More than 700,000 workers in North Carolina live on $7.25 per hour, making about $15,080 per year, but according to census analysis by the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education 25 percent of part-time college faculty now receive public assistance. 

That’s an awful lot of people with doctoral degrees who are living as the working poor. This government assistance includes programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, food stamps and cash welfare. 

In April 2013, The New York Times reported that adjunct professors only make an average of $2,700 per course, as opposed to the yearly salary that full- time professors make. Because of this, adjunct professors were among the hundreds of protesters advocating raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour last week at Shaw University. 

One of those protesters was Demetrius Noble, an adjunct professor of African American studies at UNC-Greensboro. Noble said many people don’t realize adjunct professors often make less than minimum wage workers.

Noble is justified in advocating that adjunct faculty members from North Carolina universities pay them $15,000 per course taught. The Adjunct Project through The Chronicle of Higher Education, a crowdsourcing project used to detail salaries of adjunct faculty members, reported that adjunct faculty members made anywhere from $2,000 per course in Women’s and Gender Studies to $7,000 per course in computer science at NC State.

What is most alarming is that while tenured track professor positions are at an all-time low, adjunct professor positions are at an all-time high, making up 76 percent of American university faculty positions, according to The New York Times. 

Roughly 40 percent of faculty positions have been eliminated since the 2008 economic crash, making it extremely difficult for those holding Ph.D.s to find tenure-track positions. 

This system that is taking advantage of professors like Demetrius Noble resembles indentured servitude more than a way to cultivate and challenge the top minds in academia.

But Noble isn’t alone. Across the country, adjunct faculty members, students and faculty members alike are standing in solidarity in the “Fight for 15K,” a nationwide movement to ensure that adjuncts make $15,000 per course. 

“While they are fighting for $15 an hour, we are standing shoulder to shoulder as we are fighting for $15,000 a course,” Noble said.

Here at NC State and across the UNC System, we need to see students, faculty members and administrators stand alongside adjunct faculty members and lobby the UNC Board of Governors and our legislature to fight for the same.