There have been some really good letters to the editor in the ABJ over the past few days, including several from Akron faculty members who have wanted to point out a few salient points:

1.  Akron already has a "VP of student engagement," but somehow found $200K to add a second one in the form of Jimmy T.  No one is saying what his official duties will be.

2.  Akron uses more adjunct faculty (many of whom are ill-equipped to teach, based on personal experience) than almost every other Ohio public university. The average salary of a FULL TIME  adjunct faculty member at Akron is less than $20k.  They receive no health care coverage or other benefits.

3.  The chances of being taught by a tenured faculty member during your first two years at Akron is less than 10%.

4.  More than 30 percent of Akron full-time students need 6 years to graduate; a leading reason is class availability.

Dr. Proenza and the university are running a tuition collection operation, not an institution of higher learning.  Tress should fit in quite well there.

Far from me to stick up for 'kron but has this Dr. Proenza been at the school since the 70's when the school had the same reputation you outlined in items #2-4 above  OR  is the leader a more recent hire with a potential chance to change 40 years of mediocrity?

Either him, Richard Nixon, or MH55.  Hard to keep my scapegoats apart. 

I removed the political reference and forgot to set the "edit by" statement.

Really, now, if they pay the (actual) instructors a living wage how will they support that athletic campus they are building.

Just want to emphasize that full-time instructors/adjuncts - i.e., those teaching full class loads - earn less than 20K.

And Akron does it because they can...their faculty is weak and the adjuncts haven't banded together to fight back.

The ultimate loser is the student.

Akron doesn't count adjuncts as full-time faculty, even if they teach full course loads, so they are not reflected here. According to the ABJ, there are more than 1,000 adjuncts on staff, making up for more than 50% of all instruction on campus.

I'm not sure what Kron considers a full teaching load, but for our fair university, it's 12 quarter hours, three quarters per year. And it may vary by department or by faculty credentials, but I make about $650 per credit hour adjuncting, so for a "full-time" teaching load, it's about $23,400 a year. If you figure an hour of prep time for each hour of class (and, it has been my experience, that after teaching a class a couple of times, that's about how much time I spend prepping), it works out to about $32.50/hour.

In my experience it is usually because they are just supplementing another income by teaching classes. My wife got an MS in Social Work in Chicago and about 1/2 of her professors were adjuncts. They had private practices and they would teach about two days a week. Its a cash cow for the university because they can charge 30-40K a year in tuition and pay their professors very little.

As a PhD student....I certainly hope not.

Some of the above comments seem as though they could come from editors at the The Post...