I think you have to separate teaching track from adjuncts

by Savage, Around Ye Olde Colonial College, Wednesday, May 20, 2015, 13:41 (3997 days ago) @ HumanRobot

4k with no benefits (or even 9k as an additional teaching stipend, in your case) is a much different animal than a full-time instructor/lecturer/whatever-the-title.

(Edit to caveat the entire ensuing discussion: yes, yes, this is for CS, which is probably a different animal than comparative literature of philosophy of art history of ...)

Now I'm not at all going to argue that the latter are still underpaid, but it's not nearly as dire: per the latest Taulbee survey, at CS departments that "look like ND" (20+ tenure track faculty, private school), the median average for a NTT teaching faculty is actually 87k per year. (Aside: median department average is a ridiculously stupid metric devised by the CRA for the institutions to shield employees from actually knowing how underpaid they are ... </rant>)

We have a grad school colleague, one of your fellow Triple Domers, who just took a teaching job in our old department. His pay at his former employer is public-records accessible -- his salary in his former TT position was just under 80k. If we are to assume, even with the draw of going home to his alma mater, that he probably wasn't going to take too significant of a pay cut as the lone breadwinner in his family of 5 to head back to ND in a teaching role, then again we're not talking about the well-known plight of the adjunct here.

Similarly, UW-Madison has a "faculty associate" position (a lecturer by another administrative title) advertised right now, and looking at the public-records salary database, the current holders of those positions are making 76-87k.

So even as I'm actively advocating for those in my role in my department (as many know, I'm a teaching-track faculty member at a rather prominent institution), where we aren't close to the numbers listed above -- we actively seek out summer support in order to pay the rent and put food in the table, given the astronomical cost of living -- I still have to advise you to tap the breaks just a bit when you group all "teaching faculty" into one bin, because there's definitely a differentiation.