[lbo-talk] Academic salaries

[Michael McIntyre]

Two notes needed here:
(1) There's substantial variance even among full-time salaries.   
Salaries in most of the Liberal Arts & Sciences are substantially  
lower than these averages.  Having a viable exit option (law profs,  
computer science profs, etc.) makes a big difference.
(2) The AAUP data explicitly does not include the salaries of part- 
time faculty.  This is where the real scandal lies.  At DePaul, a  
part-time adjunct can teach no more than 6 courses per year.  Since  
the normal teaching load is 7 per year, that's almost a full-time  
load.  The top salary for a part-timer teaching six courses is a bit  
under $25,000, with very limited benefits.  The current AAUP fact  
sheet says that part-time faculty make up 46% of faculty (http:// 
www.aaup.org/AAUP/issuesed/contingent/contingentfacts.htm), so this  
isn't a small population.  Faculty with full-time appointments aren't  
among the wretched of the earth, but adjuncts are terribly exploited.

Michael McIntyre

From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] 15% of the Population, 2 Hours per Weekend,

	(was Development of Political Underdevelopment)

For all the postsecondary teaching occupations, there is no mean
hourly wage published - as footnote 4 says, "Hourly wage rates for
some occupations where workers typically work fewer than 2,080 hours
per year are not available" - so the second part of note 2 applies,
i.e., the annual wage has been directly calculated from the survey.

By the way, here are the average salaries from the most recent AAUP
survey, as published by the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

                  professor   assoc prof assist prof  instructor
I (doctoral)     102,962      73,570      62,591      45,539
IIA (masters)     76,782      61,719      51,875      42,062
IIB (bachelors)   69,613      55,989      47,230      40,099
III (2-yr)        63,609      53,030      45,900      39,528
all               77,051      60,505      51,193      41,621

The median annual salary for a U.S. worker, reported in the same BLS
table, works out to $29,432/year (median hourly * 2,080 hours, and
that's for 12 months, not 9 months, of work); the mean, $37,870. I
really think that academics have a hard time arguing that their job
places them among the wretched of the earth - and to steal a phrase
from Bob Dole on why he wanted to be vice president, it's "indoor
work, no heavy lifting."

Doug