Last week, when I was writing about sessionals, I made the following statement:
“Had pay levels stayed constant in real terms over the last 15 years, and the surplus gone into hiring, the need for sessionals in Arts & Science would be practically nil”.
A number of you wrote to me, basically calling BS on my statement. So I thought it would be worthwhile to show the math on this.
In 2001-02, there were 28,643 profs without administrative duties in Canada, collectively making $2.37 billion dollars, excluding benefits. In 2009-10, there were 37,266 profs making $4.29 billion, also excluding benefits. Adjusting for inflation, that’s a 56% increase in total compensation – but, of course, much of that is taken up by having more profs. If we also control for the increase in the number of professors, what we have left is an increase of 18.8%, or $679 million (in 2009 dollars).
How many new hires could you make with that? Well, the average assistant prof in 2009 made $90,000. So, simple math would suggest that 7,544 new assistant profs could have been hired for that amount. That means that had professors’ salaries stayed even in real terms, universities could have hired 16,347 new staff in that decade, instead of the 8,803 they actually did.
(Okay, I’m oversimplifying a bit. There are transaction costs to landing new professors. And hiring that many young profs all at once would just be storing up financial chaos 5-15 years down the road, as they gain in seniority. So $679 million probably wouldn’t buy you that many new profs. But on the other hand, if you were doing some hiring, you’d spend less money on sessionals, too, so it’s probably not far off.)
Would that number of new hires have eliminated the need for sessionals? Hard to say, since we have no data either on the number of sessionals, or the number of courses they collectively teach. What we can say is that if 7,500 professors had been hired, the student:faculty ratio would have fallen from 25:1 to 22:1, instead of rising – as, in fact, it did – to 27:1. That’s a pretty significant change no matter how you slice it.
(The question remains, though: would you want to give up sessionals, even if you could? As I pointed out last week, in many programs sessionals perform a vital role of imparting practical, real-world experience to students. And even where that’s not their primary function, they act as swing labour, helping institutions cope with sudden surges of students in particular fields of study. They have their uses, you know.)
Now, I’m not suggesting that professors should have foregone all real wages increases over a decade, in order to increase the size of the professoriate. But I am suggesting that universities have made some choices in terms of pay settlements that has affected their ability to hire enough staff to teach all the students they’ve taken on. The consequence – as I noted before – is more sessionals. But it very definitely did not need to be that way.
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“Hard to say, since we have no data either on the number of sessionals, or the number of courses they collectively teach.”
And therein lies the rub. Is this the universities’ dirty secret? They should be compelled to collect and divulge such data. Any excuses that “they are too hard to keep track of” is nonsense if only because every employee of a university through its HR has an assigned pay code designating their status and thus rate of pay.
The sad fact of the matter is the whole neoliberal race to the bottom ethics here. The argument of “we pay what the market will bear” is silly as it becomes pegged on arbitrarily set low compensation numbers. If universities value quality – as their glossy brochures seem to trumpet – they would pay for it. How many sessionals do we know that have long-standing service, with teaching awards and even publication records that sometimes are on par or exceed that of the already tenured? Sure, hiring a large group of desperate, overachieving sessionals from an expanding pool of the academic reserve army may make a lot of sense budgetarily to meet increasing capacity, but that is pretty deplorable.
Assuming an average sessional compensation set at 6k per semester course, teaching a full load (i.e., more than 2-2, so we’ll say 4-4 in lieu of research and service) amounts to 48k. Not terrible compensation if you can get it, but teaching a 4-4 load while trying to boost the CV with research to be marketable for TT jobs? Hm. And the longer the sessional remains a sessional, the more they carry the scarlet letter A for Adjunct.
Added to this scenario is the lack of job security provisions. As disposable labour, even if sessionals design and deliver courses that meet or exceed standards of excellence at their institution, they would still need to apply for it the following semester or year. In some cases, for several years. Teaching awards and high evaluations guarantee little to nothing, except possibly another stint on the sessional hamster wheel.
I agree with you that suddenly introducing a raft of TT lines would be catastrophic, and for a few other reasons. Yes, it would be a huge budgetary shock, but also consider that a wave hire also would lead to a wave sabbatical, which thus places the academic unit in that awkward position of how to staff courses during that year. What is needed is a plan or roadmap that creates TT lines incrementally, pegged in part to anticipated retirements. At least this way it would be a gradual approach that could transform the boomer-indexed myth of “replacement faculty” into an actual plan. No doubt implementing such a plan may mean changes to the tenure system and expectations on workload. However, for the large number of sessionals (and the data I’ve been able to acquire puts their teaching across the PSE sector at around 50%) that would be better than being on the perpetual precariat track.
You and Alex have both made very strong arguments here.
Just one quibble: I’m told that for reasons of human rights, one cannot suggest that someone ought to retire, and there is no longer mandatory retirement in my province. So it’s basically forbidden to anticipate retirements.
And one note of support: there’s obviously a market for more professors, if there’s a market for more sessionals.
The movement towards adjunctification isn’t a simple function of budgets (as Alex notes) nor of supply and demand for the courses they teach, but seems to show a conscious effort to reduce the size and power of the professoriate with mere staff.
Sorry. That last sentence made no sense. It should read, “to reduce the size and power of the professoriate by gradually replacing it with mere staff.”
Hi Sean,
You make an exceptionally powerful point here: indeed, the professoriate would be politically weakened by growing ranks of sessional labour that is only marginally attached to the institution. If the trend were to continue, imagine the nightmare scenario: who will supervise graduate theses? Who will be on hand with the institutional wisdom to set curriculum programming? Who will be left to afford to go to conferences? Perhaps only a shrinking few. But, be it in the roles of an academic or faculty association bargaining unit, a paucity of full-time members with a swell in the ranks of the precariat makes planning for more than one semester or year very difficult: “I would love to serve on committee x” or “I would love to participate more in my faculty association but I cannot commit since I don’t know if I have a job here next semester.”
As to retirement, it is true no one can be compelled to retire. I am careful to parse the words here to “anticipated retirements” to include those who have communicated their desire to do so, or have already accepted a phased retirement offer. Depending on the university’s pension arrangement, those on defined contribution plans may have lost a significant chunk of savings due to the 2008 downturn, and so have less incentive to leave the profession as initially planned. If senior faculty are holding on to their jobs for longer, part of the reason may be attributed to making up for losses in pension funds (amidst a plethora of other reasons that are not necessarily financially related).
I want to have what you say above – “there’s obviously a market for more professors, if there’s a market for more sessionals” – embroidered on a flag and raised for all the administrators to see!
Thanks for the kudos.
I think it’s worth looking at what fields are becoming increasingly adjunctivized (sessionalated?). Perhaps Alex has some stats he can share with us? I think that ACCUTE (the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) keep track for their own profession, and other professional organizations might be able to furnish specific information.
My conviction is that the increasing use of what you term “the precariat” is part of a general abandonment of the core meaning of a university, as a place where research and teaching reinforce each other. Getting sessionals to do a lot of the instruction, especially in first year, frees full-time faculty to do more research. The nightmare scenario for me is one in which the researchers don’t teach, and the teachers don’t do research. It would have a place of learning (but only of job skills, not real education) sitting alongside a place of (largely applied, government or corporate-funded) research. Imagine the McDonald’s Hamburger University coincidentally located in a Soviet research village.
The nightmare grows darker when we consider which fields are becoming dominated by sessionals. In my experience, these are languages, literatures and humanities. Increasingly, the role of teaching (say) first-year French will be handed to non-professors, rendering it more and more marginal to the work of the university as a whole. Every time an administrative “initiative” comes around to further marginalize languages (or literatures, or pure sciences) in favour of STEM or professional programs, there will be fewer tenured faculty to object. We’ve already seen several American schools shutting down their French and German programs altogether in the last recession.
I don’t think this is some sort of conspiracy, as Alex quite rightly warns us against assuming. It’s just a lot of people making decisions that seem reasonable and self-interested at the time, but failing to cleave to the connection between teaching and research, and therefore disaggregating, hence destroying, the university.
“Hard to say, since we have no data either on the number of sessionals, or the number of courses they collectively teach.”
I agree with this point, having tried to find this data, both for the university where I work, and for universities across Canada.
Sometimes an individual department will be quite forthcoming by telling you how many sessionals are teaching that term, and which courses they are teaching, and at some times you can approach the union to find out how many dues-paying members there are, but even when there are collective agreement clauses requiring the university to keep track of this info and disclose it, it can be a challenge.