The Death of an Adjunct

And those circumstances, her friends seethe, were the hardships Thea faced as an adjunct professor, as a member of academia’s underclass. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues. Pioneering: a coveted designation to have when entering the academic job market, and one of the reasons Thea did not wait long before landing a position at Western Connecticut State University in 2004, soon after completing her dissertation.

Source: www.theatlantic.com