I was a professor at four universities. I still couldn’t make ends meet. - The Washington Post: Why are universities relying so heavily on this type of labor? According to Marisa Allison, co-author of the George Mason University survey, administrative bloat is at least partly to blame. “The university is the only space where you’ve seen an increase in middle management, in jobs that were never there before,” she says. “That is definitely a culprit.” In places like Virginia, sharp cuts in state funding for higher education are also leading universities to curb costs. Others point to rising executive compensation, especially for campus presidents.
And there are the graduate programs, which keep churning out people with MAs or PhDs, even though there aren’t enough positions for these graduates to move into. For many of us, our graduate programs didn’t tell us that teaching in academia was no longer a guaranteed — or even sane — route on which to rely.