teen teen was blown over in a cable and their cable car tab innings rendered inoperable. they were lowered to the cabins from helicopters everybody was rescued without any serious injuries. >> hi, i'm lisa fletcher andy are in the stream. ajunct professors fight for a living wage. how their working conditions could impact the quality of higher education.

>> our producer is bringing all your live feedback through the show. holy cow there is is a lot of it. i was shocked when we started looking into this at the number of ajunct and part time professors who are making wages similar to fast food producers. and we are hearing about people who love teaching but had to give it up because they were not making enough money. >> i'm sad for them meaning adjunct professors and myself. after five years i have moved on. but missing the students is real. >> lecturers teach more than professors but earn way less and have less privileges. we have carol who has a different take. employees get screwed, why should acdeem yeah be any different. that is pretty cold of yuca roll. >> this reign of terror needs to end by any means necessary. not your adjunct sidekick.

for those of you at home, we want you to be a part of the show. >> university professors with masters and ph.d.'s not the typical example of someone struggling to pay bills or put food on the table. a event report from congress found most adjunct or nontenure track professors are making a median salary of 22,000 which is about what a fast food worker makes. >> some of the obstacles i face as an adjunct professor is compensation. i make below the poverty line living in california. teaching full time course load. and because of this the financial difficulties i'm unable to pay rent on my own. so i'm forced to live at home with my parents. there was a time when i had office space. i don't really have that anymore. and so now i just kind of have fallen back on coffee shop a couple of blocks up the street.

>> i teach three different universities. i spend about 13 hours every week in the car. and i could be using that time to you know, to spend time with my students. >> and of course the instructors are not the only ones affected. 98% of respondents from the same report said they missed opportunities to better serve students because of scheduling demands. many adjuncts juggle side jobs and have little job security and few if any benefits. that makes it tough for them to maintain high standards and be readily available to their students. university are now depending on azjunct faculty adding to the low wage workforce. the numbers differ significantly from campus to campus. but according to the association of university professors more than 75% of all people teaching at colleges and universitieses are essentially temporary or azjunct faculty. so are they being exploited and how this impacting higher

education? to shed light on this issue. we are joined by john curtis the director of research and policy with the association of university professors. maria joins us from ohio. she is an adjunct professor and is a member of the new azjunct majority. they are doing some innovative things in st. louis to get a handle on this. and an adjunct professor. thanks everyone for joining us. john, am i hearing this correctly. more than 75% of the people teaching students on college university campuses are essentially temporary part-time workers? >> that's right. what we have seen over the last three or four decades is pretty much a complete inversion of the faculty employment situation we had previously. in the early 70s, the majority of faculty members

were full time and most of them were on the ten you're track. now we are looking at a situation where the majority of faculty members are teaching on a part-time basis which means they are paid on a course by course basis. very little or no job security in most cases not receiving any benefits. and not enough support from their ingstutions. and if you add in graduate students who are also doing teaching and full time nonten tour track faculty member whose are on a one year appointment perhaps two or three but also are in these essentially temporary positions, we are up to 76% of all the people teaching at colleges and universities in these various kind of temporary positions. >> we have a couple of comments here. we have parka who says like any other field you get to pay your due before you reap rewards. many azjuncts are there to try out out. >> take a look at this. >> hi.

i'm -- i was an adjunct for six years until i went to better opportunities. adjuncting is not sustainable for me. we need to reconsider the term adjunct. it is supposed to be inessential. but come on, we are not adjunct at all. we are necessary. so given the fact that we are looking at these numbers is adjunct is the right word to be using? >> i don't think it is at all. this is the majority of the people who are doing the teaching. and these are people who are doing this, they are at least trying to do it as a career to the extent that it is possible. the pay isn't sufficient, the benefits aren't there, but they are dedicated to their students and to the teaching that they want to do. the survey that a echolition of groups did in fall of 2010, there is a survey where we got

responses for more than 10,000 part time faculty members and 7500 full time nonten toured type faculty members. the part time faculty members were for the most part had been teaching for several years. they considered teaching to be their primary employment. and if a tenured track job were available they would take it. maria. john mentioned a couple of conditions that these temporary professors work under. the low wages. the insecure benefits. but what are some other things you have to deal with? >> well, in addition to the working conditions, you are always think thinking about the effect on your students. you are thinking in terms of your professional responsibilities. and you are probably pretty stressed out about the fact that you can't do all of the things that you know you need to do in order to ensure that they are getting a quality education. >> what about things you are mission though. do you have an office, do you have office hours?

do you have the same resources available to you? >> right, right. that is all part of that piece of the need for academic quality. having a private office is important. there is a federal right to privacy for students. they need to be able to meet with their professors privately to talk about their individual situations and most adjunct professors don't have access to that. that is of concern particularly to me as a parent of future college students. not having access to these including support for the research that we need to do in order to keep -- to keep current in our field is also problematic. so the working conditions are connected to the student learning conditions and the quality education we are trying to provide. >> hold on. i would like you to way in on this. are you worried about the quality of educationin given the conditions the professors are working under now.

>> as you said, this varies a lot from intereststution to institution. but i think as part of the industry of higher education all of us should be concerned about the situation. it impacts our students who are here. but also to the adjunct faculty. and i prefer fixed term faculty. but the fixed term faculty that we have, these are products of our ph.d. programs. so, we need to be thinking about whether we are training the right number of ph.d. students, if we are creating this problem. now as far as the impact on education again, washington university is a fairly highly resourced place and we are very fortunate in that way. but there is no question that there are fixed term faculty members. especially the part time ones that are as you said either working two jobs and more than two jobs. working multiple universities

whose teaching is impacted by that. there is no question that that is the case at the 3,000 colleges and universities in america. >> we are getting some comments about the impact. >> one place i was at didn't think adjnct needed an office, students had painful conversations in public. this destroys the quality of education. we asked if he was an adjunct professor or student. he said i'm a student. this -- >> one of the things i was thinking about as we were all talking about this, you know we are talking about not having an office and office hours. ha is important. but when i look back at my college experience, i realize one of the best parts of it is that i developed relationships with my professors over four years. they knew me, i knew them. they mentored me. it seems like that doesn't

exist in the current situation very much. >> right. if you have got a situation where most of the faculty are on short term appointments. then the students don't have a chance to build a relationship with those faculty members. when they come back the next semester or the next year, they will be meeting a whole new group of faculty members. and if a couple of years later they want to go back to someone for advice or maybe recommendation about graduate school or thinking about studying abroad or whatever it might be, they are not going to find someone who they know who they have been able to develop a relationship with. and this really all comes back to the question of the support that the faculty members receive from their institution -- institutions and whether it is sufficient to do the best job, the job that they could do if they had the support. into these very secure positions. a tenure positions have been shrinking for decades. there is no signs that that is likely to change. who is been fitting the most from the high row show of

adjunct professors and is the situation different between community colleges and universities. we will have more on that. think about it and tweet us during the break. >>

>> when i started grad school 15 years ago, or 15 1/2 years ago i envisioned what a lot of people i know have. that is getting a full time tenure track position somewhere settling in and having that very predictable kind of schedule. what i have gotten is very much the opposite. of that. that is working at some level probably just as hard as full time professors but having to do the work in so many different places effectively being a full time part timer.

welcome back. a recent congressional report says adjunct professors and other fa culltry likely the most educated and experienced group of workers on food stamps and public assistance in america. these folks are teaching the majority of classes on campuses across the nation. are they being exploited by the higher education system? >> i think given the structure of employment the way it is right now. i think there is exploitation. part time faculty are teaching -- i don't refer to it as a salary. it is like a piecework wage they are receiving. for the most part they are paid course by course. they are paid very low rates. they don't have benefits in most cases. and they have no job security. they don't know whether they are going to be teaching that course again the next semester, whether they will have two courses, three courses, in some cases they don't find out until right before the economies terr begins whether they are going to be teaching a course. when you say low wage. i think we should qualify that

because i have a few friends who are adjunct professor whose say for an entire term i get paid 1600 or 1800. is that -- >> that is probably at the low end. but, in the 2010 survey combining responses from over 10,000 part time faculty members we found a median pay per course of 20 -- 2700. that covers the whole economies terr, 15 or winn 6 weeks. usually at least three to six hours of teaching time in the classroom. then you figure at least two hours of time outside of class to prepare for the class. right. and then on top of that, you want to spend time with students. these faculty aren't being paid to do that. so, does what is happening near what we are seeing in the economy more broadly work.

>> well certainly there is some impact from the last five years and in higher education ever since 2008 even private universities have been in a period of strain. but, as john said at the very beginning. this has been developing over several decades. and the whole time that i have been in administration i have been concerned about this point. and coming up with new things that i can do to move the two institutions where i have been further along on the path of getting more permanent fix term or full time fix term faculty. and fewer part time faculty, better career predictability for fixed term faculty and i think we have to keep at that. but i don't -- i think it has been exacerbated by the economic strain that we have had. but i think what john said at the beginning of this is correct. this is something that has been developing for several decades.

>> we are getting some community in right now. joseph is dismissive of the so-called reality that cut adjunct pay that allow for more and more senior administrators. mary on face book chimes in saying education is a for profit business. owners and top management make all the money. core personnel are paid meager wages. and this from robert. listen to this. >> isn't it interesting that the very corporate mind-set that seeks to address market needs and market value and likes to bring those structures into essentially a nonprofit institution like a college or university cannot even meet the central market demand right now across vocational professional and academic communities. which is teachers. our students need teachers. not more administrators and certainly not more vice presidents. >> do you think one of the problems we are seeing is that way the money is being

displaced is it is bloating administrative staff at the expense of having qualified teachers? are you still there? >> yeah. i'm still here. yeah, there was a report that just came out this week that studies higher education and finance and shows that there has indeed been a rise in the expenditure of money for administers. and this is something that has to be paid attention. and it is something that we have to a-- address because those expenditures if they are not really in the service of the core mission of the institution. is education. then we have to rethink those. we have to prioritize the mission. and we have to put that money back into instruction and what serves the students. i want to get you into the conversation. you are not only an adjunt professor you started the hash tailing not your adjunct sidekick. how vulnerable are you as a

temporary professor to speak out as you have? >> well, i would just like to say from my experience that i made the hash tag -- it came from not your asian sidekick. for asian americans it is very difficult to organize and she is trying to get a virtual community going to talk about asian americans. >> right, we had her on our show and did a whole show open it. >> but talk to me about your hash tag. >> that was my inspiration. i used her hash tag and used not your adjunct sidekick instead. within a few hours after i returned home there were thousands of different adjuncts all over the country

who were airing their grievances about low pay, no sick leave, lack of contracts, which is huge for adjuncts. yeah, all of these bad problems that we have been talking about throughout the show. it was gutsy of you to do this because the sense i'm getting is if you are an adjunct professor you don't have the same security as someone who is ten you'red, you can be let go pretty easily. how vulnerable are you and are others likely to speak out about these issues? vulnerable. >> when you are when you have tenureed you are protected. you can't be fired. so in adjunct there is no legal protection whatsoever. you could be fired for wearing a red shirt. you could be fired for teaching a text that another professor disagrees with. so, in essence leaguely adjuncts are vulnerable because they have no contracts. they have no ability to advance

professorially and so -- professionally. so there is no opportunity for you to advance your career. you are working going to conferses, applying for the tenure track jobs. and those jobs are dwindling. >> some professors are returning to unions. some institutions are coming up with innovative ways to come up with the issues. we will talk about what the future of higher education looks like. but you want more interaction with our show? of course you do.

>> did you know that american university is using adjuncts to replace tenured positions and drive down the quality of our education. i ask you, what's disgusting? you're disgusting. what is outrageous? adjunct wages. >> welcome those back. those are students here in d.c. that are outraged by the working conditions of adjunct professors many of whom are living at the poverty line. maria, let's get to the fix. you have been involved with organizing contracts.

why is that a good solution? >> i have not been involved in organizing contracts. our organization is an advocacy that is trying to spread the word about the reality of these working conditions. also supporting adjuncts who are trying to organize in union contexts and outside of union connell text. and trying to work with a broad bates to figure out practical and ethical ways to solve the problem. >> john is unionizing the answer? >> it certainly is one answer. the evidence that we have showings that faculty part time faculty, other types of contingent faculty members earn more and have better job security and that enables them -- it gives them the support that i'm talking about so they can do a better job for their students. holden, what is washington university doing to wrap its arms around this issue? >> well, as i said, we are very fortunate here. we have a relatively low

number of part time fixed term faculty. only 14%. in the arts and sciences division. >> is there a formula to that that other universities may be able to look at and copy? >> well, what we are doing is making sure that that number is always going down and that we are moving more people from those kinds of positions into full time contract based fixed term positions and in fact our number of part time fixed term faculty has gone down over the last -- >> but that costs you more as an intereststution, doesn't it? how do you sell that to other ingstution? >> well, i think again, the all of higher education has to come to terms with this and be part of the solution. so just because we are able to do this more easily at a place we need to do what we can to help our students understand that when they leave here the kinds of things they need to and we need to continue to set the example of doing the absolute best job we can on

getting more faculty on to longer contracts and giving them career predictability. and letting them know something that has been said many times on this program. that our fixed term faculty or great teachers and important to the functioning of the university and education of young people. we are getting a lot of ideas about potential solutions. >> it is important that tenure -- tenured faculty stand with adjuncts. that will not happen any time soon. but i appreciate the idealism. >> potentially having more tenured positions? >> definitely i think there

are some colleges and universities who are working to create contracts where it is not tenured track but they are lecturer positions where they are paid more money 8,000 per class plus benefits. longer contract. one to two years and then review if they have done well. and i think there is this movement to not get rid of adjuncts but create a more sustainable advancement so it is not just disposable classes that get taught. so i think in terms of fighting for adjuncts rights it is across the board because there is such -- >> i'm going to cut you off because we are coming to the end of the show. we have about 30 seconds left. what does the current system mean for career professors and

the future of higher education? >> well, the trends are going in the wrong direction. and we can do better in higher education. it is an institution that is all about providing opportunity for students for academics. and we need to reinvest in the core mission of teaching and research the educational program of colleges and universities. thank you for all our guests for that discussion. until next time, we will see you online.

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