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Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

theguardian.com

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Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#21

Post by SubiculumCode »

A friend of a friend is an adjunct. His college has put him and 20 other adjuncts into a single classroom to serve as their offices..open floor plan?

When students come in to talk, they must do in a room filled with other students and adjuncts. As we know, these conversations often include quite personal details. After complaining to the dean, the dean responded something to the effect, "I realize that you don't have access to the big picture, so let us worry about the big picture and feel assured that this is necessary."

Outrageous.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#22

Post by tkyjonathan »

pwaivers wrote: post #12

There is only one academic who turned to sex work in this article right? Unless I missed some one else the article mentioned. This is a very specific example and paints with a broad paintbrush.

Are you saying that this news article is anecdotal and incorrect about the actual situation? It seems to me that as a whole, the situation with adjunct teachers is quite bad..

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#23

Post by thearn4 »

vkou wrote: post #18
Overtonwindow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reform the tenure system and place caps on university administrators pay.

Tenure's not the problem, the problem is that in their academic career, a PHD will produce X new PHDs. Where X is substantially greater than 1. Until this is fixed, it doesn't matter if academic jobs are for life, or are contracts that get renewed (or not) every 8 hours. This pyramid scheme was fine while demand for PHDs was increasing (By industry, and growth of academia), but now its really not (Industry doesn't wa…

As a PhD who never went into academia, I can easily take the pledge not to have any (academic) children.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#24

Post by aaron-lebo »

KirinDave wrote: post #9

For those who have university degrees, this should be a difficult read. Next time you say to yourself, "Sure, I went to college. I know that's a privilege, but I worked hard there and made it because of my hard work and nothing else!" Remember this article. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's a phenomenon that's becoming more acute. Even if we ignore the adjuncts, the brilliant folks who taught us all what we know…

It's not just the adjuncts, it is graduate students, too.

I've got friends who are working on their PhDs while teaching 4-5 classes (at other locations). I considered being a TA a few years ago, but you couldn't have a second job. The stipend as a TA was $1300 a month + tuition for 40 hour weeks (may have actually been "20" hour weeks, not certain). Yeah, right.

It's pretty screwed up. It's a privilege to be in higher education but it is also pretty crushing and you've got to be a soldier to deal with it. The worst part is I've almost never met anything but great people who willingly put themselves through it.

It's why as an overeducated graduate student, I'm against expanding education more and more (like free community college for all). The incentives are way off currently, not sure what the solution is, but it has to change.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#25

Post by yardie »

qaq wrote: post #2

The explosion of administrative staff is crazy universities keep cutting teaching positions and increasing admin.

I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals.

I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget.

I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#26

Post by wehadfun »

I would like to know which universities these people work at. Are they Billion dollar universities or are these lower tier schools. Regardless schools care more about money then education and enslave their students in debt, send their athletes on the road for week missing class, and literally pimp out there professors.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#28

Post by Analog24 »

KirinDave wrote: post #9

For those who have university degrees, this should be a difficult read. Next time you say to yourself, "Sure, I went to college. I know that's a privilege, but I worked hard there and made it because of my hard work and nothing else!" Remember this article. This isn't a new phenomenon, but it's a phenomenon that's becoming more acute. Even if we ignore the adjuncts, the brilliant folks who taught us all what we know…

University of California salaries are shared publicly. I haven't actually crunched the numbers but it seems like an average salary is around 150k for professors in research based fields. That's well over half of the median salary in almost any profession.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#29

Post by yardie »

jacquesm wrote: post #6

Reminds me of the former Eastbloc countries where you will find scientists as janitors and living in terrible conditions. Not that people who are not scientists don't live in terrible conditions but you would never expect a maths or physics professor to be unemployable. Even here in NL there are niche websites that pretend to be dating sites but that actually are sites where students are hooked up with 'sugar daddy's…

Don't even need to go east. Cuba is that way right now. Bartenders, cab drivers, and prostitutes with PhDs.

Re: Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars

#30

Post by conjectures »

GuiA wrote: post #11

“I feel committed to being the person who’s there to help millennials, the next generation, go on to become critical thinkers,” she said. “And I’m really good at it, and I really like it. And it’s heartbreaking to me it doesn’t pay what I feel it should.” Sadly, there are more people with that kind of deep calling and sense of duty to the next generation willing to put it above a better salary than universities need,…

This. It should be pointed out that for individual decision making for someone in this situation that opting out may not only improve their own prospects, but also benefit those still hanging on in this career.
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