Poor Professors

~ Clarissa

There’s a huge drama online about a young woman who has an adjunct job at Columbia. She says she lives in poverty, and people are blowing a gasket because nobody understands how academia works.

Those adjunct jobs are miserable. They pay a little over $30,000 a year, and you never know if your contract will get extended. There’s no chance of career advancement, so you are stuck for life, chasing these crappy temporary gigs. Adjuncts often don’t even get office space and have to see students for office hours at coffee shops. They don’t live a life of the mind because they never find out it exists.

And what most people don’t know is that the more expensive a university is, the less likely it is that an undergraduate student will ever talk to a real professor and not be stuck with these itinerant, hassled, uninterested adjuncts with zero intellectual life. Pay for an Ivy, and get nothing but these Molly McGhees for your money because real professors prefer to teach graduate courses.

Only at a cheap school like mine you are guaranteed to take every course with a real professor.

So yeah, Molly McGhee probably is as indigent as she says. She also sounds extremely shallow with not a thought in her head beyond the usual woke sloganeering. This is what you get for $30,000 in New York with New York’s cost of living.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. You want a real education, create good working conditions for the professors. And if you are looking for a college for your kid, the #1 question to ask is what percentage of courses in the program you are interested in is taught by NTT (non-tenure-track) faculty. Or resign yourself to paying for bitter Molly McGhees.

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Published by Clarissa

17 thoughts on “Poor Professors”

  1. “Those adjunct jobs are miserable”

    They don’t have to be, university administrations have made the choice to make them miserable. It’s part of the de-skilling process.

    ” the #1 question to ask is what percentage of courses in the program you are interested in is taught by NTT (non-tenure-track) faculty”

    When I was an undergraduate a bunch of courses were de facto taught by graduate assistants… and I didn’t/wouldn’t complain. They were often better able to understand what undergraduates had problems with and how to address them while TT was often in its own little world regarding having to teach intro courses as demeaning… and/or were totally unable to relate to students in order to teach the basics…

    I remember dropping statistics (summer session) when it was being taught by regular faculty. Then when I retook it in the fall the ‘main’ course was 300-400 students crammed in an auditorium watching a video tape of tenured faculty… fortunately they had study sessions (15 or so students) taught be a GA and I was able to easily get through the course just going to those and I actually ended up enjoying it.

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    1. She now closed her Twitter account but not before posting a series of twitchy denunciations of “white supremacists.” The woman herself is very white, which makes the whole thing very sad.

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  3. Why would they keep working for the uni, though? My husband has a BA in literature. As soon as he figured out that wasn’t worth anything in the workplace, he did a 2-year vo-tech program at the local community college and immediately got a job that paid almost twice what this adjunct is making, with room for advancement, and we live in a place with a much lower cost of living.

    Like, what is chaining these people to crap jobs like that? They’re smart enough to have advanced degrees– surely they can do a quick licensing program and just get a better job? I’m pretty sure janitors make more, and get union protections too.

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    1. I knew it wasn’t an option for me, and I wasn’t going to consider such jobs. But the academic life is very addictive. Teaching, if you have the personality for it, gives you a near-narcotic high that you can’t find anywhere else. I know somebody who left an extremely lucrative job in the pharma industry to go into academia. It’s just so enjoyable that people can’t give it up. And there’s always a hope that you’ll win the lottery and become one of the tiny minority with tenure, full professorships, and the best quality of life a person with intellectual interests can hope for. It does look nuts from the outside but once you try it, it’s irresistible.

      The problem is that no society needs that many people who live to read and think. It needs some but not huge crowds. So the majority of people who play this game end up losing.

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      1. That’s completely nuts. It sounds like wannabe writers and actors, but worse. I mean, there are tons of people out there toiling away at their novels and going to tons of auditions and sleeping with directors and whatnot, but most of them realize they need a day job to support themselves while they wait for their big break. Are academics reality-impaired?

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      2. Thinking further on it, in Sayings of the Desert Fathers, there are repeated cautions against the desire to teach. The monks treat it as a vice to overcome– and not a minor one, either. That confused me when I read it.

        But your comment here begins to make sense of it.

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            1. I had a friend from Kenya in my youth who refused to go to certain clubs because she “hated the smell of black people.” I always remember this sad, embarrassing attitude whenever I see white people accusing others of “white supremacy” or curl their lip at “white people.”

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