Underpaid Adjunct Professors Sleep in Cars and Rely on Public Aid

Adjunct professors are the minimum-wage temp workers of academia. Underpaid, overworked, with no benefits and no job security, their numbers have ballooned in recent decades. They are part of what Herb Childress calls “hope labor,” in his new book, The Adjunct Underclass. Childress quotes researchers who define hope labor as “un- or under-compensated work carried out in the present, often for experience or exposure, in the hope that future employment opportunities may follow.” For most adjuncts, that hope comes to nothing.  Read more.