ABSTRACT
In what must be regarded as an irony every bit as cruel as T. S. Eliot’s April, as more adjunct faculty like James Sullivan labored in the freshman classroom for a salary that frequently fell below the minimum wage, critics of higher education continued their assaults throughout the 1980s and ’90s on an “overpaid, grotesquely underworked” professoriate living the good life at the tuition payer’s expense. Such critics, however, often echoing the list of “indictments” with which Charles J. Sykes introduces Profscam (1988) as we just have, typically haven’t bothered to look very hard at higher education in America and the status of the people actually teaching introductory mathematics, English, or Spanish. Or, for that matter, bothered to credit the industry of the vast majority of tenured faculty on today’s college campuses. The numbers don’t lie: in 1993, 47 percent of the teachers at the nation’s colleges and universities were part-time or “non-tenure-eligible” faculty working for little pay and often less job security (see Table 1);1 another 18 percent were graduate students who, increasingly, borrow more and more money to supplement the meager stipends they earn teaching. Nor have critics like Sykes actually made any effort to discover what life is like for a growing number of Ph.D.’s in English, history, sociology, and French, earning a salary just above the minimum wage if they can successfully cobble together a career teaching two classes here, two or three there, a town or two away down the highway. Our later entry on part-time faculty attempts to provide a glimpse
of their lives. In this essay, however, we hope to extrapolate from such sobering statistics a definition of what the term faculty might mean in the new millennium.
