A lifetime adjunct professor, Troy Camplin, writes at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy why he’s leaving academia.
It boils down to bureaucracy, intolerance for “challenging” professors, and a teaching schedule that makes research – and thus advancement – impossible:
For those out there who think that teaching and research (and sometimes creative work) are all there is to working at a university, it might seem odd that I will never again seek employment in such hallowed halls. What people do not realize is that universities are not primarily about teaching and research anymore.
No, they are all about administration. …
One reason is that the pay is so ridiculously low that you have to get a half dozen or more classes at more than one institution just to survive. That means that all of your free time is spent preparing for class and grading papers. And for what? Nobody at any university cares about your teaching experience. They care about your research. But guess what? No one has time for research when you are an adjunct. Thus, you can never do what you need to do to actually get a full-time position. …
For academic bureaucrats, the most important thing of all is retention. That is, to keep students coming back, to keep the money pouring in no matter what. A professor who is challenging is thus a threat. …
Adjuncts and lecturers should not buy the rhetoric that your input is wanted or needed. It is not. It is a trap to find out who won’t follow the unwritten rule of bureaucracy that student retention is the one and only thing that matters.
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