Though there were many aspects of teaching college students that I loved, I quit when I realized that for all the work I was doing at a top tier university, I was making less than $10 an hour. My situation was not unique. I was one of the tens of thousands of adjunct faculty members whose underpaid labor fuels the modern university system, which has sacrificed the principle of educating students for the sake of maximizing profits and protecting administrative jobs. Debates about American colleges typically center on culture war battles over woke versus anti-woke curriculums. But if you want to understand how the university system got to be so broken you have to look at the underlying infrastructure of higher education. The best place to start is with the adjunct system.
