The Ph.D. Glut, the Adjunct Crisis and the Budget Deficit
I want to kick off the first post of this blog by talking about an issue that every graduate student is probably concerned about, the dearth of job openings for tenure-track faculty, and how it’s connected to CUNY’s widespread use of adjuncts and the state’s budget deficit. We’ve all heard the horror stories about how there are too many students getting Ph.D.’s, that there aren’t enough academic jobs to go around, and that these degrees are worthless for anything else.
What is usually left out of such accounts or relegated to secondary status is that there are hundreds of thousands of university teaching jobs in existence that, rather than providing the comfortable middle-class lifestyle one associates with academia, are instead being compensated at a very marginal level, with no benefits, that it would be difficult to support an individual and impossible to support a family on: adjuncts. Adjuncts now make up over one half of the teaching workforce at public universities, including CUNY. For many grad students, adjuncting is a convenient way to gain some teaching experience and pick up some extra income. Yet many graduate students have difficulty surviving economically even by combining loans, adjunct jobs and/or other work. For many others, adjuncting becomes a life-long career of constant financial hardship and struggle.
The common refrain of those academics lucky enough to receive tenure is that they have earned their positions through their hard work and high-quality research. This position ignores several realities. First, the vast adjunct workforce was not created by the inferior scholarship of its members. State governments have been slashing their contributions to public universities for decades, resulting in severely underfunded institutions, such as CUNY. University administrations have responded by creating a two-tiered labor system in which half of the workforce receives low pay, poor benefits and no job security. This is not an intellectual strategy, it’s an economic one, and it’s the same strategy used by major corporations to prop up their bottom lines by attacking workers. It is part of the thirty-year-long national and indeed global “one-sided class war” of the employers against their workers in which median wages have stagnated and public services have been cut back while taxes on the rich and corporations have been slashed. Right now, education is one of the central fronts in this struggle, with K-12 schools being privatized right and left and public universities having their budgets cut, employees laid off, and tuitions raised.
Second, despite the universities’ role as producers of research, their educational role remains their core function. When tenure faculty complain that adjuncts deserve their low pay because they produce inferior research, they ignore the fact that without enough teachers, universities would cease to function, and rather than teaching their low-enrollment advanced seminars, tenured faculty would be forced to do the grunt work of teaching high-enrollment introductory lectures, which are usually relegated to adjuncts.
As the above makes clear, the “Ph.D. glut,” the adjunct-ification of the university, and the budget deficit are intimately linked. None of these problems can be solved individually, which is why it’s in the interest of all graduate students, adjuncts, and anybody interested in preserving the quality of public universities to become active in the fight to defend public education. If we lose this struggle, we can say goodbye to a secure economic future for ourselves and to higher education as a public good. To get involved, check out the Adjunct Project, the “March 4th” CUNY-wide coalition, or the PSC.
One Response to “The Ph.D. Glut, the Adjunct Crisis and the Budget Deficit”
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One of the things that can be done to improve CUNY finances is to close all of the traditional libraries in each CUNY school. Push automtion and resource sharing to the max. Yes this may not be good for the librarians, but honestly many of the librarins are not worth the money they are being paid