professors dying in poverty

Where's all that tuition money turning college students into debt-slaves going, anyway? Not to their teachers.

An Adjunct Tragedy | The Nation

The proletarianization of higher education, according to the associate general counsel of the United Steel Workers Union, has now claimed a life. In a moving op-ed published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Daniel Kovalik, wrote this week of Margaret Mary Vojtko, a French teacher at Pittsburgh’s Dusquesne University whose tenure there—though it was, of course, a tenure without tenure—lasted twenty-five years, who just died at the age of 83.

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...“I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Dusquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits”—after twenty-five years of loyal service; something for today’s adjuncts to look forward to, should they decide to stay in the grueling game—“and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.”