Glenn Harlan Reynolds

We’ve heard a lot about the problem of inequality in America over recent years. But most of that talk has ignored one of the very worst pockets of inequality in American society. I speak, of course, of the American university system and its treatment of adjunct professors and graduate students.

Academics seem to think that the business world is a feudal environment characterized by huge status differentials and abusive treatment of underlings. They think that because, to be honest, that’s a pretty good characterization of . . . the modern university, where serfs in the form of adjunct professors toil in the vineyards.

As a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports: “Tenured faculty represent only 17% of college instructors. Part-time adjuncts are now the majority of the professoriate and its fastest-growing segment. From 1975 to 2011, the number of part-time adjuncts quadrupled. And the so-called part-time designation is misleading because most of them are piecing together teaching jobs at multiple institutions simultaneously. A 2014 congressional report suggests that 89% of adjuncts work at more than one institution; 13% work at four or more. The need for several appointments becomes obvious when we realize how little any one of them pays. In 2013, The Chronicle began collecting data on salary and benefits from adjuncts across the country. An English- department adjunct at Berkeley, for example, received $6,500 to teach a full-semester course. It’s easy to lose sight of all the people struggling beneath the data points. $7,000 at Duke. $6,000 at Columbia. $5,950 at the University of Iowa.”

And those are the high-paying schools. The article reports that the average salary received by an adjunct for a single course is just $2,700, and 31% of part-time faculty members live below the poverty line. We’ve heard a lot about low-paid Walmart employees having to collect food stamps to make ends meet, but what about adjunct professors? It’s gotten so bad that in 2014, over 500 adjuncts petitioned the Labor Department over working conditions.

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Today universities have a two-tier class system: Tenured professors and administrators on top, with generous pay and benefits and job security, while many (in some places most) required courses are being taught by the equivalent of serfs, with low pay, no job security, and little in the way of status.

This is happening even as tuitions are skyrocketing and the numbers of (much better paid) university administrators are mushrooming. In The Fall Of The Faculty, Johns Hopkins professor Benjamin Ginsberg reports that although student-faculty ratios fell slightly between 1975 and 2005, from 16-to-1 to 15-to-1, the student-to-administrator ratio fell from 84-to-1 to 68-to-1, and the student-to-professional-staff ratio fell from 50-to-1 to 21-to-1. Ginsberg concludes: "Apparently, when colleges and universities had more money to spend, they chose not to spend it on expanding their instructional resources, i.e. faculty. They chose, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources."

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A growing army of administrators, standing on the backs of underpaid and overworked adjunct professors, is the kind of exploitative two-tier system that people on the left typically denounce. But now, although there’s a bit of support for graduate students and adjuncts who want to unionize, there’s nothing like the “Fight for 15” movement aimed at ending this unfairness. And, weirdly, no school is hiring “adjunct administrators.”

And that’s an opportunity for President Trump and his administration. After all, Trump has spoken out on behalf of American workers victimized by outsourcing and abusive H1B “guest worker” visas. Universities’ move to replace full-time faculty jobs with poorly paid part-timers is something similar, and offers an opportunity for Trump to stand up on behalf of exploited workers in this important sector of the American economy.

Thus, a modest proposal: Now that Betsy DeVos has been confirmed as Secretary of Education, she should look into the way universities treat their adjuncts, and consider setting limits on how much teaching colleges and universities that receive federal funds can outsource work to low paid serfs, and perhaps on how much administrative bloat the government will permit.

It needs to be done. In the name of economic fairness!

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

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