Will That Come from Your Tuition Or Mine?

Written by Daniel on April 27, 2008 – 11:56 am -

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The Theology Department has called on the University to provide health benefits to adjunct professors. At the law school, we joke that “adjunct” is Latin for “has a day job.” But apparently for lots of adjuncts in other departments, they cobble together a living from teaching a number of classes adjunct at several different schools. This leads Eric Lombardi, columnist for the Marquette Tribune, to conclude:

Essentially the administration thinks it’s more important to pay a coach $1.6 million a year to teach boys how to bounce basketballs than to provide fair benefits to its professors.

My thoughts are these: The money is there and if we’re going to call ourselves Catholic and we’re going to teach Catholic doctrine, which emphasizes the value of human life, then we better be ready to back up that teaching.

My thought is this: the money is just not “there” because Mr. Lombardi says it is. The Athletics Department runs its own budget, and a cut in the coach’s salary is not going to result in more spending money on the academic side. Moveover, Mr. Lombardi first ought to figure out if a cut would cover the benefits he’s talking about - If we’re talking about 40 professors, plus their families potentially, that could be a huge outlay.

Maybe rather than a conversation about health benefits for adjuncts who teach full-time, we should be talking about making sure our adjuncts are just that, adjuncts, and that we have real, tenure-track faculty lines to teach the number of classes we need.

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3 Comments to “Will That Come from Your Tuition Or Mine?”

  1. Dan Says:
    April 27th, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Also, Mr. Lombardi fails to realize that the basketball coach’s salary is paid by a small group of donors. Donors who want their money to go to the basketball program, not to pay for adjunct professors.

    I have no idea why this is so hard for some people at MU to grasp.

  2. The General Says:
    April 27th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

    Keep in mind that this is the same gaggle of intellectual morons who will whine and moan in about 2, 3 years when MU tuition cracks $30K a year about how the poor and middle-class students are being squeezed out of Marquette.

    Even if Lombardi understands that fact, Dan, from what I’ve read all year in his columns, he’s pretty good at ignoring facts when he or any of the Tribune writers want a cheap excuse to rip on the athletic department and basketball program.

  3. Jane Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 8:22 am

    Let’s be serious: a major (if not the major) reason tuition keeps increasing across all colleges and universities is the ballooning of university administrations. I’d start there with funding cuts.

    Also, it’s a really crappy market for anyone with a Masters or Doctorate in any humanity or social science looking to teach. Finding a full-time tenure track position is like hitting the lottery.

    Perhaps universities should re-prioritze.

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