Letters: A lesson in how not to get paid

Re “Highly educated and badly paid,” Opinion, Dec. 23

Charlotte Allen’s Op-Ed article on well-educated adjunct instructors who are treated and paid poorly by the colleges they teach at really hit home, because I am one of those itinerant professors just recently robbed of a semester’s pay (all of $3,750).

The reason: Arbitrarily and without consulting me, the community college changed the day of the class I was to teach to the day I teach two classes at another school 75 miles away.

When I discovered this, it was too late to fix because students had already registered.

My class was given to a full-time faculty member who will receive more pay for the overload.

But what irritated me about Allen’s otherwise insightful article was her solution: Get another job. Gee, why didn’t I think of that?

Don Schroeder

North Hollywood

Allen argues that reducing the supply of doctorate degrees would affect the supply of people who are willing to teach part time in community colleges for a fraction of the salary paid to full-time faculty.

That will not happen, because the colleges would merely employ more instructors from the sizable pool of people with masters’ degrees.

About 70% of community college faculty today are part-timers, the highest ratio in history. Instruction is the colleges’ biggest single expenditure, and as long as they are legally allowed to do so, administrators will continue employing adjuncts to balance their budgets.

Part-time instructors are to the colleges what migrant workers are to farms.

Arthur M. Cohen

Los Angeles

Cohen, a professor emeritus in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, is the author of the book, “The American Community College.”

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