dykesister:

dorothea-rising:

No one ever mentions in discussions and arguments about anti-intellectualism/”out of touch elitism” etc. etc. that colleges and universities operate on the back of one of the lowest, most exploited, most underpaid, and most insecure labor pools in the U.S. Just as an example after graduate school I was offered & turned down a job at a state university for 18k dollars a year and no benefits, which is pretty typical. This is just slightly more than I made teaching a 2/3 course load as a graduate student. Yes, I was  lucky that I got funding etc. etc. but its also true that I was working a full time job for like $7.00 an hour. I know a lot of adjunct professors & PhD and other students who are basically living in poverty. There’s this weird cultural assumption that people should just be grateful/the work is not real? This particular labor crisis is absolutely invisible to most people and completely absent from infuriating conversations on both the left and right about how universities are “bubbles” or intellectualism is somehow classist or w/e when a significant portion of people standing in front of the classroom are living below the poverty line.

The most grossly overpaid employees at a uni are ALWAYS those who have the least to do with teaching. It’s probably not an overpaid snobby elite teaching your daughter’s gender studies or other subject you find useless (those “useless” subjects in humanities and the arts are often underfunded and taught exclusively by starving adjuncts btw!), but the president, the president’s staff, heads of any department (not just academic deans; the head of HR or the CIO make BANK but aren’t writing the syllabi), and coaches for the teams she might not even attend games for.