Yesterday I came across a shiny new blog over at WordPress.com by a young academic working in the South. She calls it Budget Glamorous: Living Well on Less. (hmmm… What is it about academia that leads its denizens to write personal finance blogs?)
BG, it develops, is presently working in exactly the same position at her university where I started at the Great Desert University: as a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer. Apparently the idea is considered relatively innovative in Appalachia, as it was here (more or less) when I hired on at GDU, said idea being that the school would hire a small cadre of moderately paid Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s to teach four-and-four or five-and-five, with no research & publishing expectation.
These jobs are paid one helluva lot better than ordinary adjunct gigs: you get a full year’s contract at pay that would be laughable in the corporate world but that looks pretty darned good to an unemployed wretch fresh out of six years in graduate school. I started at the same figure as the assistant professors in my cohort. By the time I left to found and direct the editorial office on the main campus, I was earning the median annual salary for Arizonans—not very much, but as a lecturer I was paid for only nine months of work. My pay, however, most certainly did not keep up with my cohort’s, by then at the associate level.
GDU already had a full-time non-tenurable position, which they called “instructor” and for which they paid shamefully. These were held mostly by ABDs and by women hangers-on, academic groupies who were having affairs with faculty members or who simply wanted a career on a university campus but for one reason or another could not get a position elsewhere. Once an incumbent finished the Ph.D., he or she was out of a job. So in effect, accepting such a position brought your academic career to a halt, in real terms.
The lecturership, by contrast, may be held indefinitely—one colleague at the West campus retired after about 20 years on the job. It has no future: you are not going to get a promotion, you are never going to get a shot at a tenurable position, and the only raises you will get will be COLAs, except that when times are tough (which is most of the time) there are no COLA increases. GDU lecturers earn about half of what a community college instructor here earns, with a comparable course load and much larger classes. To frost the cookies, you have no job security whatsoever: annoy a dean, and you’re canned with no appeal. The university can refuse to renew your contract and does not have to give a reason. No joke: this happened to a friend who got crosswise with a dean.
The advantages for the university are obvious: One lecturer can be made to teach two or two-and-a-half times the number of lower-division students that can be foisted on a tenure-track faculty member. Accrediting agencies look askance at large numbers of undergraduate courses taught by part-time adjuncts, and so hiring anyone at “full-time” status helps hugely at accreditation time. This handles the scut-work courses at a little higher cost than hiring adjuncts who will work for sweat-shop wages and no benefits, but the crucial importance of accreditation overrides that added cost. A lecturer in a non-tenure-track position can be canned at will, giving administrators a little more control over department, division, and college budgets…and a convenient political shilelagh. This came in handy at GDU when, as the current economic depression reached its height, some 550 employees were laid off, and as the layoffs continue to this day.
The advantage to the budding academic? A job. Even before higher education was pinched by the fall of the Bush economy, graduate schools were turning out many more Ph.D.’s in the humanities than there were jobs to accommodate them. There simply are not enough jobs to go around. A full-time junior-college opening can attract two or three hundred qualified candidates. So, obviously, unless you enjoy waiting tables or cleaning house, it’s much to your benefit to grab whatever academic job you can get, if it pays anything like a living wage.
Like BG, I enjoyed teaching as a full-time nontenurable lecturer, at first. I like students and in time found ways to mitigate the obscene workload. It was great for the first seven years. After that, political infighting led to the disintegration of our department and morale went south, fast. I started looking for other work, in and out of academe; it was three years before I managed to get myself into an administrative position on the Main campus.
The question is, if you know what you’re getting into, can one of these exploitive jobs be made to work to your advantage?
Possibly so.
If I were starting that position now, knowing what I know today, I would use the job as a springboard to another job, and I would work as hard and as fast as I could to find that other job. I would not delay just because I liked the teaching or felt grateful to have broken into academia.
If I wanted to stay in the university environment, I’d be angling for an administrative position, even it it meant getting another degree. The Ph.D. in an academic subject may or may not help you get into administration, but certain vocational doctorates indeed will.
You can get these degrees online or in low-residency programs. At GDU, I watched people move from underpaid nontenurable jobs to administrative positions after obtaining advanced degrees in educational administration or online course design. Most of the coursework was done online. An Ed.D., it develops, is as good as a Ph.D. in the job market—maybe better, if it has something to do with administration or marketing.
Meanwhile, I would apply for every tenure-track position advertised in the Chronicle, no matter where it is. I also would not be too proud to apply in the community colleges, where the same workload is rewarded with better pay and job security.
If I wanted to work in the real world, I would be looking all the time for any job I could convince an employer I could do. And classroom skills translate magnificently to the real world:
• Communications
• Publications
• Management
• Human resources (here, too, think online courses: get an online degree in human resources or management)
• Personnel training
• Online personnel training course design (where do you think they get people to build those see-Dick-run employee tutorials—and those annoying courses for traffic schools?)
• Translator jobs (if you’re fluent in a second language)
• Executive director of nonprofit
• Development officer for nonprofit
Some industries that seem far afield of academia welcome academics as they welcome any smart, self-starting, ambitious individual. A friend of mine went into real estate as she neared the end of the doctoral program. She had a long and lucrative career selling spectacular high-end houses to the ridiculously rich. Another went to work for Peter Bogdanovich and became an executive vice president of Paramount Pictures. Two others went to law school—today one is a prominent immigration lawyer; the other went to work in the AG’s office. Another left a tenured associate professorship in communication to found a very successful personnel training business, for which she simply transferred what she had been teaching in the classroom into the corporate workplace.
And if getting a real-world job meant I had to walk from a nontenurable academic contract in mid-semester, that’s exactly what I’d do. A university feels no loyalty to its NTTT faculty (it’s an institution: it feels nothing), and so there’s no rational or moral reason not to move on when a less exploitive opportunity comes your way.
