Most Georgetown students have probably given thought to a labor issue at some point in their lives. Perhaps you make an effort to buy fair-trade coffee, or maybe you have done economics homework on the effects of raising the minimum wage. There’s a chance that you’ve even attended a rally to improve working conditions in a factory. You might be surprised to learn, then, that nearly half of the people teaching you at Georgetown are not paid a living wage.
Members of the Georgetown community ought to care about this, primarily from the perspective of fairness. Part-time faculty members make up almost 48 percent of the instructional faculty here at Georgetown. In 2010, the total average salary for a full-time instructional faculty member was $107,601. By contrast, adjunct faculty members at Georgetown are typically paid around $7,000 for every three-credit course they teach, a figure that does not square with our tuition price tag. To put this in perspective, an adjunct professor who attempted to make a gainful career by teaching six courses per academic year — far more than a full professor’s teaching load — would only earn $42,000 annually with no benefits. That said, it is typically not possible for adjuncts to secure this many courses, so in practice, earning $42,000 is nearly impossible.
We are not against the compensation of full-time faculty; we recognize and value their research and administrative duties and understand their importance to the Georgetown community. Rather, our concern is for just compensation for adjunct faculty — members of the community who also bring high value to the classroom and are critical to students’ learning experience.
This should give students pause to think about where our tuition dollars are going. No student needs to be reminded of how expensive Georgetown tuition is. The 2011-2012 academic year Georgetown undergraduate tuition was $40,920. In that year, each student paid approximately $4,000 to enroll in a class, which means that a class of 25 students produced $100,000 in revenue for Georgetown. Only a very small fraction of this sum returns to a part-time professor as compensation. How can it be the case that most of us are taking on extraordinarily high education debt while many of those working to educate us are paid such a low wage and are denied benefits? Where is our tuition going? And, perhaps more importantly, what does this say about what we value?
Finally, from a self-interested perspective, many of us graduate students are future adjuncts. Educating undergraduate and graduate students is demanding and important work, and it should be a viable career path. To be sure, the adjunct community at Georgetown is diverse; many adjunct professors hold full-time positions elsewhere, and many wish only to teach a single course in a year. However, there are many adjunct faculty members who wish to be full-time academics and should have the opportunity to do so. If students in our generation knew that nearly half of the faculty at one of the nation’s top universities are so undervalued, this would be likely to have a chilling effect on our consideration of academia as a career option down the line.
The adjunct faculty members at Georgetown are currently in the process of voting on whether to form a union, with ballots due May 3. We urge those adjunct faculty members reading this to vote yes. The entire teaching population at Georgetown deserves fair compensation for important and demanding work. All professors deserve compensation and benefits that are commensurate with their qualifications and experience. To fellow students reading this, we urge you to support the many adjunct professors who have educated you during your time at Georgetown. We should all demand better of our institution.
KATE ROSENBERG and ANNE DAVIS are graduate students at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute
