The Highly-educated Working Poor: Adjunct Professors

It also means that these highly-educated, fully-credentialed professors have become part of America’s army of the working poor. They never know until a semester starts whether they’ll teach one class, three, or none – typically, this leaves them with take-home pay somewhere between zero and maybe $1,000 a month. Poverty.

Adjuncts usually get no benefits, no real chance of earning full-time positions, no due process or severance pay if dismissed, no say in curriculum or school policies… sometimes not even office space. Like their counterparts at Walmart and McDonald’s, adjunct college professors are not treated as valuable resources to be nurtured, but as cheap, exploitable, and disposable labor.

Unsurprisingly, this contingent of the low-wage army is organizing, too. For information, contact New Faculty Majority: www.NewFacultyMajority.info.

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This piece was first published on Jim Hightower’s website.