I feel the need to qualify this, although there was a time when I agreed with the statement entirely.
The revised version:

“This is a job you do because you love it, and have enough money to live on.”

Wonderful though both teaching and research are – and however much I miss them – it is cruel and unreasonable to expect people to do that work – and yes, it IS work even when it is enjoyable – without paying them a living wage. “The work is its own reward” is a fine sentiment, but it doesn’t pay the rent or buy the groceries or cover the emergency root canal.

I wish we would, as a society, get over the idea that work that people enjoy deserves less renumeration than work that they help. And who gets to decide that, anyway? Who is to say that doctors and plumbers and professional baseball players don’t enjoy their work?

But that still doesn’t justify radically divergent pay-scales for different groups with fundamentally similar qualifications. The steady differentiation between ‘full-time’ and ‘part-time’ faculty may be part of the ongoing commodification of expertise, but paradoxically, it also contributes to our ongoing movement (back) towards a society of estates in which privilege and distinction, not qualification, are primary determinants of status, and in which rent-seeking, not profit, drives all sorts of economic decisions.

New Kid, when I was an instructor a thing we all knew, and talked about regularly, was how much better teachers we were than the regular faculty, who were burnt out, taught from their dusty old notes, were lost in their own little worlds, and couldn’t be bothered to show up for their office hours. Even then I recognized this as a self-serving group ideology, just as it seemed clear to us that the horror of pampered tenured faculty at honest workloads is a self-serving group ideology. And until recently community colleges wouldn’t even look at someone with a Ph.D., because they just assumed they’d be a prima donna.

I’ve played on both teams now. I’ve taught 6-6 and 7-7 in consecutive years, and I will say that at that rate my performance did noticeably degrade, I lost focus, cut corners, had no life, and began to burn out. 4-4 I can do standing on my head, and 5-5 isn’t too scary although I wouldn’t want to try to do that and keep any kind of research programme going. I expect the thresholds are different for different people in different situations. I interviewed at an R1 when I came out with a guy who was producing a book every two years. If that’s the priority a 2-1 makes a lot of sense to me.

A lot of what I do doesn’t feel like work to me. This is a job you do because you love it; in my considered view as a historian, one of the best jobs humans have ever invented. There are plenty of people who feel that way, and that’s what the UT system is relying on, a constantly renewed pool of willing eggheads. When they say their system works, they’re right.

Holy shit. One question to ask that I didn’t see in the article: what is the number of students per class, not that that justifies the peanuts.

Last year, adjuncting in Missouri I was offered 1800$ to teach a course by a dean. I sent back a letter asking him if he was joking, and they bumped it up to a slightly-less-embarrassing 2200$…

On the other… it seems a little unfair to say that no one can teach 5-5 with any degree of attention or focus to students. Many many community colleges carry that kind of load, and I’d hate to say that everyone working at those schools is short-changing their students.

BUT… for $15K a year without benefits? No, that is NOT going to create a good educational environment. I agree with Carl that this kind of work has become a kind of de facto apprenticeship, but it’s a crappy, exploitative one. The awful thing is that in many cases, you *need* to have adjuncting experience to look competitive in a search pool (because everyone *else* has that experience too – and I’ve been places where they don’t like complete newbies, they want you to be able to hit the ground running), but too much of that experience, and you’re stale, old news.

Since I’m not, I don’t.

In some respects, though, I think it was a good thing to go through that period of profound disillusionment – it’s given me a better sense of my worth, and I’m less likely to put up with this sort of exploitation in the hopes that it will produce something better down the line.

If adjuncting was ever an apprenticeship, that system is now broken.