I’m going to have to renegotiate my contract


I’m a full time professor of biology, with a Ph.D. I put in long hours teaching 2 or 3 courses a semester for a middle class income.

Marco Rubio dabbled in teaching college, too. He’s got a law degree. He had a part-time teaching appointment — one course — and worked less than 10 hours a week. He got paid more than I do, $69,000. Any adjuncts out there getting by on a few thousand dollars per course? You might want to be pissed off.

There’s more. As is typical for Rubio, he shirked. He missed 30% of the classes. I teach a course 3 days a week — that would be like skipping one of those classes every week. I teach two of those courses this term.

And get this: he wasn’t the sole instructor. It was co-taught with another guy, who did all the prep work.

“We had to prepare 28 new lectures for this new prep,” he said, noting that it usually takes him “3 to 4 hours to prepare a completely new lecture,” and that he’s actually taking time off of teaching next semester to prepare a few new courses for the year.

That’s about right — maybe even a bit on the low side. It’s a lot of work to put together a new course. Rubio didn’t have to do any of that.

And hey, look at this:

And though Rubio helped prepare the tests for the class, Moreno said during the deposition, “I didn’t let him do any of the grading,” joking that, “he’s still a politician, and I was afraid he was going to give everyone A’s!”

He. Didn’t. Have. To. Do. Any. Of. The. Grading. I would be so happy if I didn’t have to do any grading. That’s what I’m going to be booked up doing this weekend.

“How do we justify paying him as much as we do to teach one course?” asked Amy Paul-Ward, an associate professor in the Nicole Wertheim College of Nursing and Health Sciences, according to the FIU student paper. “I know there are qualified adjuncts in our school who we have trouble paying $3,000 to teach a course.”

And those adjuncts would be expected to prepare the content of the course, show up for every lecture, teach it by themselves, and do all the grading.

Hey, if I became a Republican would I get a raise and a reduction in work load? Maybe not as much as Rubio got — I wouldn’t want to be greedy — but it seems only fair.

Comments

  1. microraptor says

    Well, now we know who the overpaid, underworked teachers that Republicans are always complaining about are.

  2. marinerachel says

    I don’t get paid anything to teach the o. chem and biochem labs and yeah I do all the marking. It makes me so mad that this doofus puts it no effort doing something I and so many people work really hard at and can maybe own a home one day from yet he has money thrown at him, money many people not only need more but worked harder for and are likely better qualified to be earning.

  3. Penny L says

    You can stay a Democrat and take speaking gigs like Hillary Clinton and make, in an hour, ten times what Rubio made at that job in a year.

  4. Infophile says

    @4 Penny L: Hillary Clinton makes that much because her years of experience as a Senator and Secretary of State make her valuable. If you wanted someone with comparable political experience to PZ who still gets paid a ton, you could have gone with Sarah Palin, whose wisdom is worthpriceless. But why let a good argument get in the way of scoring points? You might someday be able to exchange those points for something of value, like integrity!

  5. numerobis says

    Infophile@5: Clinton, like other politicians, gets big bucks because people like to stand near power… particularly people who stand to benefit from that power. It’s very close to bribery.

  6. congenital cynic says

    That’s some course stipend. Where I teach it would be about $3500 for the course, and you would have to do everything except grade assignments. You’d get a student TA for that, but setting and grading tests and exams, preparing lectures, and delivering lectures would all be on your head. One wonders how they rationalized the 69k for Rubio. The mind boggles.

  7. littleknown says

    Personally, I like the fact that Marco Rubio’s beloved brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, was one of Miami’s “cocaine cowboys” of the 1980s, working as the front man for a drug-smuggling operation that is estimated to have imported some $75 million of marijuana and cocaine between 1976 and 1986, and was responsible for numerous murders, including an undercover informant for the ATF.

    In 1985, the Rubio family was living in Las Vegas, and Marco

    was failing in school and acting like “a brat”

    . His father moved the family back to Miami, where Cicilia’s drug trade was flourishing. Cicilia paid Rubio to build cages for his animals, and $10/week for each of his seven Samoyed dogs he washed.

    In 1989, Cicilia received 35 years for his role in the drug operation, but he walked out in 2000, four days after Marco was elected to the Florida House of Representatives.

    In 2002, Rubio used his position in the Florida House to help Cicilia get his real-estate license. According to his campaign manager, Rubio believes that having served 11 years of a 35-year sentence, his brother-in-law “paid his debt to society”. And also, that when Rubio wrote the letter recommending Cicilia, he did not mention that Cicilia was married to his sister, because — and get this — it “could be perceived as exerting undue pressure, if his letter stated that Orlando was a relative”. What.

    From the second article:

    Rubio also declined to say whether he or his family received financial assistance from Cicilia, who was convicted in a high-profile 1989 trial of distributing $15 million worth of cocaine. The federal government seized Cicilia’s home; the money has never been found.

    What a privilege it is to be an NRA lapdog and an anti-government activist extolling the virtues of removing federal regulations, when your family was the direct beneficiary of a ruthless and violent drug smuggling operation, itself a beneficiary of easy access to powerful firearms and a weak federal government. I have a special place in my heart for people who rail against the evils of a communist dictatorship when their family took “full advantage” of their freedom.

    Like, yeah, isn’t it great not to live under Castro? You can get rich running guns and cocaine here, being a merchant of death and human suffering! Land of opportunity, indeed.

    Eleven years is fucking bullshit for the shit this man did. “Paid his debt”, my ass. I also don’t buy that the Rubios had no idea where Cicilia’s money was coming from. They might not be legally liable; but morally — absolutely.

  8. magistramarla says

    Wow. I was one of those so-called overpaid public school teachers with bankers’ hours, too much vacation time and too many breaks (snark).
    Actually, I helped to open a brand-new high school. I designed the Latin program for that school, which meant designing the curricula for four levels – Latin I through Latin IV AP. I taught six classes per day for seven years, did all of the lesson planning and grading myself, as well as doing the “extra duty” of hall and cafeteria monitoring and covering ISS for one period per day, then being available for tutoring after school.
    I was a very active sponsor of Junior Classical League, which meant many after school meetings. I also took some top students to regional and state competitions. The school district wouldn’t provide a bus and driver after the first year, so my husband and I rented a 12 passenger van ourselves and he drove so that we could take my top 10 students to competitions.
    During spring and summer breaks, I would attend teachers’ conferences, usually paid for by me. For several summers, my husband and I included my national Classical conventions into our summer travel plans.
    Such a difference between what is expected of a mere public school teacher and someone like Rubio!

  9. parasiteboy says

    Any adjuncts out there getting by on a few thousand dollars per course?

    Another issue that I ran into was trying to get enough classes to teach. The unnamed place in Iowa had a semester and yearly limit on the amount of work. Over a certain amount of work you would be eligible for health insurance. The story I got was that the Iowa legislature put in rules for the amount teaching and health insurance to try and get more permanent faculty, but instead it went the other way and they limited the amount of teaching and just hired more part-time adjuncts.

    As for Rubio, he always talks about his fathers hard work and sacrifice, but not his own. I guess he doesn’t have as many (or any) stories.

  10. Vivec says

    Well, Rubio still has that magic sword Jeb Bush gave him, so he’s probably too busy dungeon crawling to teach. Not paying his teaching salary is letting the forces of darkness win.

  11. sylwyn says

    Ethan (#11) hit the nail on the head.

    Unless you go into the republican party with a willingness to apply double-standards (“I deserve this; that lazy welfare queen doesn’t”), a moral system cherry picked out of whatever philosophies flatter you best ( I suggest the popular combination of Ayn Rand and prosperity gospels), and a iron-willed refusal to acknowledge any contradictions that might ensue, you’re going to wind up as part of the base, not at the leadership level where one might expect that lifestyle.

    Your slip of admitting that it was even possible for you to be greedy pretty much dooms you at the start.

    Actually, I should correct myself. Examples of those traits might be at all levels of the party (it seems reasonable that the faithful would listen to their leaders). I suspect those attitudes would only get you into the good teaching gigs if you were already affluent anyway.

  12. numerobis says

    Ah, reading the NBC story, it becomes clear what was going on:

    According to his office, from August of 2008 – November of 2009, Rubio raised approximately $125,000 for the Center — enough to cover his salary and then some. A sizeable chunk of that, $100,000, came from Norman Braman — the wealthy auto magnate who’s been a longtime benefactor to Rubio, is helping to bankroll his campaign and whose charitable foundation employs Rubio’s wife.

    So Rubio was laundering bribes through the university. Magnate donates to university, university hires politico. Clever. It’s even tax-deductible!

  13. Ichthyic says

    FWIW, anyone who actually believes education has value wouldn’t accept a bribe to work to destroy it.

    because that’s what clowns like Rubio are paid to do. Destroy public education.

    like Jonathan Wells was paid to get a PhD at Berkeley in order to destroy science.

    make no mistake, the reason these fuckers make so much money… is there is a LOT of money involved in the privatization of America.

    you will not be able to vote your way out of this, and you know it.

    you will have to eat the rich.

    so get the fuck on with it, before there literally is nothing left.