Due to college labor practices, many adjunct professors now need side hustles; Dr. Mistress Snow’s involves beating up men in a sex dungeon.
[This is the full version of the Daily Beast interview I did with Mistress Snow, Ph.D. Due to their length guidelines, they did not include large parts of my introduction, and some parts of Mistress Snow’s answers. Segments not included in the Daily Beast version are indicated with asterisks **before and after the segments.**]
When you think of a college professor, you don’t usually think of a dominatrix. And, you also don’t usually think of someone who is so underpaid that they don’t know how they’re going to afford rent or groceries. However, due to college administrators’ relentless drive to cut labor costs via outsourcing college instruction to freelance “contingent faculty,” the latter situation of professorial poverty is increasingly common. And for that reason, at least one professor—whom we’ll meet soon—has taken up the former as a side job.
More than half of all college professors are now “adjuncts”: part-time freelance instructors who often have the same Ph.D.s as their tenured and full-time colleagues, but who get paid low amounts on a per-course basis, with few or no benefits or job security. Typically, adjuncts (also known as “contingent faculty”) string together gigs at multiple colleges, which pay an average of $3,984 per course. Three courses a semester, or six per year, is considered a full teaching load–many adjuncts report it’s difficult to get this many courses–which implies a typical yearly income of $23,904 for the “lucky” adjuncts with a full-time-equivalent teaching load.
For reference, full-time baristas at Starbucks make an average of $27,030 per year, and are eligible for benefits including health insurance, dental, vision, 401(k), paid time off, parental leave, and even emergency financial assistance during family crises; adjunct professors typically receive none of these benefits. **And, making these thousands of dollars per year more plus benefits as a barista does not require ten or more years of study and foregone earnings during college and graduate school, nor the often-six-figures of student debt that adjuncts carry.
One researcher titled his book on this downtrodden half of the professoriate “The Adjunct Underclass.” The title is apt: according to research from the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25% of part-time college faculty are on some form of public assistance, including Medicaid, welfare, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and/or food stamps. Since 50% of the faculty are part-time now, taken together, these statistics imply that one-in-eight college professors are adjuncts currently on public assistance. If you’re taking a college class right now, there’s a chance your professor just showed up to your class having slept in her car.
Welcome to what one team of researchers have referred to as “The Gig Academy.”
How did this happen?
