Imagine spending eight or nine years of exhausting work to get a Ph.D. and then earning a salary that makes you eligible for food stamps, receiving no benefits and having no job security past the current semester.

This heartbreaking scene doesn’t come from Pol Pot’s purges of Cambodia’s intelligentsia. It is the reality of what is becoming the majority of professors in the world’s richest country.

Most college students have never heard terms such as “adjunct” and “contingent faculty,” yet the use of adjunct professors has skyrocketed since the 1970s. Adjuncts are non-tenure track faculty members hired for a semester with no guarantee of being rehired. They typically receive abysmally low salaries and no benefits– not even health insurance.

According to Dr. Tracy Leavelle, president of Creighton’s Arts & Sciences Faculty Senate, the reason for this adjunct explosion is two-fold. First, universities have irresponsibly admitted too many students into doctoral programs. As a result, the academic job market is increasingly like that of painters and independent filmmakers.

The second reason is that adjuncts are cheap and flexible, especially during a recession. Leavelle noted that at Creighton hiring of tenure-track faculty has not kept pace with rising student enrollment. He sees the increasing reliance on adjuncts as unjust and believes the burdens placed on them causes the quality of classroom instruction to decline.

However, Leavelle believes that, although it would be costly, Creighton can make the growth of tenure-track positions proportional to the growth of incoming freshmen. If we value the work of adjunct professors – and we should – then Creighton should make more of a commitment to them.

For Creighton to fulfill its mission of social justice, it must start on its own campus. Undergrads don’t have to go on service trips to the Dominican Republic or protest against Nike sweatshops in Bangladesh to make the world a better place. They should demand justice for Creighton’s suffering contingent faculty.

Creighton makes every attempt to convince prospective students of its academic excellence. So wouldn’t a growing reliance on adjuncts be false advertising? After all, how can students receive an excellent liberal arts education if their teachers have no office space, no job security and no idea how to feed their family?

Eliminating adjuncts completely is impractical. As Leavelle noted, some of them have a full-time job outside the ivory tower and teach on a part-time basis for enjoyment. Others, such as business professors, are professionals who share their practical field experience by teaching a class or two each semester.

However, those two categories represent a small fraction of Creighton’s adjuncts. Otherwise, those with a Ph.D. who are committed to college education 40 hours a week shouldn’t have to wonder what will happen if they will need life-saving surgery.