I mean, they treat me fine I think; everyone has been polite to me, I'm just a lecturer.
It just doesn't pay well enough to survive. I mostly enjoy teaching, but honestly I don't think that I will be doing it again next semester.
It's tough to say if I'm a "good" lecturer obviously, especially I think it's borderline impossible to fail a teaching evaluation here, but I do know that it's trivial for me to find work that pays more than twice as much in the private sector, without a ton of extra work.
The adjuncts in my department are all there willingly and they seem pretty happy if you listen to them tell it.
They are all retired engineers and project managers from a local technology firm. They got bored with retirement and like to come around and supervise projects in the capstone. We pay them a couple grand a semester for it, it's not a lot of work. They like it, our students like it, the faculty like it. Everyone wins, what's the problem? How are they being "exploited"?
Yeah, I largely agree; I’m not retired (only in my 30s), but I think for the part time work that I am doing (6 teaching hours a week), I am actually paid reasonably enough. It does bother me that full time professors (tenured or not) are getting paid less than half of what they could easily get in industry though.
