July-August 2002

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Salary Survey Ignores Adjuncts

Blair F. Bigelow

To the Editor:

In my university, the College of Arts and Sciences employs three adjunct faculty members for every two full-time faculty members. Paid very little and given no fringe benefits, most adjuncts have little or no hope of ever becoming full-time, tenure-track faculty. My institution is better than some places and worse than others.

It is therefore surprising that the AAUP’s annual report on the economic status of the profession, published in the March–April issue of Academe, does not yet include adjunct salary and compensation figures. That, as the report states, average academic salaries, excluding the pay of adjuncts, exceeded their 1971–72 level (when adjuncts were a tiny percentage of the whole) for the first time is clearly the result of exploitation of the increasing number of adjunct faculty.

We full-time, tenure-track faculty ride on their backs. The adjuncts have been excluded as nonpersons from the annual report, and all the editorializing and preaching in Academe about the problem is little more than hot air.

Blair F. Bigelow
(English)
Suffolk University

Salary Survey Chair Responds:

Professor Bigelow’s general point—that we should include salary information on adjuncts in the annual report on the economic status of the profession—is on target. While the total share of courses taught by adjuncts (more relevant than the number of adjuncts) is small on most campuses, it has been increasing. The problem is that it is very hard to classify non-tenure-track faculty into well-defined groups. These faculty range from full-time senior lecturers to local businesspeople who teach a night course in their specialty. The AAUP’s staff and its Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession are considering ways to make the survey more inclusive and reflective of the academic labor market. It would indeed be worthwhile to develop salary information about adjuncts if that can be done while preserving the historical continuity of the AAUP’s data on tenure-track faculty.

Daniel S. Hamermesh
(Economics)
University of Texas at Austin
and
Chair, AAUP Committee on the Economic Status of the Profession