Last week, the New York Times reported,
For the academic elite — tenured professors at private research universities — average pay this year is $167,118, while at public research universities such professors earn $123,393, according to the annual report by the American Association of University Professors.
…many colleges and universities are cutting back on tenure and tenure-track jobs. According to the report, such positions now make up only 24 percent of the academic work force, with the bulk of the teaching load shifted to adjuncts, part-timers, graduate students and full-time professors not on the tenure track.
The adjuncts earn puny incomes, typically without benefits. Should there not be forces at work leading to convergence between the salaries of tenured professors and the salaries of adjuncts?
The divide represents a new reality for skills optimization in closed educational settings, so any potential convergence (such as aligning higher and lower skill cognitive non repetitive functions) might be more likely in open local settings that utilize multiple skill potentials for arbitration possibilities. That is, a community that wants to maximize knowledge skills wealth could include “education” as a part of coordinated work and living structures.
To be fair, in many fields TT (tenured or tenure-track) professors go and get big grant dollars. Often, it is a tenure and promotion requirement (half a mil for tenure, another mil for full prof, as it was for me).
OK, what about the humanities (or even economics, where grant money is much lower)? In that case, universities pay for prestige. They want to be able to say, we have faculty with PhDs from MIT and Princeton, who were Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars, who have advised Presidents, who are interviewed weekly by or who write for the New York Times.
But they don’t need many of those. Hence the great divergence rather than convergence of salaries. Maybe Sherwin Rosen’s superstar economics would be relevant here too.
I should add that in Canada, where there are no significant private universities and where faculty prestige is much less important than it is in the USA, the gap between TT professors and adjuncts is much lower. Where I now teach, the gap between TT assistant professors and full time lecturers is less than $10,000. Here, it is the full-time lecturers who are considered to have the cushy jobs (no PhD required, no research or admin, 3 months summer holidays, and teaching many sections of the same easy courses).
“Should there not be forces at work leading to convergence between the salaries of tenured professors and the salaries of adjuncts?”
Such as supply and demand? If the demand for adjuncts increases, adjuncts will have more bargaining power.
Just as the demand for tenured professors lessens their value, and therefore their ability to demand and get more.
For completeness sake- I’m not in any academic field and have little experience with the inner workings of academia. But the connection seems reasonable to me.
A better question is to ask what the force is holding Tenured Professors salaries up, or, indeed, preserving the Tenure system at all. (NB: A “freedom to make controversial statements” argument, these days, will produce much laughter.)
Aristo-Meritocrats preserve their positions by exploiting the tournament market, the gauntlet of which they themselves were both able and lucky enough to transit.
University of Texas economist Daniel Hamermesh says that some Texas politicians often call his Dean asking for his (Hamermesh’s) dismissal. So it is unusual, but not unheard of.
Tenure is part of salary & benefits. It survives because it is mutually advantageous. Both faculty and university admin prefer tenure to $X thousands more in salary (which would be the alternative in a competitive market). Faculty have peace of mind, administrators save money.