Yes, morons.
Just think: these are the people who run the high-priced institutions that are supposed to teach our rising generations critical thinking, logic and life skills.
Would you let this happen?
The University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Reiterman who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, was paid to design the course, do the lectures, and plan the discussion sessions. She recommended a former student of hers who had just earned her bachelor’s degree to be hired as her teaching assistant. Administrators began the hiring process and copied Reiterman…causing her to discover that thanks to a 2022 strike settlement after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system walked off thee job to win pay increases and expanded benefits, many teaching assistants are earning more than lecturers, and in some cases, like this one, more than their supervisors and the instructors in their own classes. When Reiterman learned that her teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month, $300 more than her own monthly pay, she quit. It was not about the money, she told the Chronicle of Higher Education, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.” Reiterman dropped out as instructor for one class and arranged to teach another class in a different department with fewer students and no teaching assistant.
Brava! No weenie she.
Why did no ethics alarms ring for these administrators? I suspect that when your entire sense of fairness and equity is being mangled and distorted by compensatory benefit theories and DEI cant, little matters like paying a subordinate more than a supervisor with far more experience and credentials just doesn’t resonate the way it once would have, before The Great Stupid spread its dark bat-wings across the horizon, blotting out the sun.
Decades ago, running a foundation where my supervisor negotiated salaries after I decided on who to hire, my first male staff member extracted a higher salary than his equivalent female member on my staff, who had been there longer. I immediately pointed this out to my boss, who agreed to raise the salaries of the women on the staff to the same level. I didn’t even have to argue with him: he knew immediately that it was the only just course.
It’s so disheartening. One has to fight, working in my field, not to conclude, “Not only is a majority of the public cripplingly stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse, a frightening percentage of those who run our private and public organizations and institutions are also stupid, ignorant and ethically obtuse.” That way despair and madness lies.
But is it true?
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Pointer: TaxProf Blog
Ethics Alarms 
I agree it’s crazy, but there’s a deeper wrong embedded in the stupid wrong–the salary of adjuncts. Adjuncts are now essential to the functioning of almost all large higher educational institutions, and most small and medium ones as well. The market is saturated with people with PhDs, and they won’t give up the dream of teaching college easily or quickly. This creates a surplus labor force that ostensibly leftwing admins exploit like robber barons. At the same time, a largely leftwing professoriate goes along with it, wringing their hands, gee what could we do? The teaching load at most schools used to be 4/4 (that’s 4 in spring, 4 in fall) 100 years ago. It’s now 1/1 in truth for most professors at Harvard and similar schools with buyouts with grants (at my school, you bring in 35K as part of a grant, I think, and you give that to the school so you don’t have to teach 1 course, and the granters get more of your undivided work for that semester) and admin reductions (I directed a program this year, and so my normal 2-2 load went to 2-1). So you might be paying a professor 100K (or whatever) and only covering 3-4 courses a year. Which means there’s a lot more need for adjuncts. And check out the profit on that buyout. You replace a full time faculty with an adjunct making 5-8K per course! And of course, adjuncts often teach better than regular faculty, because if they suck in the classroom enough, they don’t get hired back, whereas profs who suck in the classroom, if they have tenure…well. However, I feel sorry for my students who have an adjunct prof as their favorite, because when its time for recommendations for law school or whatever, that prof may not be there…Meanwhile, the vast sums of money that kept swept into higher education are going to unbelievable amenities (food, gyms, dorms), supremely well paid coaches, stadiums, and a rapidly growing administrative class that pays itself astronomical salaries.
Republicans are going after left wing ideologies, safe spaces, crazy external speakers, BDS demonstrators, some of which may be important, some of which are rightwing moral panics, but they are missing the real problem–the administrative bloat and the misplaced priorities, plus a need to seriously revise tenure so that it protects the free inquiry of professors but not the slacking off in research and the classroom.
Rant ended.
Comment of the Day. My two years as a legal ethics adjunct fits right into your analysis. I was paid a $3,000 honorarium for the whole semester course, but, as is my fatal flaw, I wasn’t doing it for the money. (They didn’t invite me back because too many students complained about their grades being too low. I also woke up too late to the fact that I should have banned laptops from the classes.)
“You replace a full time faculty with an adjunct making 5-8K per course!”
I retired as a full professor a couple of years ago. (I was teaching 4/4, with one course release in semesters I directed a play.) One of my now-former colleagues was awarded a sabbatical this fall to have time to actually write the book she’s been researching for years. PhDs in theatre studies not being thick on the ground in small-town East Texas, I was asked to pick up a couple of her courses for the semester. Details have not yet been worked out (let’s just say that not everyone in the dean’s office is especially competent), but if I were to be offered as much as $5k per course, I’d fall over in a dead faint. (To be fair, I suspect the cost of living is considerably lower here than in Santa Cruz.)
I’m absolutely on board with your comments on administrative bloat and salary inflation for administrators. When my dad was a college president in the ’70s, his salary per se was actually less than that of a full professor who also taught summer school. He did get some perks, but not enough to make his total package worth much more than those of senior faculty.
When I retired from a comparable school, the president here was making over six times my salary even if I taught in the summer, over seven times as much if I didn’t. He was an idiot, a liar, and a narcissist, by the way, and a principal reason I retired when I did.
That’s fascinating! A career long enough to see the institution of higher ed radically change.
Are you familiar with the book Winner Take All Politics? It builds off the concept of winner take all economy, which is a documented phenomenon in which the gap between the top 1% in most professions and the median salary has just grown astronomically, throughout capitalist countries, but most of all in the US, and then in UK. And not just in market occupations, like banking, insurance, law, etc. But also in higher ed. The gap between the highest paid 1% on any campus and the media salary is just crushing now.
I remember during the pandemic, when we were letting all our adjuncts go pound sand, someone asked the interim GMU president if she, like so many college presidents, was going to take a salary cut of 10, 20, 25% as others were, along with top admins (and some of our top admins make well north of 400K). She said “that would just be symbolic, so no”. I was like hell yeah, it would be, and that’s a GOOD thing, but it would also be…real money. You take the top 20 GMU salaries, slice off 20%, distribute it to adjuncts…and they’d be making more money than they ever had. Of course, that sounds like emergency socialism….but not doing it sure looked like greed and protecting the greed/morale of your top staff.
To quote an authority no less impeccable than AOC, “it’s all about the Benjamins.” College and university presidents are tasked with bringing in as much money as possible to their school’s operating budgets and endowments. They are effectively CEOs who are compensated based on their school’s financial performance. If they make money for the stockholders, er, trustees, they get a goodly share of that money kicked back to them.
This is considerably less true at state universities (and ought to be even less so than it is), where the Regents are appointed by the governor to carry out the priorities of the political party in charge.
Again, it didn’t used to be so. Regents/Councilors/Trustees were once chosen for their willingness and ability to help the school. Now it’s how active they are in party politics.
Given the fact the headline included UC Santa Cruz, I expected something much, much worse. UC Santa Cruz actually acknowledges the ancient Greeks trod the earth? Didn’t they own slaves? Weren’t they, in large part, men, some of whom weren’t gay? Didn’t they have wars? Didn’t they do things like hold competitions against each other to determine who was better? Why study these goofballs?
Don’t buy the rightwing hype about how campuses don’t teach ancient history, or the Founding, that all they care about is wokeness, and spend all their time on Marx and cultural studies. I went through all the likely departments of all 8 Ivy league schools, looking for courses in Marxism. I found almost none (I was writing a piece on Marx’s 200th birthday for an intellectual journal). There’s a lot more Madison than Marx, and there always has been. I got a PhD without being required to read a word of Marx, although I make my PhD students read some selections from his early stuff. There are of course excesses of wokeness that take place, and a lot of faculty laugh at this stuff like you do.
Hear, hear!
That makes sense—I doubt that most Marxists have read Marx. When I took my Government theory course taught by Carl Friedrich (who wrote the West German Constitution, and Brazil’s, I think,) he read passages from Marx to us in German and translated them into English and Russian, explaining as he went that Marx was wildly mistranslated and in his view, misunderstood.
Boy, was HE intimidating.
I’m intimidated just reading it. But he still has nothing on Marx, who was fluent in German, French, and English, and had reading knowledge of Spanish, Latin, Greek, Italian, Russian, Dutch and some Nordic languages. Plus he did original research in infinitesimal calculus, along with his mastery of Hegelian philosophy and Ricardian economics. Smart guy to get so many things wrong. https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/01/19/marx-at-200/
We visited his grave in Highgate, the creepiest cemetery ever, in London. Perfect.
Back to Prof. Friedrich: he also read Plato to us in not just Greek (I’m Greek!), but ancient Greek, and again translated it saying that most versions were wrong. He put any ideas of my being a true scholar right out the window.
I went to St. John’s College, so we had to read Marx (and the rest).
-Jut
But seriously, UC Santa Cruz? Of all places? The most whacked out school of the most whacked out school system in the country? Why on earth would anyone possibly think they wouldn’t be teaching classical humanities?
So, the American Academy is just fine. Any concern is just right-wing hype. I didn’t know that. People like Bill Jacobson and FIRE are just making stuff up. There weren’t any hideous faculty and administration endorsed and even supported Jew hate festivities on campuses all over the country (until the end of the term. Tah tah, gotta go do my McKinsey internship, from the river to the sea yah!) That Georgetown Law Center adjunct didn’t get run out of Georgetown on a rail for observing black kids weren’t doing very well in her classes? Faculties aren’t almost exclusively self-identified as liberal or extremely liberal? Nothing to see here, move along. All is well.