[xmddmx]

Background: the California Master Plan for Higher Eduction (1960) essentially set up a system of free college education to all residents.

It was slowly chipped away until "free" became "not free".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Hig...

The Adjunct job title makes sense in certain situations, but when a college system is relying on Adjuncts for the majority of credit hours taught, simply to save money, this becomes a problem.

[ta988]

It is not just about money it is about "flexibility" or else said, ability to kick people out to update curriculum and take younger ones more up to date with recent research.

[dhosek]

No, it’s totally about the money. You can get the classroom coverage of a TT faculty member for a tiny fraction of the cost if you use adjuncts.

[eigenman]

For reference, a typical adjunct (non tenure track instructor) will make $5000 per course per semester with no benefits. Tenured and tenure track faculty in STEM are typically paid around $60-120k per year with benefits and will teach, at most, six courses a year.

[robotresearcher]

The job of a tenured STEM faculty member is not the same as contract lecturer.

Tenured faculty do research and run the university as well as teach. At a major research school a STEM faculty member will often raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in outside research funds, which will pay upwards of ten graduate students and the other running costs of a research lab. They will do and publish new research, usually while training graduate students, review the work of others, run conferences, sit on hiring committees,, take turns being Director of this or that (ie. management positions).

Many STEM professors raise more external money than their salary costs. They are dollar positive to the school before they teach anything. And they teach too.

Yes, it has a salary better than contract teaching.

[klooney]

> Tenured faculty do research and run the university as well as teach

At community colleges?

[ChainOfFools]

research, rarely. running their department, designing courses and materials for other faculty to teach with, as well as a lot of organizational housekeeping chores (of the sort handled by non-faculty staff) at 4 year schools? constantly.

[mjn]

It's a bit more than six courses a year at community colleges and teaching-oriented 4-year colleges (though you're still right that adjuncts are much cheaper). In California, most full-time faculty at community colleges have a 15 credit per semester teaching obligation, which works out to ten 3-credit courses a year. Some do get credit in lieu of a course for taking on other responsibilities (dept chair, director of a program, etc.), but that's the baseline workload. Even the Cal State system, which is made up of 4-year schools, has a baseline teaching load of eight classes a year ("4/4").

[beej71]

If it were just that, they'd hire full time contractors with benefits for one year terms.