A reader sent along this tempting job offer.
| Job Title | General Education: Biology |
| Date | 6/1/2006 |
| Location | NATIONWIDE, |
| Min Salary | $2,100.00 |
| Max Salary | $3,500.00 |
| Job Type | Contract Part-Time |
| Job Description |
BIOLOGY Faculty compatible with a young-earth creationist philosophy to teach general education Biology courses. |
It's from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, of course. Doesn't it make you want to jump up, drop whatever you're doing, and enter the exciting world of academia?
Aside from the demand that you teach biology as if the world were 6000 years old and with complete neglect of any research and evidence acquired in the last two centuries, I should mention that the salary offer isn't that absurd. This is fairly typical for non-tenure-track college instructors: a university will give you a few thousand bucks to teach one course for a term. It's your job to accumulate a living wage by gathering multiple contracts, which may be from scattered universities. You won't get any benefits, you typically have no say at all in faculty governance, you're treated like a peon, and there's absolutely no job security.
Parents, don't let your children grow up to be adjunct professors.
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Parents, don't let your children grow up to be adjunct professors.
Amen!! I would kill for dental insurance.
Now you've done it. You're going to get all kinds of offers from dentists who need a hit done.
If they'll give me a root canal for cheap, I'll do it.
I get almost that much as a grad student stipend. And dental insurance. Maybe I should just stay in grad school. Yikes.
As a physics adjunct instructor, I've been treated quite well. I will admit that I have extra resources, so I don't have some needs that others need.
The scary thing is, I could probably live quite well for a term on $3000. I'm used to not having any money. I think I'd be qualified to teach that course, even, since my background is mostly in literature, and what they're pushing is fiction...
Hmm, apparently not all adjunct positions are so terrible. I just got hired on as an adjunct for the coming year, and I have a reasonable salary with full benefits (even dental!).
This is why I'm not going into academia when I get my Ph.D. I make more than this and have benefits as a masters student. The Ph.D position I have waiting for me pays more and has better benefits than my masters position. And I've set myself up so that it's very likely I'm going to have a job in the ag insdustry when I'm done. I figure, why should I starve and be treated like trash as an adjunct when I can go into industry (or the USDA, or even the army) and make a living wage.
As tempting as such a generous tenure Liberty University is offering, both Christianity and Islam strongly recommend against taking up a career that forces you to live a lie.
That, and I'd sooner commit suicide by injecting MSG into my veins than to enter into a school (either as an employee or student) set up by a fundamentalist lunatic like Jerry Falwell.
In many places this is not a bad strategy. I friend of mine teaches 5 courses a term at a technical college in South Carolina to make the same wage he did as a masters student (teaching one course) at UNC-CH (~$7.5k a term). At most state schools you'd still need to teach two courses to make the same (minus benefits).
On the other hand, my wife taught as an adjunct for a couple Seattle-area community colleges, and they gave her full benefits if she could get together 3 courses a term (and it actually paid a living wage -- even for Seattle). Having to drive an hour between classes was not fun though.
Well, not in this life, but surely working for Falwell will help give you security in the next life.
I thought from the rubric that this post was going to be about some sort of Grateful Dead-worshiping suicide cult...
In my interminable academic travels I have learned that "adjunct" means something slightly different everywhere you go; every institution has em, some are more reliant on em than others, and payscales/benefits/working conditions/respect vary wildly from one to another (even sometimes vary among departments within institutions), from full-time lecturers with office & benefits (but usually a 1-year contract) to the all-too-common slave-labor scenario described by PZ.
To really confuse things, many places use the same term for non-teaching courtesy appointments like spouses, committee members from other departments, research collaborators, etc.
In biology, yes.
In engineering, if you've already got a job, being an adjunct is a good way to make connections.
Remind me why I was stupid enough to choose to go to grad school?
What fields are these, that offer the support and stipends for grad students?
I feel like I'm in the wrong field...
Job Description: Faculty compatible with a Star Trekkist philosophy to teach general education Physics courses.
Yeah Jerrrry! Jerrrry! Oh, wait, you're talking about the evil clown.... Never Mind! ;-)
On the other hand, let me strongly recommend being an adjunct professor in a system with a strong union (CUNY will do fine).
I did two years of that and most definitely had health insurance and other markers of dignified human existence.
On the other hand, I fully recognize that the union made several libertarian faculty members feel like they were living under the iron fist of Stalin . . .
Oh, they are also used in biology in that way too. For example, many faculty at biological research institutions such as TIGR are adjunct faculty at local universities. In general, they don't teach (or get paid by the university), but get access to the university library and shared lab equipment, and get the right to supervise grad students enrolled at the university.