Did you know you could look online to see how much money your professors make?

Well, it’s true. They’re public employees, and so their business is apparently our business. To help us with our super snooping skills, the Knoxville News Sentinel compiles an annual searchable database of salaries for UT employees. Been wondering how your physics professor can afford such a fancy watch? Type in their name, and start crunching the numbers.

I find myself searching this database on occasion due to boredom or late-night curiosities. It can be quite rewarding on a midterm week like this one to discover that the professor who assigned that 10-page paper makes a few dollars less than the others. What is perhaps more interesting than merely comparing figures for funsies, though, is what our professors’ salaries say about our society’s values.

Take for instance the apparent pay gap between STEM fields and the humanities. At UT, the head of the physics department makes a hefty $228,977.00 annually, while the history department head takes home $149,816.00 per year. The difference is less drastic when comparing the chemistry and sociology department heads, but the gap is still there. In some cases, even my most esteemed humanities professors make less than my worst STEM professors (although admittedly I have a small STEM sample size).

I know what you’re thinking: surely my amateur survey, with no methodology to speak of, can’t tell us much about broad social disparities. And you’re right. As much fun as this database is, there are some things it can’t show us. Among those are the salaries of adjunct faculty members. You may not even know what an adjunct faculty member is, much less whether or not you have one teaching your class. Try searching one in the database, and you come up empty.

Adjunct faculty members are hired on a contractual, part-time basis. This means they have no job security and no path to receiving tenure. Their job performance comes under scrutiny often every year, and their classes can be canceled at the last minute without notice. Adjuncts are making up an increasing proportion of college faculty nationwide as institutions work on tighter budgets. According to a November 2013 article in the Huffington Post, adjuncts earn between $20,000-$25,000 annually, compared with an average faculty salary of $84,000. 60 percent of adjuncts report working more than one job, and many struggle to put food on the table.

Last spring, adjunct faculty from UT and Pellissippi State participated in an “Adjunct Teach-Out” to raise awareness about these issues, and there is growing discontent among adjuncts across the country as they teach heavy course loads while struggling to feed themselves.

The database also cannot directly reveal disparities based on gender, but research shows us that they are there. The American Association of University Professors released data in 2009 that showed that female faculty members still make, on average, 81 cents to their male colleagues’ dollar. A 2015 study at the University of California Berkeley indicates that this might be related to the STEM and humanities gap I mentioned earlier, since STEM fields are male-dominated and vice-versa.

Whatever the cause, this disparity exists and is unacceptable. In case you were wondering why we still need feminism.

So, by all means, use this special issue of the Beacon as the impetus to treat your professors well. Send them a nice note to thank them for getting you through a rough semester or inspiring you to follow your dreams. Respect your professors’ hard work by being on time and not texting in their classes (regretfully guilty on both counts). Do all this for your professors and more.

But if we as a society really want to appreciate our faculty — young and old, male and female, tenured and adjunct — we need to give them equal pay for equal work. Peruse the database when you’re bored and question what the numbers mean. Demand that the university release data on salary equity and the ratio of tenure-track to adjunct professors. And please, for the love of the Vols, evaluate your instructors at the end of the semester.

You never know how much they might need it.

Summer Awad is a senior in College Scholars. She can be reached at [email protected].