Adjuncts, Contingent Faculty

Yesterday’s blog post referred to a small snippet of Minding the Campus’ Adjuncts and the Devalued PhD.

Today’s will as well.

The telling part, the significant kernel for those teaching graduate students or those who are considering teaching college English as a career is found here:

Back in 2003, Thomas H. Benton—the penname of William Pannapacker, then an assistant professor of English at Hope College—published the first of series of articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education (others following in 2009 and 2010) warning would-be graduate students of the pitfalls of pursuing a career in higher ed. “It pains me,” he wrote, “to tell some of my best students that the structure of employment in the academy has been hidden from them—that many faculty members make less than fast-food workers and have no health benefits.”
…
To smart, hardworking students, those motivated by genuine intellectual curiosity and used to being at the top of their classes, Benton’s message seemed to be, “Becoming a professor isn’t easy, but it is possible if you are the right kind of person. If you have what it takes and do everything right along the way, you have a chance.” That may not have been what Benton meant, but to headstrong students unafraid of competition, the obstacles to becoming a professor seemed merely the next and toughest set of challenges to be met and overcome.

Yes, some people make it.

I made it.

But it took me two years of working full-time as an adjunct (and more than full-time), spending more than I made attending conferences, writing fourteen articles, four reviews, and a book, to succeed. It took that much, and more, to win out over the 250 people also applying for my position last year.

249 people, many of them PhDs, wanted to teach at a community college and could not get a job because there were not enough positions available.

If you are a college student today enrolled in four classes during any given semester, it is likely that only one of your teachers is employed by your school in a permanent position that comes with a middle-class salary, job security, and benefits. The other three are contingent faculty, often called “adjuncts”; they have job titles like “instructor” or “lecturer” rather than “professor” but their roles in the classroom are the same. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), adjuncts at U.S. colleges and universities now comprise “more than 75 percent of the total instructional staff.”

So says Minding the Campus in Adjuncts and the Devalued PhD.

At my SLAC this would not be true. There are three adjuncts and fifteen full-time folks in the English department. Most departments are similarly constructed, though many have fewer full-time faculty.

I don’t even think this would have been true at the community college I was privileged to teach at last year either.

But if you are going to a big state university, most of the undergraduates get taught by adjuncts and grad students. I’d say almost 100% for freshman and sophomores at least. So that’s where the 3 out of 4 comes from.

Isaac Sweeney, in his Chronicle article, Why Am I Still an Adjunct? answers the question in a way I think most long-term adjuncts would agree with.

I keep doing this work because of the relationship I get to develop with 25 new students in each of my courses, every semester. It’s the satisfaction I get out of seeing them progress, and knowing I may have had something to do with that. It’s getting to stand in the front of a classroom and see students look at a situation in a way they hadn’t before. In short, it’s because I love to teach.

Most of the folks in the comments agree with him. Teaching is wonderful. The pay, while terrrible, is more than we would make for equal hours elsewhere. (Yes, I have worked at McD’s. Why do you ask?) We are using our degrees. We are doing what we love.

Is the system a problem? Yes.

Is it going to get worse? Yes.

We’re in a “hiring chill.” That means that we aren’t hiring any new folks right now. All the needs for those new faculty are going to be met by adjuncts, fine teachers who haven’t managed to get a ft job, even though they love the work they do. Perhaps (maybe?) even because they love the work they do. (And thus don’t spend time doing other work– like conferences, presentations, and publications.)

I was what I like to call a voluntary adjunct for seven years. And then for two I was actively on the job market. Now I am a non-tt, contingent (annually renewed contract) faculty.

Lots of adjuncts would be thrilled with the opportunity my school offered me last year. But now, they won’t be able to get it. We’re in a crisis mode because of the legislature cutting funding.

What will happen when all classes are taught by adjuncts? Will universities and colleges still exist? I don’t know.

In a discussion of why students are failing to engage in their undergraduate education, Thomas H. Benton wrote:

[S]tudents recognize that most of the teachers with whom they have more personal contact—graduate students, adjuncts, and other part-timers—are not well regarded by their institutions. Their lack of income, benefits, and job security are an insidious advertisement for the low status of some kinds of learning. Moreover, transient faculty members can’t help your career, since they may not be around next year and their recommendations carry little weight.

I think this is an interesting observation for several reasons.

My first thought when reading this was to question whether students really know which of their professors are full-time, part-time, grad students, etc. I think that some of them might know the graduate students, but I also think that most undergraduate students don’t have any conception of the concept of professor as anything other than full-time. I know I didn’t. And even when I was in college, there were adjuncts.

As a long-time adjunct and first-year full-timer (in my second incarnation in that category), I am also interested in the idea that references can’t be procured from professors who are transient. I had not ever thought of that as an issue, but perhaps that is because I have been transient so long. I do know that I am looking for a student from a college I used to adjunct for to give him a book I had promised him. But I don’t know where he is now or how to get in touch with him. Since I am no longer on the faculty there, they are far less forthcoming about details of students.

It is true that the college where I spent my undergraduate years, a small liberal arts college, does still employ–some thirty years later–a few of the professors whom I had as an undergraduate. Most have retired, but even some of those are teaching part-time. So if I needed references from those professors, I could still obtain them.

I wonder, though, how many of my community college students will even think of professors as references. I have only had two requests in my nine years of teaching at a community college for references. I agreed to both. Only one reference had to be written and the other person’s folks never contacted me.

Perhaps the concept of “professor as reference” could be used in developmental writing classes particularly to encourage student engagement and involvement.”

Do your students know the status of their instructors?

The Chronicle’s article, Writing Exams:

adjuncts and others who are the least qualified and the least experienced

Chronicle article on adjuncts, “Mediocrity is built into the system.”

And an adjunct, writing about his own life, said he is unprepared and doesn’t engage with his students. This certainly did not help improve the perspective others have.

The Education of Oronte Churm, from Inside Higher Ed, has the definition of cynicism:

When a university’s program for research in the humanities bars adjuncts from applying for fellowship money and release time then uses their book titles and cover photos to swell the “books published by our humanities faculty” section of its glossy brochure.

The weasel is also from Churm’s post.

The Origins of the Casualization of Academic Labor, by blogger Historianne, takes issue with Thomas Frank’s essay in Harper’s, which blames tenure-track teachers for the explosion of contingent faculty.

Tenured and tenure-track faculty, in my experience, don’t make arguments about how they can do more with less, nor are they the people who have been cutting the instructional budget at their universities. Administrators are the authors of this shift from tenured to casual labor, and they’re the ones who benefit from it directly.

Faculty may not be fighting it, but they are not the one making the decisions about contingent faculty.

I sent a proposal in to a journal about the material circumstance of adjuncts and contingent faculty here in Houston.

That proposal was turned down. I’m glad in retrospect because it would have taken a lot of time that I didn’t really have.

Now, however, I am taking part in a documentary on the material circumstance of contingent faculty for NCTE and the Forum. If you haven’t taken the Contingent Faculty Questionnaire, go now and do that.

I would like to go to my other colleges and video tape where I worked and what the offices, etc, were like. However, I don’t know that I have the time to do that tomorrow and I don’t know that I want to drive all over creation in the hopes that the buildings are open on the weekend.

Would I videotape the couch that another adjunct and I shared after offices were damaged during Hurricane Ike? We shared the couch for a year. But, at the time, officially the adjuncts had just as large of offices as anyone else. Of course, we shared them with two or three or four other people.

But having come from my other two colleges, that seemed an entire ladder higher on the rungs of professionalism.

At CC1, where I taught for eight years quite happily and would remain had they offered me a tt, there are 3x as many adjuncts as ft. The adjuncts have two offices on campus. One has three tables and four computers. The other is not for the humanities, so I don’t know what it has.

At CC2, where I taught for one semester, and where I was offered a ft/pt position which did not make because there weren’t enough classes (ft work for pt pay), there were twelve cubicles marked with chest high gray plastic and cloth walls. You had to sign up first to get them. I think mine was shared, though they weren’t supposed to be, with a sociology adjunct.

You can see why I thought an office, with real furniture, even shared with four other people, was a good deal.

I guess you’ll have to watch the documentary to find out what the material conditions are under which I work now. Or wait for another day when I might be willing to share the office experience with you.

TrueAdjunctTales is a video commentary on adjuncting.

It’s interesting. Can’t imagine asking my student for $2 or giving them an A-…

But I am bookmarking it so I will go back and look. Watch it yourself and see what you think.