Professors in Poverty

[Axulus]

Here's a thought. It is absurd that some folks who support their families by hard work on fish trawlers, welding, housing painting, cooking, garbage collecting, telemarketing, etc. should be paying taxes so as to promote the dreamy good life of some upper-middle class child aspiring to be well-paid academic.

When you send a fat check to every commoner with a dream, then get back to me.

Good point. I used to do the taxes for a professional fisherman who worked his ass off during the busy season. He also put himself at high risk (it's one of the most dangerous careers). He earned a reasonable ~$60-70k/year at the job. Why should he have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are oversupplied and comfortable and often come from privileged backgrounds can have more?

 

[Axulus]

but it is so much more fun to piss and moan about "evil liberal arts" than to discuss the fact that the people teaching the next generation are having to supplement their income with public relief.

It's not so much that "liberal arts" themselves are evil generally (although it can be argued parts of them are), but that way too many PhDs they graduate are "surplus to requirements".

Exactly. We need them in society, but when you have too many the marginal ones lose value quickly compared to PhDs in general.

The fatal flaw is to compare the average value of all of them combined to the marginal value of those who just barely qualified for the PhD and then say those marginal ones deserve more. The other perspective is that those marginal ones perhaps should've chosen something else.

 

[Axulus]

Hopefully this educational video will convince many wannabe adjunct professors to pursue a livelihood that society values more than adjunct professoring.

dismal, Margaret Thatcher once stated that there is no such thing as society. If she is so very wrong, then why have your ideological compatriots made her into such a great hero?

If a lot of people do what you want them to, do you promise not to whine about "labor shortages"?

This is also addressed to everybody else in this thread who has sneered at adjunct professors as losers and failures. If everybody gets what right-wingers consider the virtuous sort of degree, like a MBA or a degree in flnance or corporate law, and there's a glut of would-be business managers, financiers, and corporate lawyers, then do you promise not to say that it's their fault for reducing the pay of those professions by getting those degrees?

If the number of degrees for those professions goes way up, and the pay inevitably falls as a result, then it is their fault if they complain about it. If they are fine with that situation then no problem.

I don't consider the adjuncts losers or failures. That accusation only applies to those who consider the worth of a person to be the pay they receive. If they are happy with their situation that's fine. If they complain about it, they may be a loser for making a dumb choice that was clear ahead of time on what they were getting themselves into and what kind of pay they could expect.

Low pay discourages people from entering oversupplied fields. Distort that and you have even more people trying to enter the field, making the problem even worse.

 

[lpetrich]

I don't consider the adjuncts losers or failures. That accusation only applies to those who consider the worth of a person to be the pay they receive.

That's what all the capitalism groupies have been saying here and elsewhere. Like in Francisco d'Anconia's "money speech" in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Low pay discourages people from entering oversupplied fields. Distort that and you have even more people trying to enter the field, making the problem even worse.

So market failures never happen, I gather.

 

[lpetrich]

This is also addressed to everybody else in this thread who has sneered at adjunct professors as losers and failures. If everybody gets what right-wingers consider the virtuous sort of degree, like a MBA or a degree in flnance or corporate law, and there's a glut of would-be business managers, financiers, and corporate lawyers, then do you promise not to say that it's their fault for reducing the pay of those professions by getting those degrees?

If the number of degrees for those professions goes way up, and the pay inevitably falls as a result, then it is their fault if they complain about it.

But they were doing what they were supposed to do, to try to enter high-paying fields.

So why sneer at them for doing that?

 

[prideandfall]

I used to do the taxes for a professional fisherman who worked his ass off during the busy season. He also put himself at high risk (it's one of the most dangerous careers). He earned a reasonable ~$60-70k/year at the job. Why should he have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are oversupplied and comfortable and often come from privileged backgrounds can have more?

i'm 35, have never had so much as a pregnancy scare, and have a vasectomy which i test once or twice a year to make sure it hasn't randomly healed - why should i have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are too stupid to avoid shitting out a squalling bowl of crotch fruit so they can send the bastards to school?
why should i pay taxes to fund a military that doesn't give me subsidies when it invades another country?
why should i have to get car insurance when i've been driving for 15 years and have never had so much as a ding in a parking lot?

... because we live in a fucking society and propping up civilization comes part and parcel with the whole "not having to scavenge for food or get your head speared off by some hairy mongoloid who wants your womanflesh", that's why.

 

[Derec]

... because we live in a fucking society and propping up civilization comes part and parcel .

Which part of the social contract involves subsidizing an oversupply of liberal arts PhDs?

 

[Derec]

For Georgia Tech they are filed under "TEMPORARY FACULTY" and the vast majority of them made well under $40k.

But you can live for say $35k in Atlanta so they would make for poor sob stories. Also, how many of them worked only part of the year?

What do you think happens to the ~4500 adjuncts that made under twenty thousand dollars in 2014?

I would say most of them, if not all, would be in lib arts.

 

[prideandfall]

Which part of the social contract involves subsidizing an oversupply of liberal arts PhDs?

the same part that involves propping up a bunch of dickless gun nuts and/or religious fanatics.

 

[Derec]

Which part of the social contract involves subsidizing an oversupply of liberal arts PhDs?

the same part that involves propping up a bunch of dickless gun nuts

What? Armed EPA agents?

and/or religious fanatics.

Govenrment subsidies of religion are not a good thing either, come to mention it.

 

[beero1000]

But you can live for say $35k in Atlanta so they would make for poor sob stories. Also, how many of them worked only part of the year?

Boy, those pesky goalposts do tend to wander, don't they?

So what if you can technically live in Atlanta for $35k, when 99.3% of adjuncts employed by the state of Georgia make significantly less than that, and more than 90% don't even make half? You're the one who posted the Georgia website - the numbers are there for everyone to see.

What do you think happens to the ~4500 adjuncts that made under twenty thousand dollars in 2014?

I would say most of them, if not all, would be in lib arts.

You'd be wrong. Again. These 4500 adjuncts that made under $20k work at Georgia's technical colleges.

The very first 5 names on the "ADJUNCT FACULTY-APO" list, in alphabetical order:
ABDEL-HAFEZ,BRENDA D - Mathematics
ABNEY,LAURIE A - Health Information Technology
ABU-HALAWEH,NAEL MOHAMMED - Information Technology
ACHIONYE,JONATHAN - Physics
ACREE,COURTNEY N - Health Sciences

 

[Derec]

You'd be wrong. Again. These 4500 adjuncts that made under $20k work at Georgia's technical colleges.

Thanks for the emphasis. Technical colleges are not universities, they are basically vocational schools. I do not even think most people teaching there have PhDs.

The very first 5 names on the "ADJUNCT FACULTY-APO" list, in alphabetical order:
ABDEL-HAFEZ,BRENDA D - Mathematics

She is actually employed by a university, but the website lists her position not as "adjunct professor" but as "Instructor". This thread is about people who have formal qualifications to be professor, i.e. have a PhD degree, but are only employed as adjuncts and make very little. Her Linkedin account says she only has a Master's Degree in "Math Education", not even master's in real math. Thus, she does not qualify for the purposes of this thread. We also do not know what kind of courseload she took on.

ABNEY,LAURIE A - Health Information Technology

At $800 we can safely assume this was a side gig for her. She was also employed at a tech. college in the boonies, not at a university and we know nothing about her educational background. In fact, if this the the same person, she works at a dentist's office and has moved out of state (to Michigan) anyway.

ABU-HALAWEH,NAEL MOHAMMED - Information Technology

Congratulations! An actual PhD this time, and making next to nothing. Except this is his side gig (he probably teaches a class once a year or so) as he is also department head at Al Quds Open University.

ACHIONYE,JONATHAN - Physics

Actually makes slightly more than $20k. He is also at a technical college, not university and I could not find his education, although the college website lists him as "Adjunct Faculty General Studies - Department: General Studies/Learning Support" (i.e. glorified tutor), not a physics instructor, let alone professor. I doubt he has a PhD even. He and his wife also seem to own an eye clinic, so this would qualify as "side gig" too.

ACREE,COURTNEY N - Health Sciences

Another one for whom this is a side gig. She owns a chiropractic office as her main source of income.

So none of these people fulfill the original parameters of this thread: PhD (i.e. qualified for tenure track position) adjunct professors employed by a university on a course-by-course basis and doing it as a main source of income because they cannot get a tenure track position.
...

 

[Tom Sawyer]

:mod:

 

[Axulus]

I used to do the taxes for a professional fisherman who worked his ass off during the busy season. He also put himself at high risk (it's one of the most dangerous careers). He earned a reasonable ~$60-70k/year at the job. Why should he have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are oversupplied and comfortable and often come from privileged backgrounds can have more?

i'm 35, have never had so much as a pregnancy scare, and have a vasectomy which i test once or twice a year to make sure it hasn't randomly healed - why should i have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are too stupid to avoid shitting out a squalling bowl of crotch fruit so they can send the bastards to school?
why should i pay taxes to fund a military that doesn't give me subsidies when it invades another country?
why should i have to get car insurance when i've been driving for 15 years and have never had so much as a ding in a parking lot?

... because we live in a fucking society and propping up civilization comes part and parcel with the whole "not having to scavenge for food or get your head speared off by some hairy mongoloid who wants your womanflesh", that's why.

Then I deserve to be paid a living wage to oil up supermodels.

I guess we can all do whatever is the most fun and relaxing and demand living wages.

 

[lpetrich]

Why should he have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are oversupplied and comfortable and often come from privileged backgrounds can have more?

Like business leaders?

 

[Axulus]

Why should he have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are oversupplied and comfortable and often come from privileged backgrounds can have more?

Like business leaders?

We don't have to shell out money for them and if there are any examples of where I am then I oppose that even more.

 

[lpetrich]

Here's a thought. It is absurd that some folks who support their families by hard work on fish trawlers, welding, housing painting, cooking, garbage collecting, telemarketing, etc. should be paying taxes so as to promote the dreamy good life of some upper-middle class child aspiring to be well-paid academic.

When you send a fat check to every commoner with a dream, then get back to me.

Good point. I used to do the taxes for a professional fisherman who worked his ass off during the busy season. He also put himself at high risk (it's one of the most dangerous careers). He earned a reasonable ~$60-70k/year at the job. Why should he have to shell out more money via taxes to pay off the people who are oversupplied and comfortable and often come from privileged backgrounds can have more?

maxparrish, Axulus, thank you for sneering at just about every white-collar job there ever was. Including the jobs of your heroes, the economic elite. Yes, your heroes. Since you believe that white-collar workers are terribly overpaid, let's take the pay of your heroes down a notch. Not just a notch, by some significant fraction, because they clearly don't work as hard as blue-collar workers do.

After all, someone who sits in an office chair in a comfortable office all day clearly does not work as hard as someone who does heavy manual labor. Like carrying heavy objects, being out in nasty weather, working with physically dangerous things, etc. Things that can cause injury or poisoning or electric shock or nasty infections or ...

 

[Will Wiley]

Hopefully this educational video will convince many wannabe adjunct professors to pursue a livelihood that society values more than adjunct professoring.

Society values adjuncts, legislatures and universities don't. So laws and regulations are passed and initiated that allow for poor wages and no benefits.

Society values wars not adjuncts.
US Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq to Cost $6 trillion

 

[untermensche]

Society values adjuncts, legislatures and universities don't. So laws and regulations are passed and initiated that allow for poor wages and no benefits.

Society values wars not adjuncts.
US Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq to Cost $6 trillion

None of this is about the wants of a society.

It is about what is NEEDED to create a well educated society. A prerequisite for a functioning democracy.

And we should pay the people most who are most needed, like teachers.

And not reduce them to a commodity and pay them a "market rate", IOW the lowest possible rate.

 

[barbos]

The reason for oversupply of PhDs (in US at least) is that universities need graduate students to do the teaching but they eventually get their PhD and this is where universities lose their interest in you. This also reduces the average quality of PhDs and eventually professors.
Ironically the ultimate cause of this nonsense is this idea that everybody has to get higher education.