Troy

Elizabeth Gordon left Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute before the demands of her adjunct teaching job made her sick.

Gordon was in her 50s. She made $4,000 a course as an adjunct professor teaching English classes at RPI. She had no health insurance, no guarantee of employment beyond the end of the semester. There were long hours, and frequent snubs from the full-time faculty. Calculating her hourly rate of pay was an awful math equation, because it equalled $10 an hour. She said adjuncts can feel like scabs crossing a picket line when their ranks swell at universities as full-time faculty decline. As the size of her RPI writing classes grew, she worried the pace of grading, student meetings and course preparation was costing her health, which she didn't have insurance to cover.

"It was like being a volunteer serving the community because the pay was so low," she said.

That's why Gordon stopped teaching at RPI, which pays its adjuncts more than most universities. She has since found work teaching online courses for a university in Pennsylvania and lives in Cohoes, where the rent is cheap.

As an adjunct, she was used to the hustle. One semester, when she lived downstate, she taught six classes in two states. She has a bachelor's degree and studied for a master's of fine arts for two years. Still, it's better than some of her colleagues, who have Ph.D.s and work for Wal-Mart wages, with no health care. One man she knew taught 10 courses in one semester to make ends meet, about three times the course load of the average tenured professor.

An RPI spokesman declined comment.

It takes courage for an adjunct to talk to a reporter. Their livelihoods are on the line in a market saturated with able-bodied replacements.

The role of the adjunct is once again in the spotlight after longtime Duquesne University teacher Margaret Mary Vojtko, 83, died of a heart attack on her front lawn Sept. 1. A heap of medical bills were found in her home. She had worked for the school for more than two decades, with no health care. After her death, school officials defended their actions by saying they had offered priests to assist her.

Higher education is increasingly reliant on adjuncts. In 2009, they accounted for 41 percent of university faculty nationwide, up from 24 percent in 1975, according to the American Association of University Professors.

Some experts have cautioned that higher education is approaching a bubble. Student costs at a growing number of schools top $60,000 annually and continue to rise much faster than the rate of inflation, or 257 percent in the last three decades. Student debt averages $26,000. Most of the average college budget goes to employee costs. One way schools are cheating the cost conundrum is to staff up on adjuncts.

"You have a large group of people who are highly trained, these are people with Ph.D.s and years of experience who are barely making a living wage," said Bret Benjamin, president of the Albany chapter of United University Professions. Benjamin said it can be difficult to get a sense of just how many academics are employed by a college. At UAlbany, for instance, there are 442 part-time academics — most paid $2,800 a course — and an additional 50 full-time lecturers whose employment must be renewed every year, according to the UUP. That means about 45 percent of UAlbany's 1,000 faculty members are part of the growing reliance on adjuncts and contingent labor.

Benjamin said the conditions under which many of these people work impinge upon the instruction they provide. In addition, university oversight of courses taught by adjuncts, who can be cut at any time, is not as stringent as it is for full-time employees. He said schools do not appear to be looking for a way out of the labor situation.

"It has become so natural for universities to use this," he said.

Career move

A brief note about me. This is my last Campus Notebook column. I will start a job on Monday at Capital New York, the new Politico expansion into New York state. Thanks very much for reading and for your insight and comments. You can follow my work on Twitter @scottpwaldman.