He lived in poverty, or he could've gotten a real job

To be an adjunct professor is to be bombarded by stories like this by your colleagues on Facebook:

When visitors walked into the dilapidated boardinghouse where Dave Heller lived, the smell alone could transport them back to their college days.
“It smelled like grad student,” jokes Charlie Fischer, a friend. “Like years of boiled noodles and rice.”

Except Heller was 61 years old and a philosophy instructor at Seattle University. Yet he lived in a room in a tenant group house in Seattle’s U District, with nothing but a bed, a fridge and his library of 3,000 books.
When he died earlier this year from an untreated thyroid condition, Heller was making only $18,000 a year teaching philosophy on a part-time, adjunct basis, his friends say. That’s about one-third the median income for a single person in Seattle, and barely above the federal poverty line.

There's a lot of moral posing in this story. 'Look, I live like a grad-student! Look, I'd live in a barrel to teach!'

Actually judging by the pic, by the words of his colleagues, and by his Rate My Professor rankings, I can't help but like our 'gifted professor'.

But he made a choice, didn't he? Many of my colleagues do the same thing, and they all complain about the same thing. The plight of the adjunct is all too real, I see it up close with colleagues who teach at three, four even five different community colleges. The coffee shop I go to in the morning is hiring, ten bucks an hour, eight hours a day. These folks could do that.

Or maybe they can stop acting like they got a right to a decent living teaching Basque Poetry: 1848-1917, Lesbian Labor Activism, and Early American Post Modernist Art.

Me I teach history, or used to, anyway.

Of course, in the article they get the problem completely wrong taking about the 'comodification' of college, whatever that means. All that money people are paying ain't going to the adjuncts, its going to the admin all the deans, assistant deans, provosts, none of whom actually do anything.