Adjunct faculty members, the silent majority in higher education in the United States, must contend with unique issues. The purpose of this article is to discuss the current situation of adjunct professors, also known as 'academic sharecroppers.'
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'Academic sharecropper' is a label that is usually applied to adjunct faculty members due to their status in the educational system and the backbreaking nature of their employment situations. Adjunct professors are also known as 'contingent faculty' in some settings, even though many never become full professors or associate professors.
Some people in academia presently feel that adjunct faculty are being exploited by the current system of higher education, just as many people firmly believed that the agrarian sharecroppers of more than one century ago had been exploited by wealthy landowners.
The workdays of adjunct professors are characterized by minimal support, no recognition, very low salaries, a lack of fringe benefits, perpetual part-time status, grueling workloads, and absolutely no assurance of a job during the next term. In other words, adjunct faculty members do not possess the same level of status or job security as their full-time counterparts.
Most brick-and-mortar college courses in the United States are taught by adjunct faculty. In fact, some estimates indicate that adjunct professors make up nearly two-thirds of all college faculty. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of online schools employ very few full-time professors and high numbers of adjunct professors.
What are some of the drawbacks faced by schools who heavily depend on 'academic sharecroppers'?
For starters, adjunct faculty have virtually no control over the textbooks being used or the layout of the courses that they teach. In fact, they are often handed a standard curriculum and basically told how to instruct it, when to teach it, and where to deliver it. According to Rooney (2012), many have also long believed that adjuncts routinely inflate grades in order to hold onto their jobs. These aspects do not bode very well for the students who pay staggering amounts of tuition for what they believe will be top notch college educations.
Moreover, the widespread use of these so-called 'academic sharecroppers' is all about business to the many colleges and universities that employ them. School systems save a great deal of money because they do not have to offer fringe benefits or the same amount of pay to adjunct faculty members. In fact, the average adjunct professor receives one-fourth to one-third the pay of his or her full-time counterpart per course.
'Academic sharecroppers' are unquestionably vital to colleges and universities across the US because, without the thankless labor of adjunct faculty, higher education in this country would come to a screeching halt. Therefore, adjunct professors should receive more recognition and higher salaries for all of the work that they accomplish. However, I do not pretend to offer any easy solutions to this complex problem.
