Enough's enough: Contract teaching at a Canadian University - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/enoughs-enough-6c56afe36d00 <comment><USER3> I've been fortunate enough to have Andrew (the author) as my Physics prof, last year.

Although I've always enjoyed and understood physics (to my own share) before, the way he taught it all of a sudden made everything much more clear. I could see the connections between each concept and the next.

To be able to teach this well, indeed requires a lot of experience; and as much hard work and passion; and Andrew does/has all of that, despite all these issues.

> I would like to give my students the very best learning experience that I > possibly can.

I could't agree more. Not only is he knowledgeable, but he's also great at conveying it.

I'm writing this comment in a hurry but I really felt I had to write it. I'll write a follow up in near future; and I'll try to explain the situtation from a student's point of view too. All I can say right now is that this is not what he (and many other Contract Instructors) deserves.

If you ever read this, Andrew, I'd like to thank you again for all you've done for me, and many others. Please keep aspiring and inspiring us.

<comment><USER4> In my experience in governance at A Highly Ranked Canadian Research University, where most top administrative posts were held by tenured professors, they tend to take the view of "well, I successfully negotiated the gauntlet of obtaining tenure through my research, if you can't do the same, tough luck."

Dean, department head and provostial positions are heavily weighted toward highly successful researchers who have effectively "retired" into administration and seem not to consider teaching to be one of the university's core functions.

It's easier to convince these people to hire another janitor @ $70k/year than to give a contract teacher a full-time job at the same salary since to them bringing non-researchers into the ranks of permanent faculty is equivalent to letting the barbarians into Rome.

<comment><USER5> The last paragraph from one of his follow-up articles, The Importance of Going Viral, is relevant:

"In fact the response has been overwhelmingly positive from everyone, except regular faculty. Not one message of support from anyone in a tenured position, in Physics or any other department. The status quo has considerable appeal when you are in the position of privilege."

<comment><USER6> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" (Upton Sinclair)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel for the author. I really do; we need great teachers giving their best to the students, and it won't happen unless they're not living in poverty. On a more personal level, it sucks to feel like you have to heavily compromise for your dream job.

I was on a similar path about 4 years ago- 2 years into a PhD, preparing myself for a career in academia devoted to the two intellectual loves of my life: computer science research and teaching. And then I saw my older lab mates on the verge of graduation, struggling to get a decent offer that wasn't halfway around the world. I saw post docs in my lab, who had been working hard for years for very little pay and no prospect of "tenure track" anytime soon.

What did I do? I left for startup landia, where a company was willing to pay me 3x more than I could have made as a post doc 5 years later (and many times more what I made as a grad student). Now I work in R&D at a large company, paid way more than even a tenured professor (and I'm not even considered senior yet). The research is different, but just as gratifying at the end of the day. And I get to teach by volunteering for a non profit over the weekends.

Does it suck that I had to leave academia for a comfortable life? Absolutely. I wish I could have been a professor. But you have to vote with your feet, because as long as you accept the conditions imposed by the university, well nothing's going to change- why would they? Writing blog posts and sending ranty emails to students (who probably don't give a shit) isn't going to change much at all.

If you want to have an impact, quit your job and go somewhere else. Right now universities can afford to pay professors (ie the only ones doing real work) like shit and give great bonuses to administrators because professors are okay with this. Yes, that's right: you might be writing a blog post saying how upset you are, but at the end of the day, if you're employed by them then you agree with them. Things will change if enough professors quit and universities have to offer better pays to get quality teachers; but as long as that doesn't happen, things won't change.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Ironically, it seems many academics don't do the research to see what happens with a career in academia.

The market will pay for jobs at their replacement cost. If a stream of aspiring professors are willing to work for near poverty wages, with the occasional complaint, that is what they'll get. Why would the administration pay more?

(If a gas station starts charging $10/gallon, you get your supplies from another. Even if gas provides tremendous value to you, and you internally value it at $100/gal. Only if fuel isn't available elsewhere do you pay the higher cost.)

<comment><USER9> I think it's because the academics start off as trusting students. At my school the professors kept telling us how wonderful it is to have a math degree and that you'll do this and that no problem. They push you to go to graduate school because you show promise. Only to be paid very little and have a difficult future. Of course you don't do your due diligence at first because you trust your profs. And by the time you get to graduate school there is a sort of momentum that keeps you in.

<comment><USER10> As Someone who was an undergrad in philosphy; none of my professors were pushing for grad school, they know the market is flooded.

<comment><USER11> Physics is a field that has been irresponsible about this for years, at least since the first PhD unemployment crisis of 1969. Most other fields practice "birth control", and professors in many fields are shocked when they see that fewer than 5% of physics PhD(s) stay in the field.

This guy unfortunately has a bad bargaining position because (i) there are a lot of people to replace him, and (ii) most of them come from the third world so the opportunity to live in Canada and get paid $34,000 in loonies looks great to them.

(The other area of academia that is this bad is biotech, where you can spend as long as you like in postdocs, but getting to a tenured position is unlikely)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Universities don't offer any more than they have to. Apparently you can pay less than $30k a year to get a hard-working instructor with a Phd to teach your students. So, that's what they do. I'm sure this guy is awesome, but the reason he's being offered a pittance is because he and the people like him will accept it. If nobody would teach classes for less than $50k, then that's what they'd get paid.

It's the flip side of the big companies complaining about a skills shortage and advocating for increased immigration. Yeah, it's hard to hire an engineer in Silicon Valley for peanuts. But there's no god given right to be able to hire cheap labour, and if you really want to hire someone, pay the market rate, or stop whining about it.

I'm also not thrilled by the email he sent the student. I feel like communicating with students outside of class time is absolutely part of the job of instructor; his email reads to me like someone saying "I'm not paid enough to do the entire job I was hired for". That wouldn't fly in any other context. If he decided to just not show up to some lectures he was hired to teach, what would the university say if he told them he wasn't being paid enough to attend every class? He may be dealing with a shitty deal from the administratio, but passing it along to those even weaker than him is hardly admirable.

Now, despite my tone above, I am sympathetic. He's doing a crap job for little pay. I have empathy for him! But he's the one who signed up to do a crap job for little pay, and keeps signing up to do it again every year. And that makes him part of the problem.

Ultimately, there's only so many teaching slots available, and there's a fuckton of Phd graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment terms. Doubling the salary won't increase the number of teaching slots available (more likely decrease it), and it won't decrease the number of Phd grads looking to teach (it would absolutely increase it). Academia is already a lottery where the many chase the tiny number of tenure slots; does making the competition even fiercer and more Darwinian help improve the fairness?

<comment><USER13> > there's only so many teaching slots available, and there's a fuckton of Phd > graduates desperate to obtain one regardless of the salary or employment > terms

This is another problem produced by academic exploitation. Ph.D. students are produced 10-to-1 relative to tenure track jobs. Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year.

The answer is that grad students, like adjuncts, free the professors from the most onerous aspect of teaching classes: doing all the grading. In exchange for tuition and stipend, grad students have to serve as TAs once or twice a year (in some departments they can also take positions as Research Assistants or as administrators for undergrad programs). Some grad students will get the opportunity to sole-teach their own seminars. Because professors do not want to teach, and want to focus entirely on their personal research program and publications, having an excess of grad students around to grade, guest lecture, and fill out the course offerings every semester is worth the $25-$35,000 annual stipend (about the same that the adjunct professor writing this article makes).

You're right that universities don't have to offer any more than $35,000 + shitty benefits + no job security, because the adjuncts and grad students will still take the opportunity believing that it might turn into an opportunity to move up into the professoriate if they just work hard enough or if their next publication is just a little more brilliant. Doesn't change the fact that it's still a cynical and hypocritical exploitation of the "intellectual reserve army of labor" (to paraphrase Marx). Universities are some of the most leftist institutions in North America, but the professoriate and deanery are perfectly fine with naked exploitation both on the supply side (grad students) and the demand side (adjuncts).

If departments need graders, they should hire masters students rather than admit Ph.D. students and then cynically consume 5–10 years of their life. If departments need teachers to supplement their researchers, they should create a position distinct from tenure-track professor/reader, perhaps "lecturer," but that is not "part-time"/contract work and is compensated appropriately.

<comment><USER14> _This is another problem produced by academic exploitation. Ph.D. students are produced 10-to-1 relative to tenure track jobs. Why would universities eat $50-60,000 in tuition and pay $25–35,000 in stipends per year per graduate student if they know they are over-enrolling? It 's not like Ph.D. students bring money into a department, regardless of their level of "desperation" to get a terminal degree. That's a big and unnecessary loss to take every single year._

In my field, no competent grad student paid tuition, and it wasn't a meaningful measure of value or cost. Nobody would have accepted an offer from a grad program that didn't provide a full ride. So tuition was basically funny money, like a "list price" that is always discounted.

My research work brought in enough grant money to pay for my stipend plus equipment and other expenses. If anybody was taking a loss, it was the National Science Foundation.

<comment><USER13> Grants are easier to come by in certain fields than in others. Natural sciences, for the most part, have it much easier than social sciences and humanities.

Tuition begins to matter when students lose funding. Then it's no longer "funny money." According to the Ph.D. completion project, between 50–60% of students that enter a Ph.D. program finish it by the 10 year mark: [http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/book1_quant.asp](http://www.phdcompletion.org/quantitative/book1_quant.asp)

Most programs guarantee funding only through the first 4–6 years. Some programs make students compete against one another for quasi-guaranteed funding after a certain point.

A substantial minority of graduate students are either going to quit the program with only a masters degree to show for it or are going to end up paying tuition. Usually they can reduce the amount of tuition paid by enrolling as a "non-resident student" or something similar. But the tuition rate (and how long they will cover tuition) isn't something that can be brushed aside, either by students managing their finances, or by departments assessing their budgets.

<comment><USER15> Assuming some amount of my taxes goes towards funding these grants, I'd much rather that money goes towards funding advances in battery or materials technology than to in-depth analyses of Shakespeare. There are advancements and improvements to be made in fields like social work and law but I don't think they'll be made by writing dissertations.

Also, are you saying some PhD's take 10 years to complete, not including undergrad/masters? My understanding was a PhD on its own was typically a 3-6 year endeavour. I know it's a difficult project to manage but 10 years seems long.

<comment><USER6> That's probably averaged over all disciplines. The better-funded disciplines (CS, engineering, natural sciences, etc) have better outcomes in the sense of shorter time-to-completion. There's a lot more attrition in arts and social sciences, as I understand it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm also part of the problem. I teach one course a year. So it's far from a fulltime thing. The pay is about 100$ per hour OF LECTURE. Considering the prep time needed, and the mandatory unpaid interaction with students after hours, it probably works out to 10-15$/hour. I'm part of the problem because I don't much care about the money. I teach because it impresses my clients, which brings me more realworld consulting work.

Let's do the math for the last lecture I taught. 30 students pay about 900 each to take my class. That's 27K. But I also know half of the school's budget comes from the province (ie government support). So let's double that to say 50K, of which I take home 4 ... 8% to the instructor and the rest to the admins.

I think the real issue is the larger move towards academic admin as a separate profession from teaching. None of my four bosses have ever taught a class. Law schools are probably the last vestige of the old system whereby most admins are senior profs, not professional administrators.

<comment><USER17> _But I also know half of the school 's budget comes from the province (ie government support)_

Are you sure it's 50%? Back when i was in university in Canada the gov't paid 80% of the tuition.

<comment><USER4> It varies by province. In Ontario, the per-student funding grant hasn't increased (in absolute $) in over a decade, so it has fallen to 40-45% of overall revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The author posted this reply, as a sort of continuation to the story: [https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not- amused-b4a2e4c...](https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not- amused-b4a2e4c8e634)

<comment><USER19> I guess he's given up. Whining in public like that seems like a really bad idea, if he's serious about landing a permanent position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm now 24, if I got a job stacking shelves at a local supermarket I'd get paid 14 euros an hour without needing a diploma. He effectively makes 16 euros an hour, only I build up my pension, get more time off, get benefits and protection, and he's in his 50s with over a decade of teaching experience for which he receives excellent ratings, has a PhD in Physics and work experience at a Nuclear facility.

This seems awfully silly, especially with the cost of education having outpaced CPI by a wide margin for the past what, 3-4 decades while classroom sizes ballooned to 200.

<comment><USER21> > cost of education having outpaced CPI

"CEO wages" have also out-paced the CPI. I'm sure the administration isn't paying themselves a pittance (and that in a budget crisis their salaries are the last on the chopping block)...

<comment><USER22> Also, don't forget how many more administrators there are than in the past after a few decades of growing at considerably higher rate than either students or faculty, and with a considerably higher median wage. That's a large group of people who have more time to focus on resisting any cuts since they don't have to spend time on the publish-or-perish cycle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You have no future ... there are too many people that want to teach at universities and when the labor pool us too large for the market, prices, terms and working conditions will be depressed. We're still cranking out PhDs that have no hope of a university position, so I expect your chance of earning a living will drop.

I can't comment on employment elsewhere on the continent, but in Pennsylvania (US) there is a severe shortage of AP Physics, AP Chemistry and Calculus teachers. You could easily land a full-time job at a high-school here.

</comment><comment><USER24> Plentiful cheap labor, abusive bureaucratic and lethargic organisational structure, plentiful federal subsidies... why aren't we seeing more startup universities / community colleges snapping up these over-qualified and underpaid professors for themselves and offering them to the highly subsidized and eager student population?

At some levels, college is a popularity contest to get the best credential. At other levels, college really is about learning the necessary skills to enter the work force.

Is government and self-regulation of education really such an incredible barrier to entry that new entrants can't offer better deals to the best teachers and still compete?

Edit: I am seriously considering getting together with 10 other parents I know, and we can just collectively pay someone like this to teach our kids all day. He could teach a class of 10 kids for a year, earn 3x as much, and we would still be paying less than half what the private school down the street costs.

<comment><USER25> Khan's Academy, Coursera, etc. I even donate to one of them as I think it's the future of learning, free from government intervention that seems to cause so much malaise these days. But that's a long, other discussion, before anyone jumps on it.

And to tell you the truth, I've often flirted with a similar idea to the one you mentioned at the end. That, along with plain home-schooling. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a "startup" that disrupts the current teaching ecosystem. It can simply be a bunch of parents buckling-down and doing what _they_ think is best for their children.

Hopefully they don't make home-schooling illegal, as I've noticed it occurring in a few places. That would make it impossibly to change the status-quo without breaking the law.

<comment><USER24> From Wikipedia anyway, "Since the late 1980s, the focus on the legality of homeschooling in general is no longer in serious debate but legal questions have shifted to whether homeschooling communities can access state school funds, facilities, and resources."

I think it's a very exciting model. A small private co-op of like-minded parents with 10-15 like-aged children, hiring a single truly excellent teacher, and paying them about $100k per year, while supplementing with access to public school resources in the local town to which they are entitled for extra-curricular and filler classes.

The "classroom" would float between public areas like libraries, parks, museums, and local areas of interest, and rooms made available in the parents' residences.

I think the model is particularly attractive K-8. I guess the only problem is the kids would be so far ahead by 9th grade they would have to go straight to college rather than high school. :-/

<comment><USER26> > the legality of homeschooling in general is no longer in serious debate

In the US. In some (many? most?) European countries homeschooling is illegal. They believe that anyone who wants to homeschool is an abusive parent who wants to keep/hide their child from the public, or wants to teach them strange things.

I have argued with some people from countries like this was absolutely astonished at how they defended this outrage. They absolutely refused to believe that parents might choose this because (if the parents are able to do it) academically it's clearly better.

<comment><USER27> Uh? Do you have any example of European countries which ban homeschooling? AFAIK it's legal everywhere.

<comment><USER28> It's not illegal to home-school. Although, home schooling does not entitle you to get any officially approved certification of skills. You are on your own to prove your worth and go through the hiring process without any diploma.

Hypothetical scenario: it is not illegal to do your own electrical wiring in a house. However, the electrical company will only allow you to connect to their networks if your cabling is done by certified electrician. You can team up with some people in your area, build a power plant and happily run your own cabling. It's not illegal, so why complain?

<comment><USER27> We don't have the same definition of homeschooling then. In most of the countries where it's legal (see the wikipedia link posted), you are actually following official courses by snailmail, and you eventually get a real diploma identical to the one you would have if you had attended school.

So totally different from "just learning on your own".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Strike, if you're unionized. Quit, if you aren't. Encourage others like you to do the same.

This isn't going to get better if you're willing to keep doing this job at that wage. You really need to walk away.

<comment><USER30> It's interesting that. I taught a sessional course a little further west (University of Saskatchewan) and sessionals there are unionized, whether you want to or not. One of the perks of this is that after you've taught the same course 3 times, you have right-of-first-refusal; i.e. if that course opens up to be taught by a sessional, the department offer it to you before they open it up to a general competition.

Apparently that's not the case at Carleton.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well, when others see a cloud, it is good to see needed rain.

We have all these very smart, very hard working, very dedicated, and very cheap (relatively) people that the ivory tower just uses as doormats. Guys, there is an opportunity here as big as a boulder. The question is: How do we get these people to work for us? How do we get them to to view our ventures as just as valuable as academia? Is it just as simple as : "Work for us, make a decent salary, make cool things, then, on Fridays/Saturdays, go downtown and give a lecture to people." ? Is that all these grad students and post-docs want? It seems like there is a need and a place to fill it for the right company.

<comment><USER32> I don't think it's the opportunity to teach or lecture. The allure of academia comes from a kind of status, intellectual rather than social. So long as you're in the academic world, you're on the path of Newton, Gauss or whoever else floats your boat. Out in the world you're just making money.

The academic world is carefully arranged as a linear sequence which you can progress along but which is halted if you leave. It's expected that very little you could do out in the commercial world could aid your academic career, without at least the involvement of a university. At best you can return to the same point along the trail but it may be much harder.

The reinforcement begins with undergraduate students. The teaching and particularly grading, hence status, reward those suited for research. (This was particularly evident to me as a mechanical engineering student - the field is broad and empirical, but the examination of my course rewarded nothing but mathematical ability. And of course if you DO fly through the exams, interested professors will be gauging your interest in doing a PhD with them before long and it all clicks into place).

As a postgraduate student you will sit underneath portraits of your idols and eat dinners with the academics you're encouraged to look up to, be fed anecdotes and inside knowledge. The lecturers and postdocs you meet will be judged by their research ability and are already self-selected for a good mental fit with the system. It's universally acknowledged that salaries are higher elsewhere, but leaving would involve abandoning the track of research progression they're already entrained with. (It brings to mind the joke about the elephant-deconstipator at the circus who could never contemplate leaving showbiz).

I don't write any of this with rancour or ill-feeling, nor do I wish to over- egg things and make it seem like indoctrination. More like academia is a successful meme that shares characteristics with other enduring systems. If one wishes to poach from this particular set of people who are highly capable but driven by intellectual status (as well as of course their legitimate intellectual research interest) then one needs to offer them a substitute status.

Concrete suggestions to achieve this:

\- Professional certification. I'm sure a lot of people here hate the idea but progression towards say being a Chartered Software Engineer might motivate academic types.

\- Maintain university links. Collaborate with universities, offer secondments, let employees collaborate along their research interests. This isn't novel, good research organisations already do this. But it's probably rarer for the Silicon Valley 'Twitter for Dogs' type startups being involved with this sort of thing.

\- Invent some other kind of new status or proxy for status. My point is that offering enough money to compensate for dropping one's academic dreams presumably won't work, since such money is already on offer, and PhDs remain predominantly focused on the academic track rather than using their talents elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> From the email it seems the student just wants to see his exam, hardly an unreasonable request. He doesn't ask for a "review," of the exam, and this seems like it should take all of two seconds. He walks in, takes the exam, and leaves. If the exam can't leave your room, he walks in during office hours, looks at the exam, and returns it. I've caught multiple grading errors simply by actually collecting past exams, and would be understandably pissed off if I was given no opportunity to collect an exam I'd taken.

While the contract teaching situation seems pretty bad, this guy seems unreasonable here.

<comment><USER34> > hardly an unreasonable request. He doesn't ask for a "review," of the exam, > and this seems like it should take all of two seconds

It doesn't change the context that the instructor isn't being paid to do it - he says he's already spent more time on the course than contracted. From his point of view, it's not an unreasonable request that he should not spent more of his (insufficiently remunerated) time on even small issues.

> and would be understandably pissed off if I was given no opportunity to > collect an exam I'd taken.

But does that make it reasonable to blame a guy who's not paid to help you for not helping you?

I do understand the nature of your point, but I don't think any of the original argument is actually affected by the size of the task he's refusing to do.

<comment><USER33> If he holds office hours regularly (as the email seems to imply), then there is nothing extra he has to do but let the student find his exam in the pile.

<comment><USER34> So...nothing except something? This takes time and effort, even if just a little, and I suspect it adds up more than you guess. And all unpaid - <USER2> actual loss, in fact, since it distracts from whatever he's currently working on.

I do see why you argue this way, and I might agree except that I also would give weighting to the moral point he's making. Staff like this are systematically exploited, and working to contract is a classic way to try to demonstrate why they should be better supported - it's a direct attempt to make a larger point, not just a random choice to annoy a few students.

<comment><USER33> I'd agree with the broader point that this guy is making, he's being exploited by the university, and doesn't owe the school any additional work.

That being said, he does owe his students the chance to at least look at the culmination of their semester's work. I know at my university, professors are obligated to have exams available for at least a year past the date they were taken! Maybe if allowing students to look at their exams would truly take an additional 75 hours of his time as claimed, he'd have a stronger case, but that's simply not true. If the student was requesting him to explain why a problem was wrong, or engage with this exam in anyway, I'd be completely in agreement. Hell, he could just put them all in a box outside his door, or maybe leave them with the departmental secretary (this happens all the time), or come up with some sort of solution.

His broader point still stands, but this is absolutely part of the responsibilities of a teacher, and I can't get behind this guy making a point at the expense of his students.

<comment><USER35> Are commuters to blame for the poor working conditions in the public transport industry? No. Do commuters suffer when conductors go on strike? Yes. Does it work? Yes. Does complaining to your boss work? No. Its unfortunate but at the end of the day the only thing he can use (apart from quitting outright) as leverage is malicious compliance, which includes working the exact hours your paid and nothing more.

I feel for the student, but a workers' rights are more important to me. If I were in the students position I would be pissed, but not at the professor but at the institution. The same way I don't get mad at conductors going on strike because of poor working conditions even if I have already bought a ticket.

The 75 hours was also in reference to allowing every student to do the same (you either allow all students to have a look, or none), and I can tell from experience that it will end up taking quite a bit of time. Most students mean "could you go over the exam with me" when they ask to review their exam. Just having them glance at the red markings will generally not do them much good anyway. And putting them in a box for pick-up (while also being more unpaid work) is generally not allowed in my opinion. The university holds on to the exams for administrative purposes, meaning he would have to supply photocopies instead.

(Source: TAing and TAing friends)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> So long as bright young students continue to ignore market realities and pursue academic careers, nothing will change.

In fact, as a taxpayer and student I would be upset if my university unilaterally chose to pay more than the market would bear. So long as highly- educated individuals will accept reaching jobs for $34,000 a year, that is precisely what we should continue to pay them—doing otherwise would be an inefficiency in operations which would drive up the already high cost of education.

Unfortunately, even in his follow up he fails to acknowledge that market realities are the cause of his fate: [https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to- conclusions-4044...](https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to- conclusions-40446decf18a)

<comment><USER37> >In fact, as a taxpayer and student I would be upset if my university unilaterally chose to pay more than the market would bear.

Why would you be upset that a public institution decided to behave humanely rather than exploitatively?

<comment><USER36> I don't see anything in the article to suggest this is exploitation (see my response to girvo). He is choosing to work in a low wage job because it offers him flexible hours.

I hold public institutions to the same standard of efficiency in accomplishing their goals a private ones (mainly, not paying people extra for no reason). The only difference is that their goals are public, not private.

<comment><USER38> The University already has permanent positions (lecturer/instructor) defined in their salary structure. Which are relatively well paid and have the same workload that I do now. But they are pretending that my job is a rolling "temp" position, because it's cheap and they can get away with it. That's the bottom line. And they have to be stopped getting away with it. That's why I wrote the article. And I have overwhelming support from present and former students too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't understand why he doesn't attempt to leave the university and get a job as a programmer. CAD 34k is a joke and less than the stipend I received as a graduate student.

<comment><USER12> Given his writing ability, degree, and student reviews I imagine he's quite capable of doing so.

Since he doesn't, all I can assume is that he values the intangibles of teaching enough that it makes up for the incredibly low salary.

<comment><USER40> to quote from a followup article[0]

"And then we get to the "Why doesn't he quit and get a proper job?" people. The answer is, I'm 52 years old. There aren't that many job opportunities coming my way. Have you tried getting a job in Ottawa these days? And I can't move elsewhere. My younger son is in a fabulous Special Needs School here in Ottawa, with wonderful teachers, we have the specialist doctors at the Children's Hospital, and a pool of wonderfully talented therapists to work with him. He needs to be here, and so I need to be here in Ottawa. He needs round the clock attention, so I need flexible working hours, which University teaching gives me."

[0] [https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to- conclusions-4044...](https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/jump-to- conclusions-40446decf18a)

<comment><USER41> OK, so there are benefits to the job beyond salary. You can't mix and match - oh I'll have the conditions of job A, with the pay of job B.

<comment><USER35> He is already doing job B, while on paper it still says A. (fulltime work without benefits for an hourly wage comparable to an intern). That's the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> No one should go into teaching at any level, K-12 and up, until the existing teachers and professors start dying off, quitting and retiring.

This treatment, for this skill, commitment, experience and education, is terrible. But it's enabled by all the people who hire in. Stop doing that, you're more than capable of doing something that society values. And no, society doesn't value teaching, or they'd pay you. What they value is poverty rates.

And if schools and universities "solve" the problem by hiring whatever the educational equivalent of an H1-B is, then they're just restating their position: we don't value quality teaching, not enough to pay a fair rate.

Don't teach.

<comment><USER43> We should have a pleasant planet in a couple decades if everyone follows this advice. /s

All of human progress up this point can be wiped out in a generation if it's not passed on to the new individuals in the world.

Seriously, how is this good advice? If anything we should be encouraging more people to teach their knowledge and to get people interested in learning. Instead of shutting everything down, how about we figure out how to make things better?

<comment><USER44> You could start by paying more and making it easier to enter the profession. If it's as valuable as you say, surely you'd be willing to pay more than he could make as a cleaner or a convenience store clerk.

<comment><USER43> And how do I pay for that?

<comment><USER42> Three ways: raise tuition, reduce administration costs, or de-emphasize the obsession with Egyption pyramid scale building. Probably others.

<comment><USER43> I've already graduated and I likely won't be returning as a paying student, so these aren't really viable options for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> As the author of the articles. I'd just like to say that walking out and finding another job is not as easy as you might think in Ottawa at my age. And also if I leave, the system just continues. I'd leave my successor in the lurch. And I'm not prepared to do that.

Not on my watch.

Sometimes you have to go public and take a risk, and do the _right_ thing. Not the easy thing.

cheers

Andrew

And yes, there is a real risk that I could lose the job. So before you condemn my actions, remember that.

</comment><comment><USER45> On a related note, University of Toronto contract professors are about to strike because of low wages.

Source: [http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/02/12/u-of...](http://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/02/12/u-of- t-non-tenured-staff-poised-for-strike-feb-27.html)

</comment><comment><USER46> How hard is it to found a new university and get accredited degrees in Canada (or the US)? Seems like there's quite the opportunity to do just that if you can identify excellent and underpayed teachers.

I think many students primarely look at the teaching and don't care all that much about the research output (outside of name recognition/can I get a job with a degree from X-university which is the initial motivator).

Well executed positioning, offer great teachers more money/benefits/being treated like a human being and you could have a nicel little university set up.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm salaried tech staff at a major .ca univ, and have done sessional teaching. I think the pay rate is approximately appropriate. yes, it's not great for a career, but neither is flipping burgers. sure, it's not the same thing, but why should just doing something for N years force your employer to change your status and pay you more?

teaching is one of the univ's core functions, but it's not the only one. the career of a normal prof is and always has been primarily a function of their research contribution. yes, they also teach, and have to teach well, but teaching is time consuming, so inherently eats into research productivity. why is everyone here bitching about how tenured profs don't like to teach?

also remember that by "research activity", a prof also includes upper-level honors students and grad students.

the real conflict in universities today is about the revenue associated with undergrads, especially the tension between well-funded parts (engineering) and all the other parts (science, arts, humanities) which do so much of the teaching for hordes of eng undergrads.

<comment><USER48> > yes, it's not great for a career, but neither is flipping burgers.

If the candidates were told this, I'd be fine. (I can easily imagine a world where most teachers happily work for low wages, because they've already done their primary career and are now retired, but are staying active in the community and passing on their knowledge.)

But lots of these candidates were lied to and told things like "there are a lot of professors retiring soon, so new spots will open up, so you can teach for a few years and then be ready to grab those spots." Meanwhile the full professors are making six figures and stringing along the adjuncts with promises of tenure, some day.

<comment><USER47> No, I don't believe incoming grad students would be told an outlandish lie like that. People in academia are extremely aware of how low the rate of "job creation" is. Profs are quite honest with grad students, since the supervising relationship is quite familial and personal. (Less so for coursework-only MS programs, of course.)

You also don't seem to understand tenure progression. An adjunct isn't tenure track: this is explicit from the beginning. Anyone hired on tenure track has a "tenure clock" during which they have to qualify (basically, publish enough good papers). Typically about 5 years, and if they don't make it, they're gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I like the article, but on the other side - I hate how he wants a student to complaint. Why he puts his own student in a situation where he suggest he should complaint? Why he tell student how much money does he make? I find this non-professional. If he have a problem with this - him and other contractors should do something about it, not looking for others to find a solution. This is very socialist way of looking at solution.

I am not agreeing about how schooling system works as imo it should be all results based - eg. minimum wage + results based bonus. As an addition any sick days/pension would be calculated on average yearly wages adjusted by days off. This way universities would get rid of teachers that cannot deliver the results, scientists that do everything to stay on payroll without doing anything and more.

System like that would promote teachers to spend occasionally overtime teaching students to maintain good results. And since testing would be done independently - it would be fool proof system. As close to capitalism as you can get in a schooling system.

</comment><comment><USER50> Has anyone heard a theory that the environment and types of scenario that the author is describing could be the result of concerted efforts to undermine the American education system?

I know it sounds rather far fetched, but does no one remember the animus and rhetoric that has emanated from the right side of our political range, mostly between the 80s and 00s? It seems to me rather odd that just as the rhetoric takes a notable back seat the corporatization of education starts kicking in.

First, there was the huge push for charter schools in the 00s, then there was the deluge and influx of for profit schools that provide little more than a false certification of largely inappropriate skill.

I don't want to make this too long, but if you were a wealthy magnate that loathed society's contempt for your psychopathic will, what better way to attack that pesky government than by eroding its foundation. I'm not saying that the legacy schools have been undermined, although they too have seen standards slide and cracks have begun to appear, but if you can't attack the institution directly, what better way to undermine the source of competent staff to the government than by washing out the soil under the foundation with sham universities and a cadre of people who have a "degree" from an "accredited" university?

Along with a hiring preference for military experience, which pollutes competencies, once you throw in people with hollow degrees, you really start seeing your most hated agencies, i.e., EPA, IRS, etc. crumbling, while making your loved agencies, i.e., DoD, DHS, etc. that are a source of money and power, become nice and pliable.

It's just a theory, but let me put it this way, I am paid for strategy, and that is a rough idea for a mid length strategy proposal depending on desired outcomes.

<comment><USER51> I don't really buy this for higher education in general, there's too much diversity in funding and ownership, and it's much cheaper to build and pay for your own school (which the Kochs have done).

Public education I think there is much more evidence of systematic undermining. But that could be more about misguided ideological libertarianism rather than an actual desire to undermine the country. That's the trouble with ideology - empirical evidence can't sway you until it's too late.

I also have had a much better experience with ex-military types than not, in terms of their management abilities, and a fairly representative mix of political ideology too (they're not all conservatives).

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Undergrads and sessional instructors tend to think of the primary job of a university to provide well-taught classes. On the flipside, university management and the faculty running each department are often much less focused on teaching than you might hope.

Research, recruiting grad students, sports, student services, and facilities are all things that may worry a university administrator more than ensuring the best teaching is going on in their undergraduate classes. The more familiar you become with how a university is run, the more you'll realize that the goals undergrads think the university should have are quite different than the goals it really has.

For example, if a great teacher leaves and is replaced with a grad student with weak teaching skills, that can show up on an administrator's spreadsheet as a win because that grad student was dependent on the university for living expenses.

<comment><USER53> In research universities, research tends to occupy the focus of the tenure- track faculty, as well. Publications pave the way to tenure. Teaching evaluations may help one's tenure case slightly (if they're outstanding) or hurt a little bit (if they're really bad). Being in/chairing the right committees can help a little bit, as well. However, the lion's share of one's tenure case often comes down to research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> the followup wherein Andrew received a card from the University President and sent it back was pretty epic [https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not- amused-b4a2e4c...](https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not- amused-b4a2e4c8e634)

</comment><comment><USER55> My advice is don't participate in the broken educational institutions.

Take up a job somewhere else, and teach the way Salman Khan of Khan Academy started teaching. Just start teaching on YouTube and helping students on Skype. Your paid job should sustain you.

Using your skills, you should be able to get a 9-5 job somewhere that pays you better than what you are getting paid now, which should leave 15-20 hours for your teaching side project.

I started teaching programming to a few people in this way, while I was employed in another (non-programming) profession.

Teaching is more rewarding when you don't have to follow someone else's rules and curriculum.

<comment><USER56> And what if you're teaching something that, when done improperly, could be actively dangerous in the teaching process? Many of the sciences are like that - biology and chemistry experiments gone wrong, etc..

Or what if equipment required to perform the teaching is extremely expensive, like lab equipment, telescopes, etc.

While the DIY approach is nice if you're doing something that doesn't have many unique/expensive prerequisites (beyond internet access and a computer), there's a whole lot of stuff out there that needs real hands on instruction using expensive gear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I keep seeing more evidence that the economy is not doing well. I am also a contract worker. I am a programmer. I believe that there is not enough money going around/being generated by consumer spending to actually pay the majority of the workforce real competitive salaries with benefits.

Even in the startup world I believe there is a crunch. There is a fair amount of funding being thrown around, but for the most part the money running operations at startups is not actual revenue but capital funds. And not everyone works at a well-funded startup.

</comment><comment><USER58> I am sad to say that this guy just made himself a persona non grata as an adjunct not just at his current school, but at any school. Adjuncts are perceived as a commodity, and the administrators absolutely do not care whether he is a good teacher or not.

I strongly suggest this person start looking for jobs in industry. Once a convenient opportunity comes along to stop offering him work, the admins will do so.

If he wants to continue teaching, I suggest he use one of the online services that will actually pay him well if he can teach a difficult course well.

</comment><comment><USER59> I work as a contact teacher for a local college (on top of my full time job) and it's sort of absurd the way they pay you. I get paid for 3 hours during lectures (60/hr), but not for any of the work I do outside of the school (marking, creating lectures, creating assignments)

I have realized that I should be payed way more and I'm having serious doubts of continuing to teach given the pay. The only reason I'm actually teaching is because it looks good on a resume and I want to improve my presentation skills.

Note:

I also teach in Canada.

<comment><USER60> For context, when I worked as an education consultant for a corporation, I would bill 1 week of work for preparation, 1 day for the session (if it was a day long) and then 1 day for review and reconciliation.

It's ridiculous how little educators in a UNIVERSITY get compensated. I'm glad I got out of that environment early.

<comment><USER61> My father works as an engineering consultant for major oil companies, and he has the same deal. He charges the companies for every hour he spends preparing for the presentation, so the actual presentation can be less than 10% of the invoiced amount.

If you look at what tenure track professors do, it's the same thing. They'll spend hours working on their lecture notes that they get paid for (admittedly, most TT professors work 80 hour weeks). Not paying instructors to prepare for class only guarantees that they'll under prepare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Do Canadian universities hire "teaching professors"? Typically, professor also do research and (varying degree of) service (examining PhD theses, departmental and faculty committees, reviewing journal papers, etc.) in addition to regular teaching (2 to 3 courses per year, sometimes more). Is the author asking for a permanent position where none exists?

<comment><USER4> I graduated from the University of Toronto. Teaching-stream permanent faculty positions are very, very rare. I was aware of only two such positions in the entire engineering faculty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I had no idea that adjunct staff were paid so poorly compared to regular full time academic staff until I taught a class for one semester.

In my case it was in addition to my regular full time job so the money was not as important to me. But to imagine someone trying to make a living from that and considering the level of eduction required it just doesn't make sense to me.

</comment><comment><USER64> The university system in the US (and apparently Canada) is socialism for the rich.

This guy is getting screwed, and the Canadian taxpayers are getting screwed, so that employers do not have to pay for their employees to go to college or get other training (or factor it into their salaries to cover student loan debt if they already have a degree).

I hope this guy shrugs and gets a better job.

<comment><USER65> While employers paying for training may work in economies were there is a high level of worker loyalty, in Canada and the States, people change jobs frequently. Thus, the employer wouldn't get to keep the benefit of the training often, because the employee would leave to work for a employer who pays high wages because it didn't pay for the training.

</comment></comment><comment> r-s I received 30k/year while working for a professor while obtaining my undergraduate degree (all I ever got) in CS. This was almost 10 years ago now, in Canada, at a University in an area with a low cost of living. I thought this was peanuts at the time as I was used to working in Northern Alberta. Looking back, it seems I was very lucky.

</comment><comment><USER38> As the author of the article, I'd like to comment that "Walking away" and getting another job is not as easy as it sounds, when you are in your 50s. And if I just walk away, some other person gets stuck in the same position. And that I'm not prepared to let happen.

Not on my watch

Sometimes you have to do the right thing. Not the easy thing.

</comment><comment><USER66> I've been an adjunct professor myself, 2 different little private schools at the same time. It doesn't seem fair. But so many are qualified. So instead I went to industry where I am paid 5 times more, and if I get the teaching bug again, I can teach a night class or two. I think that's fair.

</comment><comment><USER60> Make sure you catch the follow up article as well: [https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not- amused-b4a2e4c...](https://medium.com/@AndrewR_Physics/i-was-not- amused-b4a2e4c8e634)

</comment><comment><USER67> You know, as horrible as this sounds, I don't feel bad for this professor. Rather, I feel bad for the poor student whose education had to suffer because of a labour dispute.

I strongly considered graduate school after I finished my undergrad, but the job prospects were absolutely horrible. It took me three conversations with trusted professors for me to realize that if I spent six or seven years of my life working on a PhD, my expected return was about $30k Canadian a year.

Now, I would have loved to teach, but losing six years of earning power to earn an expected $30k a year struck me as a particularly poor investment. Heck, the expected annual return from applying at McDonalds exceeded that of getting a PhD...

</comment><comment><USER68> eu teacher here, sadly sarcastically true:

This is the free market, if you are not willing to work for the money and conditions we gave you someone else will. Next, please!

</comment><comment><USER69> This is the end result of all those "No Tuition Hikes" buttons my classmates wore 10 years ago.

To all my classmates that wore those buttons, I TOLD YOU SO!

<comment><USER46> I disagree. As far as I know the tuitions hiked happily. In a nutshell it's the end result of people shamelessly exploiting passion mixed with a bit of an unhealthy research >> teaching attitude.

It's kind of like the academia counterpart to EA exploiting people enjoying game development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Another contributing factor might be that there were a lot more jobs for physics grads in Canada back in the heyday of Nortel, JDS Uniphase, etc.

</comment><comment><USER71> i used to be a college teacher for several years & my sympathies are with the author.

Advice for those considering this path in science/tech - learn to write code on the side. Pick something mainstream that will be around for a while, and which you can tap for a sideline. Develop deep expertise, spend as much time continually educating yourself as you do for others.

<comment><USER72> Contract programming parallels much of what he says about contract teaching, with the added difficulty of having to track down and find projects to work on.

"Learn to code in order to generate side income" isn't as simple as it sounds. I wish people would stop perpetuating this myth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> What's his h-index?

<comment><USER38> h = 20. I have 50 peer reviewed papers (with 1200+ citations), and a patent to my name. And know what? It doesn't make a bit of difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> good informative tips

</comment><comment><USER75> "I was unable to comply with this request"

He was unwilling to comply, not unable.

Supply and demand is a thing.

</comment><comment><USER76> In response to some of the comments here regarding graduate students being taken advantage of...I don't get it. I fully understand an undergrad paying a lot of money for a degree with a course of study that will not allow them to find a good job. In that case, you are talking about people making a decision with no college experience at the age of 18. In the case of graduate students you are talking about 22+ year olds that have already gone through the higher education process. I honestly don't see how someone can start working towards a PhD in their 20s and not see the potentially grim prospects of a career in academia. The only exception I would make is international students that didn't do undergrad in the country of their graduate studies.

</comment><comment><USER77> It's the corporatization that killed learning, just like it killed healthcare. From rigid rules to unequal pay scales , there is no reason for a corporate hierarchy except to make cannon fodder. Educators should go to work at Valve to build 'Valve Academy'. The flat and free-spirited culture seems to be working there. They have revolutionized game development and distribution. They have enabled communities of people to exist and interact. The only thing lacking is to formalize the knowledge that the gamers posses. Not just winning strategies and tactics. But game design and game theory. This would require knowledge from all the subjects conceivably taught at university - after all, they are building virtual worlds, not just experiencing them.</comment>


Show HN: Embedstagram - <AUTHOR> http://embedstagram.com

<comment><USER2> How does this work exactly? You input lat/long and it spits out a gallery of photos with EXIF location data that's close? How do the pictures get into the system?

EDIT: Ah, I see now the footer text. You're pulling the photos from Instagram. Interesting.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This was a weekend project I knocked out primarily to scratch my own itch. Any thoughts you folks have are warmly welcomed.</comment>


Financial Alchemy: David Einhorn's "value" play for Apple - <AUTHOR> http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2013/02/financial-alchemy-david-einhorns-value.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Aswath is getting pretty deep in the weeds of academic semantics here, but the article is otherwise pretty solid.</comment>


Gig workers find it harder to make money as unemployment drives up competition - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/26/gig-workers-compete-with-jobless-americans-for-work-as-600-boost-ends.html <comment><USER2> Unfortunately not much of a surprise. Gig work is the technologically enabled version of people sitting on street corners waiting for someone to drive up in a truck and offer them ad hoc work. There's more people on the virtual street corner now and the companies hold all the power, showing very little, or no, loyalty to their ad hoc "employees".

</comment><comment><USER3> Gig work is always going to lower the bar to entry and simultaneously raise the amount of competition. The real way to make money is find a niche that artificially prevents competition. Something with a government mandated qualification always helps.</comment>


Acme::Don't - The opposite of do - <AUTHOR> http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Acme-Don-t-1.01/t.pm

<comment><USER2> From the man page:

 _BUGS: Unlikely, since it doesn't actually do anything._</comment>


Wait, Don't We Want This Guy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/asaf-darash-entrepreneur-deported-visa-error.html

<comment><USER2> The same story seems to be happening again and again. [http://www.businessinsider.com/its-crazy-that-the-us- kicked-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/its-crazy-that-the-us-kicked-this- startup-ceo-out-of-the-country-2012-3)

Last time, due I suspect to much of the publicity that was garnered from the lack of an available visa, Amit (CEO of CruiseWise) was given a visa to stay in the country, and his company has continued and grown in the US as a result.</comment>


Rethinking Visual Programming with Go - <AUTHOR> https://divan.dev/posts/visual_programming_go <comment><USER2> > There is a whole field of Visual Programming Languages or VPLs, and there > were literally hundreds of languages developed over the last 60 years.

> By every single metric, modern programming languages landscape is 100% > dominated by textual programming languages with zero exceptions.

> Why is it so? Text is clearly not the best way to represent everything, and > all those bright minds working on the visual programming languages were > clearly onto something.

This section reads weird -- I'd think that after seeing 60 years worth of failing visual programming attempts, one would accept that maybe text _is_ clearly the best way to represent programs. How can one say that text is "clearly not the best" in fact of such overwhelming evidence?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point, thanks, I'll address this!</comment></comment>