Adjunct Professors Facing Homelessness

I recently moved back to the USA, my home country, to get a masters degree. Since arriving I can’t help but constantly note the extent to which most US universities are governed by cash—the richest students must be let in, the most questionable donors and sponsors must be allowed to have a say.

And as this Guardian article makes clear, on the other end of this obsession with cash-flow is a whole generation (or more) of part-time professors on the brink of joblessness or homelessness, whichever comes first.

Funding for universities from the government fell by a quarter between 1990 and 2009, leading to the rise of the “adjunct”; a professor often working full-time (or more) hours for a small slice of the pay and benefits that a “full professor” would receive.

“We take a kind of vow of poverty to continue practicing our profession,” said one adjunct professor, Deborah Leigh Scott. 

In this story, Alastair Gee writes of adjuncts who’ve lost their homes and resorted to side jobs one doesn’t typically think of for a nation’s most highly educated workers (Gee emphasizes sex work for its shock potential). While there are specificities to academia’s decline in the US, this fits in with an overall trend of loss of steady employment for “temp” work around the world—just think Uber for academia and you get the picture.

This is why adjuncts have been called “the fast-food workers of the academic world". Why does the US punish its educators?