Less Than 30% of Professors Are Full Time Faculty
via 5 Infuriating Things Nobody Tells You About College | Cracked.com.
Unfortunately, the notion of college professors as scholarly experts who inspire learning is as outdated as the idea of getting a job after graduating from college. Fewer than 30 percent of all professors are full-time faculty. The other 70 percent are the underpaid, unwashed masses doing most of the teaching, and, in many cases, doing it poorly.About 32 percent of all courses are taught by grad students attempting to stave off unemployment. What makes them qualified to do a job previously performed by tenured Ph.D.s? Nothing! Only half of teaching assistants get any sort of meaningful instruction on how to teach, where “meaningful” can mean a five-hour, completely optional seminar. The rest walk in on the first day of class and reflexively stumble toward the back row before realizing, “Shit. I need to be up here now.”
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The dirty little secret is that good teaching is about the lowest priority on the college totem pole. We all know good teachers when we have them, but they don’t bring in big bucks or quantifiable prestige. Grants bring in lots of bucks, winning athletic teams get headlines, and writers get cites in journals and can be quoted as experts in their subject. All that can be measured. Good teachers often don’t make a real impression until after the class is over – sometimes years after the class.
At community colleges, the poorly paid part-time instructors aren’t grad students, but those of us who are good at what we do, but considering teaching an important part of the process of making responsible citizens out of young people.
As a former adjunct professor,i.e. part time teacher I do agree that the situation is horrid. Part time teachers receive about one fifth the salary of full time professors for teaching the same course and the using the same amount of time and they receive zilch in benefits. However adjuncts are treated as poor migrant workers by the rest of the faculty and looked down upon. I had a full time job so I could afford to be an adjunct and I did it becaue I wanted to teach and I think I did a good job. I once had a student tell me that she prefered adjunct teachers because she knew that they were not there for the money but for the joy of teaching,whereas full time professors were usually pompous asses who had no time for their students because they were so busy sucking up to the power structure. That being said it is still a disgrace that so many US universities use such an unfair system. Ironic as it is that the full time professors are piously condemning Wallmart for underpaying employees while they enjoy their positions and high salaries because part timers are doing the bulk of the work. The US education industry needs to be thorougly changed; however it is only a matter of time before on line courses et al make the current university structure obsolete.