Better adjunct rights a part of better education
JENNIFER DE JESUS
Staff Writer
Despite incessant tuition hikes, it seems Hunter students are receiving less and less for their money: less access to computer labs, less opportunity for individualized attention from teachers, and ultimately, a lesser quality of education.
Full-time professors at Hunter teach three to four classes a semester, and earn an average salary of $50,000 with benefits. Adjuncts, on the other hand, have an average salary of $24,000 and no benefits while teaching two or three classes a semester. As a result, adjuncts are often forced to take multiple jobs to make ends meet, and often end up teaching at other CUNY schools. They’re then left juggling a workload even greater than a full-time faculty member’s, and as adjuncts are forced to split their attention and efforts, students may receive a lower-quality education. Underscoring this question is the fact that adjuncts and graduate students teach more than 55% of the classes taught at Hunter.
Full-time and tenured positions guarantee job security, and promote and protect free speech and academic integrity. Basic job security means professors are able to experiment and develop a teaching method that works, instead of being forced to follow the mandates of each department like adjuncts must. Job security also provides the freedom to speak out against policies that seem unfair or wrong without fear of harsh repercussions.
The more Hunter relies on ill- compensated adjuncts, the greater the strain on the departments will become. However, the solution to this issue is not to decrease the number of adjuncts at Hunter—that would limit the number of classes available, again devaluing our education. The solution is instead to provide and protect adjunct rights. With more rights and better pay, adjuncts can focus on their classes at Hunter and improve the learning process. Better pay would free up more time to spend grading or meeting with students, as it often seems most adjuncts do not have sufficient office hours, and they are not currently paid to provide them. Protecting adjunct rights goes hand in hand with improving the quality of our education—imagine a high school taught mostly by substitute teachers. In order to improve our education and help us get our money’s worth, Hunter needs to begin by properly valuing its instructors. The college shouldn’t be run like a corporation: cutting down on operational costs wherever possible, paying its workers minimal wage and eliminating job security. Rather, Hunter College should be run in a way that maximizes the quality of our education.
CUNY was founded to be as a collective of free colleges, to promote education within groups that were excluded from most universities and colleges at that time. Yet within the last few years, Hunter has increasingly begun to use a business model, which minimizes costs, often at the expense of quality.
Students, professors and adjuncts need to fight against an administration whose focus sometimes seems to lie too much in increasing revenue, and not enough in increasing the quality of our education, and the quality of the college as a whole.
