Are Adjunct Faculty Exploited: Some Grounds for Skepticism

Excerpt

Adjuncts’ rights activists and their sympathizers have a litany of complaints about how adjuncts are treated, but one chief complaint is that universities exploit adjunct faculty. Al Jazeera describes adjuncts as “indentured servants.”¹ Some activists compare adjuncts to sweatshop workers,² others compare them to sharecroppers³, while a Times Herald columnist calls them “America’s modern slaves.”⁴ A reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Vitae webpage labels adjuncts “exploited professors;”⁵ op-eds in the Guardian ⁶ and the Boston Globe ⁷ concur. An article in the Observer claims “colleges would implode without exploited freelance professors”⁸, while a prominent adjunct activist claims she decided to leave academia because she was tired of being exploited.⁹ The American Prospect celebrates that “exploited faculty members” are “eager to band together” under unions.¹⁰ The popular blog Philosophy Smoker claims again and again that adjuncts are being exploited, while the popular New APPS blog refers to their “hyper-exploitation.”¹¹ Consortium news published an article explaining “How ‘Adjunct’ Professors are Exploited.”¹² The phrases “exploited adjunct,” “exploited adjuncts,” “adjunct exploitation,” “exploitation of adjunct faculty,” and “adjuncts are exploited” return over 15,000 hits on Google as of August 2016. When a writer for Vitae scolded other adjuncts for comparing themselves to slaves, he was subject to brutal and swift condemnation.¹³ …