One Year of Adjuncting

Last summer I began this blog upon receiving the "Good News," which was the email subject line, that my hours at my formerly full-time temporary faculty position were to be cut.  It was late in the summer to be looking for piecemeal work, but I managed to find some classes over 60 miles away, thanks to a friend.  It was either that or find a cheaper rental place for my family in a town that has neither loads of safe, cheaper rental places for families or other teaching jobs.  Though I truly had been an adjunct all those years of full-time work, I had not ever considered myself one until that moment I took on two schools.  I was wrong.  I was always disposable to the system.  Now I was to find out just how precariously many of the nation's 76% of higher education faculty truly do live.

I started the fall term with an abundance of optimism -- really what choice did I have?  I could either teach six composition classes for two schools or children would not eat and bills would not be paid.  An added bonus was that the fall breaks for both schools lined up, giving me real and much needed rests.  For the most part, the fall was okay if not absolutely maddening in the amount of work that I did.  It was during this never-ending onslaught of grading that I became more involved with adjunct activism, and it was quite likely that involvement that kept me from losing my mind entirely.  Even the sometimes two hour plus commute--of which it sometimes took over an hour to go about three miles--gave me time to think, plan, and compose in my head.  My smartphone became my best work tool, giving me a place to take notes down on the fly, check all of my email accounts, do research, keep track of my to-do lists, and about four million other things that would have been impossible even six years ago.  Without constant access to my files and the internet, my work would have been twice as difficult.

Then winter came.  On the last Tuesday of fall term I fell on the ice outside my house as I took off to walk to School One.  I fell straight down.  This resulted in the destruction of my trusty old laptop that was in my backpack on that day and, worse, I injured my hip joints and continue to limp even now.  This was the beginning of the no-insurance-health-meltdown.  Though I only missed one class all Fall term due to illness, the Spring term was disastrous.  It should be noted that School Two provides no real sick leave.

Any of my US readers know that this past winter was utterly deplorable.  Once I cancelled classes on my commute day for a complete whiteout.  Once I cancelled it for an ice storm that left roads impassable.  A third time, when I was within an hour of my destination, a large truckload tiedown hook was launched from the road and through my radiator.  Luckily, I'd kept my AAA membership and my vehicle insurance covered almost all the costs.  If I hadn't had these safety nets, I likely would not have been able to get home that day or to afford the repairs.  Despite any other scrimping and saving an adjunct must do, from experience if I'm going to drive anywhere for this job, those two things are worth every penny to have.

In February, my smaller son brought home a cold from daycare.  After a week of coughing on me, I became ill.  This was no minor cold when set loose in my system.  For two weeks it raged and then, just as I began to feel better, some upper respiratory flu attacked me.  All of February and March were miserable.  I coughed so hard I either cracked a rib or pulled something important in my side.  Sleep?  Not lying down.  So here I was, dragging about two schools separated by 60+ miles, limping, coughing, and teaching.  I traded my trusty backpack for a small wheeled bag marketed as a mobile office.  Another good investment.  This bag even has a padded pocket for my new-to-me laptop that should protect it better than the sleeve did and I wouldn't be as much at risk for dropping it from on high.  The only drawback is that when I ride the bus downtown to School Two (parking is so expensive it is more cost efficient for me to park on my friends' street for free and take the bus), it can be a pain to heft it up the step and then keep it out of everyone's way.  However, I can take all the things I need, as well as heavy textbooks and papers, more easily than before all without hurting myself.

For most of February, March, and April, while the weather in my area was less than optimal--snow, ice, whiteouts, more snow, freezing cold temperatures--I coughed and snuffled my way through the five  classes.  My spring breaks did not line up, but this at least provided two "easy" weeks; therefore, I only had to work at one school each week.  I thought that I would get some insurance help straightened out during this time, but instead I got much sicker and spent the off days of the one week in bed and then the off days of the break two weeks later trying desperately to stay awake long enough to grade the monster stack of writing that accumulated during the worst of the illness.  There were things students needed back in order to continue, so those were prioritized.  I took the honesty approach with the students.  They already knew I taught at two schools because I made that clear from the start of term as part of my introduction, and they knew I was very ill.  I promised work would be back when needed.  I offered extended rewrite deadlines.  I used email services routed to my smartphone to keep up with everyone, having instructed them that was the best way to reach me and get quicker answers to any questions or any needed help.  The students also suffered with the wretched sickness at both campuses.  The weather and flu took their tolls on us all.  Somehow we made it to the end.

By the end of April for one school and the middle of May for the other, we completed the spring term.  Students wrote some great things.  Some of their reflective portfolio letters were fabulously specific in the things they learned and how they would apply them in other classes and writings.  I did not lose too many from my rosters and most of those were folks who withdrew from the universities fully early in the term.  I did lose a few more in one of my developmental classes than I would like, but that is not uncommon. I cannot help but think that if I only worked at that one school I would have had more opportunity to chase them down and keep them in the course.  Teaching developmental sections takes more care, more effort, to retain students who struggle for a various intersection of reasons.  They are courses I've been entrusted with in the past, just never as a two-school adjunct.  That isn't doing the best for the students.

So now it is June.  I have finally stopped coughing.  I do not always feel very good.  I still have trouble with my left hip.  I am in a battle with assistance agencies over medical, food, and income help as I enter summer with no work.  I've been applying to jobs inside and outside academia.  Would I do this two school adjunct thing again?  I would really prefer not to, but it may once again be the only option available.  My position at School One, the original job that I had and the one that paid the best is now gone.  All of the adjuncts in my department there were replaced with graduate students.  Fifteen folks lost their jobs.  The other adjunct options in this area pay far less and are term-to-term contracts whereas this one at least provided an entire academic year's guaranteed amount of pay.  Losing this is the next level down:  term by term work only.

This is one year as a two-school adjunct in short.  It does not address the good things:  the fun of classes; the great things students said, created, and wrote; and working with other adjuncts to organize, unionize, and draw attention to the cause.  This is my truth of one year.  This is the state of American higher education for many of the 76% of adjuncts teaching at our colleges and universities.

Adjunct Verses/Versus Badmin

First Badmin came for the retired tenure track lines, and I did not speak out

     Because I had a tenure track job. 

Then they came for the liberal studies jobs, and I did not speak out—

      Because I did not teach much liberal studies anyway. 

Then they came for the adjuncts’ jobs, and I did not speak out—

      Because I was not an adjunct. 

Then they came for my tenure track job—and there was no one left to speak for me. 

My apologies to Martin Niemӧller: This is in no way meant to belittle his original and very powerful quote on the dangers of not standing up for the right thing when one should, nor is it meant to equate the adjunct crisis with the Holocaust--that would be inane and inappropriate.  This is only to remind people how we got in this current situation and just how far it could still go.  Too often we are complacent until the crisis knocks on our own front door.  If you feel alone and powerless, it is much easier to stay safe and quiet.  I can understand that because I have been that person.  Doing the right thing is often not easy and entails risk.  Across the nation I watch my adjunct family lose classes through cuts or tenured faculty poaching of already filled contingent faculty sections.  I see policies implemented in the name of "the greater good" that cost current teachers their livelihoods.  If the adjunctification of the professoriate is allowed to reach its endgame, there will be no tenure track by default.  When the tenured become the minority on every single campus, who will balance votes and the job of shared governance?  

We can either take a stand or continue to watch American higher education succumb to corporatization.  The current rise in adjunct unionization efforts countrywide is no mere trend.  People are drawing the line and beginning to fight back.  

Where will you stand? Beside us or against us?  

Let' s Make this as Painful as Possible!

This is my last week at School Two.  I'm nearly finished grading all the papers and portfolios for those two classes.  Today was my last day there and it started out pretty well.  It was nice that more than one person in my Composition II class thanked me for the course and said they enjoyed it.  My day should've stopped there.

Then I checked my email.

From School One, the one that has dismissed all the current adjuncts, came an email request.  This missive went out to the entire department, but it could just as easily have been sent to a list of only the permanent faculty members.  Instead, every single one of us was asked to do a big favor for the new horde of incoming TAs--our replacements:  would all faculty be so kind as to submit their assignments and prompts to be stored electronically for these students to access?

Excuse me?

I've just been told that I'm no longer needed.  It is then implied that I am not good enough to go through the existent conversion to permanent faculty member process that is part of our contract, but my ASSIGNMENTS would be APPRECIATED?!

Nope.

So very much nope that if nope had a tonnage measurement this would break the scales of Nope-i-ness.

My years of professional education courses, of teaching experience, of trial-and-error--->reflection--->reconfiguration ARE MOST CERTAINLY NOT going to go to the people who will be paid less money to do my job.

Would I share ideas with a colleague? Yes.  Have I done this in the past? Yes.  This is what makes a community of teacher/scholars function well.  Should I leave my hard work to be vampirishly siphoned off by those with no context or knowledge of me and my methodology?  Hell no.

This was an absurd and highly offensive request.  A parting blow with just over a week to go.  A reminder that we are not wanted, just our products that are beneficial to others. If that isn't greasing the wheels of the corporate education machine with our own bodies and minds, I don't know what is.

I sincerely hope that any other adjunct or TA who is not returning ignores that request and doesn't submit a damn thing.  I do admit that one friend's suggestion of turning in a syllabus with a theme of adjunctification amused me, but I don't have the time or the patience to even make a satirical stab at an assignment for this.

A request such as this takes the cake.  This cake, to be precise:

P.S.  Adjuncts, don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Earlier Optimistism Probably Erroneous: Farewell to Fifteen Adjunct Positions

There was a time a few short weeks ago when I believed that the outrage over what could happen to adjuncts was going to make a difference in the department at School One--this is the place where our very own department reduced our workload down to 3/3 from our former 4/4 full time, year-long schedules, thus making me a two-school Unarmed Education Mercenary.  Several tenure track folks got angry enough to speak out publicly and also called for the issue of our cut hours, ridiculously unaffordable heath care situation, and part time status to be discussed at full department meetings both in the fall term and this spring.  Readers of the blog already know that I went to a portion of that first meeting, but I never really wrote fully what the fallout was from that day.  I think that it has taken me this long to comprehend it all myself.  It has not been a mentally easy few months and the last few weeks have been especially discouraging.  From trusted reports, it is probably better that I did not attend the last meeting.  It sounded like an ugly scene between colleagues that likely has deepened the divide between undergraduate and graduate faculty.  A divide as apparent to an outside assessment committee as it is to those working there. Instead, I taught my classes, which are scheduled the same time as the departmental meetings,

Aside from a disinterested disregard for what happened to the adjuncts by many people who spoke up at the first meeting--a lot of people didn't speak up at all, so I don't know what to say about that other than maybe they agreed with those who did--was an utter lack of respect for liberal/general studies courses, both the people who teach them, and the students who must take these required classes.  Underscored by reports from the latest meeting, it seems to be the view that the overly large doctoral program students deserve these formerly adjunct courses as places to gain teaching experience.  It is already a practice that there are Teaching Associates granted a few courses and nominally supervised by mentors, but these positions have been highly competitive.  How that competition plays out is, perhaps, a story for another blog or even another writer, but these positions do exist.  The competition is supposed to ensure the best qualified candidates get the positions.  This also should guarantee, by extension, that undergraduates aren't exposed to educated fools who have no idea how to construct, direct, or assess learning.  I'm fairly certain no chairperson or dean wants to be inundated with grade or unprofessional conduct complaints, and having once covered classes for a TA who could not take the pressure and left unexpectedly, I was told that "avoidance of all grade complaints" was the goal as I covered the last four weeks and finals while trying to salvage some shred of learning for those students.  Art Linkletter used to say that "Old age isn't for sissies," and I would revise that to "Contemporary teaching isn't for them either."  Education is an art and a skill that can be learned, but it should not come at the expense of undergraduate students paying full price.

When I think of how many times undergraduate non-English majors have told me that my class has been the first English class they've ever enjoyed or felt the freedom to really write in, I am very pleased.  I also neither appreciated or followed the advice of tenure track faculty who told me, when I was a TA and an adjunct finsihing a dissertation, to let the classes languish in favor of my own work or I would "never get done" with my degree. Do what now?  I'm supposed to give a class of students who have paid the same amount as everyone else a sub-par experience because my writing is more important?  I guess that makes sense to certain people, but most likely not those from professional education backgrounds.  I neither compromised my classes or my work and, TA-DA, degree in hand, for what good it does me. Is that what those advice-givers did?  Did they sacrifice the quality of their undergraduate teaching in favor of their own work?  Doing a dissertation is not dissimilar from working on a scholarly book, so teaching while writing should be the norm and not something to get past. 

This move to gift all the former adjunct positions to less qualified teaching associates seems a direct disservice to the many highly qualified adjuncts who do a great job AND an equally bad move for undergraduate students.  It also furthers the rift between graduate and undergraduate faculty as in, dear undergrad profs, your classes are not really worthy of anything but a learning experience for our doctoral programs.  W. O. W.  Way to undercut morale while missing the boat for on-campus recruitment and retention of majors, which seems to always be a concern we are to keep in mind.  Additionally, this particular campus likes to claim, both in PR materials and in on-campus recruitment tours, that "At mega-universities, students might catch a glimpse of the professor; too busy doing research to be in the classroom, he or she passes the class off to a graduate assistant.  Not at _(Insert name of PA State System School)___, where the professors who conduct the important research also teach the class." Furthermore, according to projected course offering data and current coverage statistics, Professor "Staff" will cover over 50% of undergraduate liberal studies required courses.  This is based only on currently scheduled courses and does not take into account those invariably added during summer orientation sessions as required courses fill to the maximum and new ones are approved for the overflow.

To compound the situation further, readers of the blog may recall that there is indeed a faculty union at this school--one that is for tenure track faculty AND adjuncts alike!  Ah but herein lies a terrible conundrum that has led me to an answer I pondered earlier:  can a union represent both tenure track and adjuncts equally?  The answer in this case is a resounding NO.  The union failed us utterly.  In the fall our concerns were treated as no major issue.  A union member sympathetic to our cause told me at one point that a policy grievance on behalf of all 15/16 of us was being filed.  It disappeared.  My contact could not discover what became of it.  I guess this place has one of Winston of Nineteen Eighty-Four fame's memory holes.  This spring, when our chair summarily dismissed us with the notice of a policy change in fact giving all the classes to graduate students, our grievance chair went from reportedly outraged, to wishy-washy in a meeting with some adjuncts, to nothing happening again as the short clock on our window to file ticked away.  What happened here? 

In the latest round of contract negotiations between this union of PA state system faculty and the state powers that be, our team stood up for adjuncts when the state wanted to reduce us all to part timers to ostensibly save a few bucks.  No, said the union.  This is wrong.  However, I believe that the union team did not go far enough to protect us.  Perhaps, being union members, they could not fathom that our very own union members, faculty themselves would then turn and do to adjuncts exactly what administration wanted in the first place!  With no explicit language in place to protect adjuncts, the wonderful conversion to tenure track option for long term temp facutly can be subverted by any department willing to flout solidarity and the spirit of the contract.  In my opinion, either this contract, voted for and approved by a statewide membership covers EVERYONE who is a member or it is a useless document fit for the bottom of birdcages.  If our nominal protections can be subverted for the will of this department or that, then why should anyone abide by the articles of it at all?  That is not solidarity, it is pick-and-choose, not unlike those people who use one verse from Leviticus to denounce their favorite sin while shoveling in likewise forbidden shellfish as they sport polyblend clothing!  

Adjuncts, I think that if we are going to successfully work for better working conditions for us and better learning conditions for our students, we should trust ourselves and our OWN unions.  This situation has made it clear to me that very few people still clinging to the tenure track dream are truly concerned with the reality of the situation that their very own programs are complicit in creating.  When job searches nationwide generate 200-300+ candidates per posting, the reason so many PhDs remain jobless in the academic field is not the incompetence of those candidates, but rather the dearth of positions for which we have been trained.  It is not a case of not trying hard enough or being good enough; instead it is entirely because full time positions have been systematically reduced and divided until there is the appearance of only part time work.  The classes are there.  The money is being diverted elsewhere.  It is time to fight a system bent on perpetuating itself on the backs of adjucnt faculty and out of the pockets of parents and students.