Erin O’Connor, a former English professor, writes about false advertising in colleges.
One of the arguments against universities’ growing reliance on part-time, non-tenure-track faculty is that it amounts to a form of false advertising: students enroll at Prestigious University X, and expect to receive an education from the world-class faculty employed there. Instead, they get taught by a cadre of grad students and adjunct faculty who work cheap, who are not the reason for the school’s top reputation, and who are, arguably, functioning as part of a shell game played with students’ tuition dollars.