[technofire]

While I'm not trying to be gratuitously harsh, I ask what have any of the adjunct lecturers in this article really contributed to the world? Not much in my opinion. You don't need someone with a doctorate to teach a student critical thinking. These people are living in a fantasy land and are mentally ill; who becomes homeless, putting any children they have at financial risk, or lives in a car or a dilapidated mobile home with no shower, and doesn't get the clue that what they're doing is stupid and that they should get a real job and start working up the ladder? Can they not get a real job and teach evening classes as adjuncts like many of their peers do at community colleges across the country? Oh no, they're "dedicated to scholarship" and have "taken a vow of poverty." Give me a break. These people have superman complexes. We should stop glorifying them and glorifying academia. Lectures came about back when most people were illiterate and printed books were scarce and that was the most effective way to get the knowledge out to the students. We have books and a literate populace now, and of course the Internet. The United States is one of the only places that glorify and sentimentalizes higher education so acutely; visiting students from other countries have remarked that universities here are basically vacation resorts for rich people. Modern academia is a joke.