Why Aren't You on the Schedule?!

There is the post I began writing, and then there is this one.  I fully admit that I censored myself this time because, during a meeting at one of my schools, another blogger who writes about adjunct issues was named and had her employment status exposed to the full meeting.  How dare she criticize the treatment of adjuncts! Never mind that she does not work at that school, she still was named and a personal detail about her revealed.  I've been thinking about that brief moment more lately, yet here I am still writing.

It's that time of year when students scramble to get classes for next term.  At one place I am already in the system because my contract was full-year.  At the other, I was not since the contract was term by term unless their scheduling system was updated recently.  I know because my students asked me, "Why aren't you on the schedule?"  I've gotten this question before.  A lot.  Writing is a sequential subject at many schools with students required to take at least Composition I & II, whatever that place happens to label them.  When students have a successful semester of writing and want to continue in the same way, it is natural for them to seek out the same professor.  Likewise, if the teaching style did not match the students' learning styles, they necessarily look for a different person.  When a good portion of the sections in required courses do not visibly belong to anyone, it makes planning difficult.  It also sends a message to the students that these important required classes are at the bottom of the heap to be staffed:  Instructors TBA and STAFF are very busy, if scheduling systems can be trusted.  These must be incredibly talented folks to teach so very many sections in so very many general studies fields!

When students ask me why I'm  not on the schedule, I tell them.  I've been doing this since they started asking me when I began teaching at the post-secondary level.  I do not use class time to speak on it because part of me is pretty sure that could be held against me.  However, these conversations often occur before class starts since I'm usually in the room early getting things set up, or afterwards when I hang around to answer questions and close up the electronics.  I explain that as non-permanent faculty I cannot expect to have certain sections or types of courses:  I must teach what, if any, things I am assigned.  Common responses include "But why aren't you full time?" and "You're the only professor I've had all semester that knew our names!"  Could they just be flattering me? Maybe.  If it didn't happen every time my name is not posted due to my nefarious status and relegation to TBA/STAFF, I would buy that.  If the students are in my major they often ask will I have something beyond the general studies level.  No.  No I will not.  Adjuncts aren't likely to get courses that full-timers often fight over teaching.

I don't preach on the situation but I give them direct answers regarding the status of adjunct faculty.  I remind them that the stereotype of the wealthy professor living in a beautiful home taking summers to travel abroad and write is, on the whole, fiction for most people whether at the temporary or new faculty level.  I don't begrudge those teachers higher on the totem pole their salaries, based on years of experience, research, and publications, but I am appalled at the walls preventing many of us from moving out of the academic gutter onto the sidewalk that leads to the gates of the comfortable.  I don't find the ivory tower image fitting for 21st century academia; I prefer more students and instructors from all walks of life to have access to higher education.  However, if the students are going to still be charged what are now exorbitant sums, the people teaching them deserve a living wage to provide that education.  Continually showing them that the foundational and general studies courses that comprise much of their first two years are, for the most part, only fit to be staffed by the itinerant faculty doesn't send the message that the classes are worth attending or caring about as much as higher level majors courses.  No wonder the general public's perception of higher education is that much of it is a waste of time hindering the student from becoming the wage-earning, highly trained worker! This is the current way it is presented for too many colleges and universities across the United States.  The value of foundational knowledge linked with predominantly adjunct faculty belies the importance of one and the true skill and worth of the other.   

"Civil Disobedience" and Campus Equity Week

It just so happens that this week one of my classes is reading Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"--it is also Campus Equity Week here in the US.  The preface to my edition reminds us that the influence of this text extends into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, specifically through Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.  Originally a speech, this piece provides much encouragement for the contemporary activist, including those striving for sustainable employment for adjunct educators.

Speaking about the contemporary academic scene, many temporary faculty members find themselves in bleak situations, as most recently highlighted by the case of Margaret Mary Votjko.  This is not dissimilar from the plight of American workers in many fields:  both food service and retail also coming under fire for the heartless ways they treat their employees.  The single mother who spoke up to the McDonald's CEO and lost her job, the recording of Wal-Mart instructing its workers to file for food stamps due to their paltry take-home pay, these are not uncommon themes today.  Must this be so?  Thoreau writes "It is truly enough said that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience" (¶4).  We live in a time when the Supreme Court considers corporations people, yet we also see what happens when the people behind that Corporate Personage have no conscience.  We have the state of the American worker today.

Thoreau, however, does not leave us without hope.  Instead, he issues a challenge perhaps forgotten among the more popularly quoted lines regarding government and unjust laws.  First he instructs that "when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say let us not have such a machine any longer" (¶8).  Do we have friction? Ask the working poor who are mocked at every turn, on newscasts of every stripe:  are they too lazy and not worthy of a living wage, of being able to afford nutritious food and shelter for themselves and their families, do they not have a right to health care so that they can work and care for things and people without worry and extreme medical debt?  So many are quick to say no, but I say we are not to oil this machine any more, for a machine we certainly have:  the Machine of Corporate Education, and it has no conscience.  Therefore, we are required to "Let [our] life be a counter friction to stop the machine" (¶18)!  It is not going to stop for us. It is not going to stop because we set aside a week.  It is not going to stop unless we quit enabling it with our sweat, our intelligence, and our lives.  

What can one person do?  I do not have an answer for everyone, but for me starting this blog serves as a risk-taking step.  Already, tenure track friends have warned me to be careful, to stop, to delete it.  I cannot.  I can not now stop talking back because I am full-up with sickness, with work pain for these conditions.  I wept for the life of a woman I never knew.  I know that I cannot keep up this maddening commute for multiple years.  This kind of teaching is not my best though I am trying as hard as I can.  I also cannot keep shortchanging my family for the adjunct lifestyle.  Reading Thoreau for class today gave me some solace and I turned the quote over in my mind all the way to work and home again:  "For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be:  what is once well done is done forever" (¶21).  I could take the blog down, but likely there are already screenshots, copies, reposts, and, as Anonymous has shown us, nothing put on the Internet truly ever disappears.  It is done, or rather begun.  

So what will we do next?  The author of "Civil Disobedience" says "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.  A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight" (¶22).  We may be the minority only in perception, but reality shows that the numbers are on our side.  The Machine of Corporate Education has no conscience and it has no heart, but right now it has our lives.  We can go on until it grinds us to bits or we can, in our collective strength--to paraphrase Thoreau--clog it with our whole weight.

#CEW2013

Signal Boost: "Adjunct Blues" video

Next week, October 28-November 2, is Campus Equity Week (CEW) nationwide!  This event is also known in some states and Canada as Fair Employment Week.  Visit www.campusequityweek.org for more information, events, and ways to participate.


The linked video stars John Manning and his banjo performing the song "Adjunct Blues," -- with Manning's lyrics set to "Rockin' Chair Money" by Lonnie Glosson and Bill Carlisle.  Thanks to friend of the blog, Matt Ussia, for sending me the link and also filming the video.

The lyrics are below:

                         "Adjunct Blues"

I got the adjunct blues and I got ‘em the hard way

Teaching for the university, working for low pay

And we’re getting robbed…yeah robbed

We’re getting robbed

We got the adjunct blues.

Now students got the adjunct blues and they get it every day

Your teachers got no job security, working for low pay

And you’re getting robbed…yeah robbed

You’re getting robbed

We got the adjunct blues.

Your folks got the adjunct blues and they get ‘em the hard way

Paying big tuition for adjuncts who get low pay

And they’re getting robbed…yeah robbed

They’re getting robbed

We all got the adjunct blues.

                                                                                                                     

Adjunct Carnival, Buyer Beware

Being an adjunct is bad enough when I see posts on line of the travails of this career from others, notably CUNY's refusal to pay their adjuncts until October 14th though they started work at the end of August.  However, some weeks this nationwide crisis gets a bit more in my space.  Recently I attended a meeting that included discussion of a department's treatment of adjunct faculty.  I still do not know if this was a good decision on my part or not.  I don't even know if I even understand what happened, what it all meant, and if anything aligns with our current contract, but two things from this meeting have rarely left my thoughts since.

The first item seems to me to be an unattainable golden ring--no, not the Lord of the Rings one, but the kind that used to be on carosels high up in the bunting which conferred a free ride to any merry-go-round jockey lucky enough to grab it.  The ring was stationary while the horses not only spun around but moved up and down, making it next to impossible to reach.  I feel that just such an enticement has been nailed up in front of us.  While being told we may no longer be welcome to apply and teach at this school as adjuncts, we were told that any of us were eligible to apply for any of the full-time tenure track positions that were posted.

This might be the point in the meeting that I chuckled out loud.  Ever since I first arrived at this school I have been told by multiple sources "off the record" that the department in which I work WILL NOT hire their own people.  Will not.  Won't.  Don't bother.  I know of two people who were highly qualified for positions there in the past who did bother to apply.  Neither of them were even interviewed.  They eventually were picked up full time elsewhere.  But, we can apply.

The second thing that I cannot seem to ditch was a comment on the part of a tenure track graduate faculty member who, among other things, proposed that part of the solution to this problem of adjuncts was simply to "advise our graduates not to pursue a career as adjuncts."  My apologies if those are not quite the exact words.  I was so caught up in the brilliance of this solution that I might not have written it word for word in my notes.  If only my adviser had told me about the dangers, nay horrors, of the adjunct lifestyle, how much trouble might I have avoided?  Why oh why did no one tell me instead to apply for full time jobs only?!

No really.

I left shortly after that.  If anyone thinks I left in disgust or outrage, they can go on believing that.  In truth I had to go start a class.

I still can't figure out why no one else ever solved this crisis in such a simple way.  It eats at my soul.

Now excuse me while I try to find an open amusement park to practice my agility on moving carnival rides.......