If you find your college classroom un-taught today, do not be alarmed: it's for a good cause.

Today is "National Adjunct Walkout Day," when the overworked, disrespected, and underpaid adjunct professors of the world (the US, mostly) go on strike to raise awareness of the fact that, while colleges keeping getting more and more expensive, adjunct professors keep getting screwed.

I mean, have you ever stopped to consider just how bizarre and exploitative and nonsensical the employment arrangement is for college professors? It's bananas! Instead of the familiar and time-tested "Apply for a job, get hired, get a salary and benefits" arrangement that works for most industries, higher education prefers to go with a system of "Spend a decade going into massive debt in order to educate yourself in a tiny, impractical specialty, then compete against other similarly well-educated and poor colleagues to earn an 'adjunct' teaching position that comes with an insultingly paltry salary and zero job security whatsoever, all in the hopes of one day earning a faculty position from which it will be almost impossible to fire you." Adjunct professors have the education levels that one would assume would offer secure middle or upper class employment, but their pay and working conditions are in fact so awful that they are one of the ripest fields for unionization drives—smart enough to understand the benefits of a union, and pissed off enough to want one. Universities have managed to make themselves tiny little bastions of job inequality. By choice!

It is not a good system.

You can peruse this page to see how National Adjunct Walkout Day is going. Better yet, if you are in college or going to college or pay money to a college one way or another, take a few moments today to openly wonder why our nation's centers of learning have decided to create this entire class of desperate, well-educated aspiring academics, working for crumbs, scrambling for gigs, like day laborers of the higher education world. It is a bad way to set things up. A regular salary ain't that much to ask for.

Peace 2 all the broke anthropology PhDs today.

[Photo: FB]