EXPOSED
The paper side of this job — syllabus drafting, lecture outlines, reading summaries, literature reviews, first-pass essay feedback — is squarely inside what current models do at usable quality, and the scholarly output (journal articles, book chapters) faces the same pressure. What holds is the live seminar: facilitating charged discussions about race, identity, and power where a human's presence, credibility, and willingness to be accountable in the room is the pedagogy, plus thesis advising and mentorship students specifically seek from a person. The real threat to this occupation over ten years is enrollment shifts, program consolidation, and political defunding more than automation — and the modal worker here is increasingly adjunct, with no licensure or tenure shield.
Dipped in 2020, then grew past where it started.
Median pay $77,070 → $85,020 -11.7% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+2.4%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 11,300 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Exposed, but growing
AI can already do a lot of these tasks, and the BLS still expects +2.4% more of these jobs by 2034. Demand for the output is growing faster than the work is being automated away — the mechanism BLS gives for software developers, and the combination people most often misread as an error.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~1,100 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
LecturerProfessorFaculty LecturerAdjunct ProfessorCollege ProfessorEthnology TeacherAssistant ProfessorAssociate ProfessorEthnology ProfessorHumanities ProfessorCollege Faculty MemberEthnic Origins TeacherEthnic Studies TeacherAsian Studies ProfessorBlack Studies ProfessorGender Studies LecturerEthnic Studies ProfessorGender Studies ProfessorAfrican Studies ProfessorHawaiian Studies LecturerUniversity Faculty MemberWomen's Studies ProfessorAmerican Studies ProfessorLatin American Studies Professor
Holding it up: trust premium . Weakest point: liability shield .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier Roughly half your week — building the Chicana feminism unit reading list, drafting lecture notes, summarizing secondary literature, writing the first pass of comments on a 12-page paper on settler colonialism — is work a model does at draft-usable quality today, which is why this sits at 9 rather than 14; what pulls it up from 5 is that running a seminar where students are arguing about their own family histories and someone starts crying is not a text-generation task.
Some physical or field component You are in a physical room, and that matters — reading the silence after a hard comment, holding office hours, occasionally leading a community site visit or archival trip — but nothing in the job requires manual skill in an uncontrolled setting, and the pandemic proved much of this delivers over Zoom, which caps it at 6.
No licence, no signature requirement No state licence, no board, no exam: a PhD (or in adjunct hiring, an MA plus availability) is a credential the department screens on, not a legal barrier, and if a course is cut or a section handed to a cheaper instructor no statute requires that instructor be you.
Meaningful discretion You decide whether a text stays on the syllabus when it will hurt some students to read it, when a heated exchange gets stopped versus pushed further, and how to grade an argument you think is wrong but well-made — real, unscripted calls — but they are made inside institutional rubrics, grade appeal processes, and a department chair's oversight, so the buck does not stop at 14+ with you.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (9/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (3/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (14/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (11/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 28 of this occupation's 43 points (65%).
Embodiment (6/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
Law Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 62/100, still EXPOSED.
Enforcement of the US Department of Education's 'regular and substantive interaction' requirement for distance education (34 CFR 600.2) plus regional accreditor rules (e.g. SACSCOC, MSCHE faculty credentialing standards) explicitly naming a credentialed human as instructor of record who cannot delegate interaction to an AI system — if written as an auditable Title IV condition rather than guidance, the named faculty member becomes the compliance point for federal aid eligibility
Genuine two-tier structure: if summarization, syllabus scaffolding, and first-pass essay comments are conceded to models, the residual day is seminar facilitation, thesis direction, primary-source and oral-history fieldwork in languages with thin digital corpora, and archive work under access restrictions — the measured task mix shifts upward without any new rule
Post-2024 Title VI and state 'divisive concepts' complaint regimes make a named instructor the accountable party for what is said and assigned in a charged classroom; if institutions formalize this into instructor-of-record attestations for contested content, the role owns consequential ambiguous calls with personal exposure rather than departmental cover
Faculty union contract language barring AI-generated instruction or requiring human sign-off on grades and course content — Rutgers AAUP-AFT and several CSU/CFA and Ontario OPSEU college negotiations have raised exactly this; if a system-wide contract makes grade authorship a named-human obligation with grievance teeth, the shield stops being purely reputational
IRB and community-research review roles: if universities and funders (NIH/NSF community-engaged research terms, tribal IRBs, CARE Principles for Indigenous data governance) require a named area-studies scholar to certify community consent and cultural protocol for datasets and archives, that certification is an ambiguous consequential call with a signature attached
If institutions market and price human-taught small seminars as the differentiator against AI-delivered general education (visible in residential liberal-arts positioning and in emerging 'AI-free instruction' disclosures some campuses are debating), enrollment in discussion-based courses becomes an explicit purchase of a person
The limit. The binding constraint is not capability but demand and headcount: program consolidation, state defunding of ethnic studies units, and adjunctification cut positions regardless of how these dimensions score. Embodiment has no realistic route. Also note liability_shield gains attach to the instructor-of-record credential, which adjuncts hold too — but they hold it contingently, so the shield protects the function more than the incumbent.
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 1,190 | $103,700 +22% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 440 | $100,140 +18% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 360 | $101,700 +20% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 310 | $102,030 +20% |
| Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell, GA | 300 | $80,980 -5% |
| Ann Arbor, MI | 240 | $106,140 +25% |
| Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX | 230 | $97,200 +14% |
| Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI | 230 | $81,220 -4% |
| Santa Maria-Santa Barbara, CA | 40 | $145,530 +71% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 40 | $129,270 +52% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 50 | $125,890 +48% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 43. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.