We should give thanks to the forgotten part-time teacher, Victor Davis Hanson suggests:
An English 1A class taught by a TA or part-timer might service 30 students at a cost of $4,000 to 5,000 in instructional fees; an upper-division required course for the major, with 10 students, like “The Construction of Manhood in Blake” taught by a full professor might run the university $25,000. Part-timers might make $35,000 without benefits for juggling together 5-7 classes at different campuses, while tenured professors might make well over $100,000 for teaching 4-6 courses with full facilities, benefits, and support.The problem is that all the old justifications for such wide imbalances — tenured faculty advising, publication, intangible college governance — don’t wash any more, at least in the case of the humanities and social sciences — not when TAs, lecturers and part-timers often have PhDs, and are as good or better teachers than full professors, while the scholarship of the affluently tenured, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is either irrelevant or unreadable, while their teaching is not subject to the same scrutiny or consequences as part-time evaluations.