Jim Hightower: This is a poor educational system

6:38 PM, Dec. 11, 2013  |  Comments
Jim Hightower
Jim Hightower
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There's a growing army of the working poor in our nation, and big contingents of these folks are now on the march. They're strategizing, organizing and mobilizing against the immoral economics of inequality being hung around America's neck by the likes of Walmart, McDonald's and colleges.

Wait a minute. Colleges? You get advanced degrees to get ahead in life. More education makes you better off, right? Well, ask a college professor about that - you know, the ones who earned PhD.s and now are teaching America's next generation.

The sorry secret of higher education - from community colleges to brand-name universities - is that they've embraced the corporate culture of a contingent workforce. They're turning lots of professors into part-time, low-paid, no-benefit, no-tenure, temporary teachers.

Overall, three-quarters of America's higher-ed faculty members today are adjunct professors or off the tenure track. That means they're attached to a particular school, but not essentially a part of it.

It also means that these highly educated, fully credentialed professors have become part of America's army of the working poor. They never know until a semester starts whether they'll teach one class, three, or none - typically, this leaves them with take-home pay somewhere between zero and maybe $1,000 a month. Poverty.

Adjuncts usually get no benefits, no real chance of earning full-time positions, no due process or severance pay if dismissed, no say in curriculum or school policies ... sometimes not even office space. Like their counterparts at Walmart and McDonald's, adjunct college professors aren't treated as valuable resources to be nurtured, but as cheap, exploitable and disposable labor.

Unsurprisingly, this contingent of the low-wage army is organizing, too. For information, check out the New Faculty Majority: NewFacultyMajority.info.


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