As they nibble away at your control over your working day, and marginalize you and the other adjuncts more and more, your job satisfaction cannot possibly improve. Time to move on. Really. You’re not in it for the money, which makes salary negotiations really easy. You want students you can actually benefit and a place that affords you a modicum of respect for the job you do and the credentials you’ve earned.

These administration drones (pity them in their inadequacy) will eventually reap the rewards of their mismanagement when the graduates enter the work force, even more pitifully unprepared for real life because they’ll have been rewarded simply for showing up by the dregs they’ll get to replace you. That word gets around in the work world, believe me, that hiring a graduate of Your School is the kiss of death, and given the situation now where employers with an actual job have their choice of many experienced and/or properly educated applicants, the worm will turn around and erupt right under their feet.

Wow. What a tortured metaphor. The point being that under-served graduates will demand their money back, or some other satisfaction.

Leave them to stew in their own juice. In your exit letter or interview, make it plain why you’re leaving. Name names. They won’t care, but it ought to make you feel better. When they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to keep the fourth or fifth adjust from quitting after taking your classes, perhaps they’ll take another look at the Administrators From Hell.

Yes, of course they’ll lose adjuncts–but maybe not so many as you think. If this is the lowest-paying college teaching gig in the area, the adjuncts either can’t get into the others or–like you–aren’t primarily in it for the money. You want “to be of use to the students,” and their objective is to pay you as much in satisfying that desire and a little in money and faculty prestige as they can get away with. For that matter, replacing you with someone less capable won’t bother them unless and until the loss of capability gets so obvious it affects enrollment.

Incidentally, it’s not the “for profit” that causes the problem. Plenty of government agencies and charities are just as bad. The problem is we’ve set up a system in which they can sell diplomas rather than training or education. At that point, any teacher better than the worst they can hire and maintain accreditation is a waste.

It’s an administrator’s way of thinking. And I’m sure the fact that many of them enjoy the pettiness and form-filling is part of their compensation package.