Mad Professors — from inthesetimes.com by Rebecca Burns
The adjuncts are at the barricades.
Excerpt:
That so many advanced degree-holders are toiling in poverty conditions flies in the face of the assumption that higher education is a path to prosperity. But low wages and precarity represent the new norm for what some adjuncts have termed “academia’s version of apartheid.”
Hired on a contract basis, adjuncts (who may include contingent full-time faculty) are paid by the course—the average rate is $2,900, according to crowd-sourced figures from the website the Adjunct Project. Most contingent faculty are also excluded from access to health insurance or other benefits, and are guaranteed neither a full teaching load nor a steady contract.