Every time I write about contingent academic labor and argue that adjuncts/lecturers should get a "fair wage" commenters pop in suggesting how difficult it is to calculate such a thing. It isn't. /thread. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
Take the salary of tenurable faculty. Divide the salary by the percentage dedicated to teaching. This gets the amount of salary ostensibly dedicated to teaching for that tenurable faculty. % that number by the number of courses the faculty member teaches for the per course wage.
Ex. An Asst. Prof at an R1 like Clemson (the example in the column) makes $62,500. Let's say 40% of their job is designated towards teaching. $25k. They teach 4 courses per year, per course pay is $6250.
Next, for lecturers take that per course pay and multiply by number of courses taught. At Clemson, that's 8. 8 x $6250 = $50,000. There's your fair wage according to this calculation. In reality, Clemson English instructors make $35k.
It's easy to adjust the numbers according to your institution. How much are lecturers/adjuncts getting paid to teach a course v. tenurable faculty? Any gap is a failure to enact fair pay.
I've made this argument many times at my blog, but a good reason to pay contingent faculty a fair wage is to protect the wage value of college teaching. This is in the interests of tenured faculty.
When states realize that the going rate to teach a college class is $3k, rather than the $6k or $9k tenured faculty get (pro-rated to the portion of their job dedicated to teaching), they will wonder why tenured faculty are "overpaid."
I think most tenured faculty are more likely to be underpaid than overpaid, but when some laborers do the same work for half the pay, follow the logic. Protect the value of your labor before it's too late. (It's too late.)
Every time I write about this stuff I swear to myself I'm never going to do it again because the comments put my teeth on edge. Why is it so difficult to analyze labor from multiple (moral, ethical, efficacy) dimensions beyond simplistic notions of "supply and demand?"
"There's an oversupply of qualified lecturers" is another frequent defense of the status quo for contingent faculty, as though this is a sufficient explanation or excuse for that status quo. It's simply another form of handwaving over the problem. It is not a good rationale.
There is also an oversupply of qualified tenured faculty and we do not see quite the same pressure on their wages. In many cases, the distinction between tenured and untenured in terms of qualifications are arbitrary.
What is happening is a decline in the number of tenureable jobs as they are reclassified into contingent positions. One of the reasons this is happening is because the wage the two categories are paid for identical labor (teaching) is disparate.
To claim that the wages that some faculty jobs (contingent faculty) should be subject to supply and demand pressure while others (tenurable) are not, is a way to dodge the complexities of the system of labor all faculty work within.
For faculty who believe contingent faculty are treated fairly because of the "law" of S&D, how willing are they to open up their own positions to those same forces? It's rich to sit behind the safety of one's guild while others are exploited to protect that privilege.
The reason to support a fair wage for teaching college is to eliminate one of the most significant incentives for eliminating tenurable positions, that the labor of teaching is done for less money by contingent instructors.
