By James Patterson. In the conservative imagination, the archetypal professor is Grady Tripp from Wonder Boys, Dave Jennings from Animal House, or Dr. Talc from A Confederacy of Dunces. They have old corduroy sports coats with worn suede elbows, stale lectures, incomprehensible publications, poorly kept offices, and leering stares for young co-eds. The truth is far different. Most professors are men and women in worn-out clothes from their senior year of college (the last time they could afford clothes). They no longer have offices, but they have up-to-date lectures. They chase jobs, not co-eds. The only continuity, perhaps, is the prose of their academic papers, when they have time to work on them. In other words, the archetypal professor is now the adjunct, and she is miserable.
The Once Silent Majority
Adjunct professors comprise upwards of 70 percent of university faculty nationwide. Often, they teach the introductory courses that tenured or tenure-track faculty wish to avoid. More...

By Anonymous academic. Pay PhD students teaching university courses a living wage, or risk pricing most of us out – and shortchanging our students. Many universities employ PhD students like me as graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to teach on undergraduate courses. Yet at my university – a Russell Group institution – and others, we struggle to make ends meet because we are not paid for the majority of the work we do. Meanwhile, despite our efforts, students are not getting their money's worth. More...

By Jim Hightower. There's a growing army of the working poor in our U.S. of A., and big contingents of it are now on the march. They're strategizing, organizing and mobilizing against the immoral economics of inequality being hung around America's neck by the likes of Walmart, McDonald's and colleges. Wait a minute. Colleges? That can't be. After all, we're told to go there to go to college to get ahead in life. More education makes you better off, right? Well, ask a college professor about that — you know, the ones who earned Ph.Ds and are now teaching America's next generation. More...

By James Hoff. Adjuncts are over-worked, underpaid and have little job security. It's an injustice, and it hurts higher education. I am what's called an adjunct. I teach four courses per semester at two different colleges, and I am paid just $24,000 a year and receive no health or pension benefits. Recently, I was profiled in the New York Times as the face of adjunct exploitation, and though I was initially happy to share my story because I care about the issue, the profile has its limits. Rather than use my situation to explain the systemic problem of academic labor, the article personalized – even romanticized – my situation as little more than the deferred dream of a struggling PhD with a penchant for poetry. More...