The story of Margaret Mary Vojtko brought out quite a few adjuncts with their own tales of exploitation by universities. It really is shameful how the current system often takes people who love learning and want to teach and treats them like crap, when they should be regarding them as the heirs to the university tradition.

There were also a few clueless twits babbling in dumb incomprehension: why don’t you just get a real job? Meaning, of course, some kind of work, any kind of work, that pays you more money. I come from a blue collar, union family, and I know I baffled my father a bit, too; before I went off to college, he had made tentative arrangements for me in a union apprenticeship in refrigerator repair, which, if I’d taken it, would mean I’d be making twice as much money now, and it would come with long paid vacations and all kinds of benefits, and I would have started earning when I was 19. In the ’90s, I had a shot at jobs in software that paid three times what I make now (that was the bubble, though, so maybe it’s just as well I didn’t take one). In every case, I went for the pittance I’d earn in academia, because I love biology.

If you want to know the sacrifices every college professor makes for his profession, read this summary of the economics of a science career. I tell all my students that an academic career is the most fulfilling, happiest job you can get (if you can get it), but the last reason you should go for it is to make money, because you won’t. Especially now that the United States is flatlining its research budget and building more sophisticated bombs, instead.

What you also have to understand, though, is that even now we aren’t complaining that we want to get paid as much as an experienced expert in refrigeration maintenance of software development — all we want is a living wage and that our colleagues are treated equally and with respect — I don’t want to work in a divided environment where some of us have tenure and the freedom to do more than grade papers all day long, while others are stuck in the scut work of overloads in service courses.

Everyone should think to the future. The professoriate represents the stem cells of an intellectual culture. Starve us into extinction and you won’t see the great progress of a sophisticated society; we make poets and engineers and doctors and leaders and scientists. And we do it for dirt cheap because we love our work, so why are people demanding that we do it for less?

Margaret Mary Vojtko was a professor of French at Duquesne University for 25 years. She died of a heart attack at the age of 83 after struggling with cancer for a number of years.

She was an adjunct professor. Do you know what that means?

As amazing as it sounds, Margaret Mary, a 25-year professor, was not making ends meet. Even during the best of times, when she was teaching three classes a semester and two during the summer, she was not even clearing $25,000 a year, and she received absolutely no health care benefits. Compare this with the salary of Duquesne’s president, who makes more than $700,000 with full benefits.

Meanwhile, in the past year, her teaching load had been reduced by the university to one class a semester, which meant she was making well below $10,000 a year. With huge out-of-pocket bills from UPMC Mercy for her cancer treatment, Margaret Mary was left in abject penury. She could no longer keep her electricity on in her home, which became uninhabitable during the winter. She therefore took to working at an Eat’n Park at night and then trying to catch some sleep during the day at her office at Duquesne. When this was discovered by the university, the police were called in to eject her from her office. Still, despite her cancer and her poverty, she never missed a day of class.

What that means is the university hires a highly trained professional for a pittance and strings them along with temporary assignments year after year, giving them no benefits and no retirement funds, and can simply not renew their contract whenever they feel like it. It’s indentured servitude with no job security at all and paying them less than the custodians make.

About half the teaching staff at American colleges are adjuncts. This is a position that initially had some reasonable utility; here at UMM we hire temporary faculty to fill positions when professors go on sabbatical, and sometimes to address temporary surges in the student population, but at many colleges they’ve become a way to stretch their limited funds…at the expense of the very people who fulfill the primary function of the university. It has become a disgraceful practice, much abused, and harms both the quality of the education (not because these are bad teachers, but because the constant shuffling of staff erodes the continuity and consistency of the curriculum), and also represent gross exploitation of those faculty.

Duquesne is a Catholic university, which ought to shame people who claim an exalted moral status, but this isn’t a Catholic problem. It’s going on at most universities. If you’ve got a faculty member who plays such a role that you keep hiring them year after year for 25 years, you have no excuse other than your miserliness for not promoting them to a permanent position. What Duquesne did was simply abusive oppression, taking advantage of someone in particularly desperate straits.

The Director of the Campus Ministry at Duquesne made excuses.

I knew Margaret Mary well. When we learned of problems with her home, she was invited to live with us in the formation community at Laval House on campus, where she resided for several weeks over the past year.

Over the course of Margaret Mary’s illness I, along with other Spiritan priests, visited with her regularly. In addition, the university and the Spiritan priests at Duquesne offered several other types of assistance to her.

Mr. Kovalik’s use of an unfortunate death to serve an alternative agenda is sadly exploitive and is made worse because his description of the circumstances bears no resemblance to reality.

No, the reality is very familiar — I’ve known many people who have been taken advantage of by the adjunct system. I’m wondering what “other types of assistance” a gang of priests offered her that could possibly compensate for the fact that they starved her with degrading wages for 25 years? I reckon that if they paid her $25K for 25 years when a more reasonable professorial salary is closer to $50K, offering her an envelope with $625,000 in it might have been fair. I suspect that what they offered Margaret Mary Vojtko, who was apparently quite devout, was a little hand-holding and prayer…nothing helpful, in other words.

What was sadly exploitive is Duquesne’s short-sighted abuse of adjunct faculty.