        
        Besides, if we take into account that after teaching Spanish 101 for 20 years (or even 20 days), there is no actual prep for one to engage in, I’d say this is very easy, very well-compensated work. It leads absolutely nowhere professionally, but many people are perfectly fine with that because they have different priorities.
        
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