I picked up A City on Mars yesterday and I was reading the author bio on the back cover.
It said “Dr. Kelley Weinersmith is an adjunct faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice University.” And I thought “Huh, I didn’t know they lived in Houston.” But then I read “The Weinersmiths live on an old farm in Virginia with their two children.”
How does that work? I’m not sure exactly what an adjunct faculty member does but I would have assumed it requires some regular presence on campus. Does Weinersmith commute between Virginia and Texas every week? Or is she able to work remotely from her home? Or is my assumption wrong and an adjunct faculty member job only requires you to drop in a few times a year?
A friend of mine lives in Chicago and teaches an accelerated course in northern Indiana once a year. He takes the train or drives in a few times a week for 6 weeks.
I suppose it could be a zero-percent position for some paperwork reason that does not actually require the person to do anything that requires physically being there (it is possible for some research to be done remotely, of course).
However, the title “adjunct” strongly suggests that a person is being fucked over, required to teach multiple courses for free (or for compensation so ludicrous it is arguably worse than working for free):
so I don’t know.
Though I have met people with (normal, not adjunct) faculty positions who commuted very long distances, interstate.
Depends really - I had a couple of high school teachers who were adjunct professors at a nearby university. They didn’t actually work at the university , they taught AP Bio at my high school and the “adjunct” was related to the fact that if I attended that university, I would have gotten credit for that class just as if I had taken it on campus. No AP test, no " you’re exempt from Bio 101, but you need to make up the credits". I’m also pretty sure I’ve seen doctors in private practice who are adjunct professors at a medical school. I doubt any of them were paid.
Also lives “on an old farm in Virginia” can mean lots of things. Commuting every week , is one possibility but I’ve known many people who work in one place M-F and call the place they live on weekends “home” They consider themselves to live in the weekend place, just as people who travel every M-F do.
I wonder if this Weinersmith doesn’t teach any courses but just does research.
This is not a normal adjunct faculty appointment arrangement.
Kelly and Zach’s main sources of business income are the SMBC comic and its various related enterprises, and the books they co-write. Kelly was adjunct at Rice, then moved, but maintains an adjunct appointment at Rice so that she has an academic affiliation. The arrangement costs Rice nothing, gives them free press, and she occasionally might teach a course, but (in her own words) she’s affiliated through research. A win-win for everyone around.
Similarly, Isaac Asimov was officially a Professor Emeritus at Columbia. As he started spending more time on his writing and less on his research, the university decided that they couldn’t justify paying him any more. Fine, Asimov said, then don’t pay me… but I have tenure, so you can’t just take away my affiliation.
That said, in recent years, a lot of college classes have been all-online, anyway. Teaching an all-online class sounds to me like the poster child for a job that can be done remotely.
Nitpick: Boston University, not Columbia. He got his Ph.D. at Columbia.
Most universities, at least around here, allow people with merely Master’s Degrees to teach courses on a contractor-like basis. I know of several of my friends who have done so. They always were called adjunct professors.
When I see the words adjunct professors, I assume a tangential relationship with that college. It’s a nice way of saying “this person has some expertise but we’re not paying for health benefits.”
While this particular case sounds like it’s unusual, the adjunct thing is kind of a red herring – at colleges that have leaned heavily into offering courses online, full-time faculty can and do work remotely on a regular basis. We’ve had a geography professor for years who lives half a continent away and teaches exclusively online courses. She’s not tenure-track, but is full-time, and her job is probably secure for as long as we’re offering geography courses at all. Right now, I have a couple of other tenured colleagues who are planning to retire or leave at the end of the year, and intend to relocate before that and teach exclusively online in the spring. It’s not at all unusual these days.
I have a colleague whose previous job was at UC Berkeley. He was full-time tenure track and I think already had tenure. His wife worked on Wall Street. He commuted from New York to Berkeley spending 3 or 4 days a week there. Many college courses meet twice a week. So if you teach say T -TH you could fly in Monday and fly back Th evening.
“Adjunct” roughly means “part time.” Adjunct faculty members are those who are hired on a semester-by-semester basis to teach one or more classes and are paid by the class (as opposed to a salary). (It’s possible they might be hired to do other things besides teach classes, but that’s something I don’t personally have experience with.)
Some adjuncts want to be full-time, permanent employees but are taking what they can get. Others only want to teach a class or two, because they have day jobs, or they’re retired, or they want something to do while their kids are in school.
Full-time faculty members do more than just teach classes, which may include: they do their own research, supervise student research, advise students, serve on committees, and do various other things that contribute to the running of a college or university. Some of these duties may well require the professor to be physically on campus, even if teaching online classes does not.
The ladder in colleges is Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor (often referred to as full Professor.) Becoming an Associate Professor means tenure, which does indeed protect from at-will removal.
At least it used to, although Republican governors are trying to change that.
Most likely, he teaches one term a year and flies in for the term. And sometimes, if the professor is prestigious enough, the school will cover costs and pay them decently for the term. He also may have some arrangement for housing (some professors get free housing in apartments in the dorms).
I know that, being a retired tenured professor myself. I was comparing adjunct professors to other non-professorial jobs which do not have protection.
And BTW, associate doesn’t automatically mean tenure. That varies from college to college. In some places (Yale, Harvard, and U of Chicago I’m pretty sure) all associates are untenured. In other places (Ohio State and most state schools I think) all associates are tenured. And in some places (MIT, Princeton) some associate professors are tenured and some are not.
There’s also a distinction between “tenure track” and “tenure”. As I understand it, “tenure track” means “not actually tenured yet, but the expectation is that you will be eventually, so long as you don’t perform really poorly”.
By contrast, an adjunct might hope to eventually get tenure, but then again they might also hope to find a winning billion-dollar Powerball ticket lying on the sidewalk.