The Adjunct

I was very upset after reading Stanley Fish’s recent blog entitled, The Last Professor. In it, Fish reviews (coincidently, of course) the most recent publication of one of his former students, Frank Donoghue, as a starting off point for a baseless rant about how adjunct instructors at America’s colleges are causing the downward spiral of our higher education system.

Fish states that, “Universities … do not hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” After paying momentary lip service to the reality that no one specifically is to blame for the rise of adjunct instructors, Fish then spends the rest of the article blaming adjunct instructors, even going so far as to say that we adjuncts represent a lack of values for “higher learning.”

Yes, we are the cheapest teachers, in that we get paid dramatically less than our tenured colleagues. But I resent greatly that Fish compares adjuncts everywhere to shameful schools like the University of Phoenix, simply because he sees most colleges and universities are now basically “for profit” organizations. Invoking the University of Phoenix to win an argument about academia is as fucked a fallacy as invoking Nazis to win…well, just about any other argument.

I work as an adjunct English instructor at several community colleges. Like most other part-timers, I do this full-time, meaning I drive between 3-4 different districts in order to cobble together a living. The reason I have to do this is that in addition to getting paid about 30% less per hour for doing the exact same work as my tenured colleagues, I also am restricted from teaching more than 1-2 classes per semester in each district. So in order to get a full workload of classes, I need to be on the books at several different districts. This is no easy task, because most districts are not hiring, thanks to constant budget cuts by our state’s governor. Even when I do manage to get hired to teach one class in one district, I have no guarantee whatsoever that I will ever again be offered a class, and thus every four months or so (depending on whether the district I teach at is semester-based or quarter-based) I have to reapply for my own job. Needless to say, I get no benefits whatsoever: if I am sick, I have to pay out of my pocket for my healthcare, and if being sick caused me to miss work then I get docked pay. I haven’t been to a dentist in 2 years.

Yet what Fish fails to observe is that most adjuncts have the exact same qualifications as our full-time colleagues. None of us, tenured or adjunct, are in this “business” for the money. Despite a society, which sneers “those who can’t do, teach,” even in this economy we could all find better paying work somewhere.

So why do we do it? I’ve talked to a lot of professors, and believe it or not, even the most dispirited, tired, beaten down of them still expresses a desire to make a positive difference in the lives of their students. They don’t all feel that they succeed, but they all understand the value of education and that their role as teacher is critical, in fact, the most critical component, beyond even the students themselves.

So what is the difference between adjuncts and the tenured? It isn’t our degrees, and it isn’t our experience. It isn’t our training, and it isn’t our capabilities. Adjuncts are not instructors who have repeatedly applied for full-time work and been rejected due to lack of a higher degree, lack of experience, or lack of capability.

Adjuncts are adjuncts, and not tenured, because there are no tenured positions available. In all the districts that I teach, only about 30% of the instructors are full-time, leaving everyone else to be an adjunct. Before our recent budget crisis, most schools would hire one new full-time professor per year.

That position would receive literally hundreds of applications, all from highly qualified adjuncts, many of who have worked at the very school in question for years (if not decades). Who gets the position? It’s a crapshoot. To be picked as the one person for a full-time job out of five hundred applicants is just a matter of luck. Sometimes it goes to the part-timer with the most seniority, other times to a fresh, young thirty-nine year old teacher who has just received their doctorate. To imply that something was inferior about all those other applicants is both ignorant and disrespectful.

Now we have a budget crisis, funding to state colleges has been slashed again, and all schools in the state have a hiring freeze, meaning they have gone from having one open full-time position to having zero.
Fish concludes by saying he was born at just right time, and that were he born today then he’d not be able to receive the quality education that he got in the good old days (you know, when women weren’t allowed to be doctors, and the entire student body was nice and white and clean). According to his website, “Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, “Save the World On Your Own Time,” has just been published.”

Congratulations, Dean Fish. It sounds like you were born at just the right time after all. No, not the right time to receive a proper higher education as you conclude in your New York Times op-ed, but at just the right time to still get hired as a full-time employee in academia. In the old days, universities were hiring, and my wife and I would have been able to get full-time work. After all, we’re both highly qualified, and committed teachers. Today, that fact is irrelevant.

Yes, Dean Fish, if you were born when I was, things would have been different. Oh, the quality of your education would have been the same, if not better, despite what you might think about all us adjuncts teaching most of the classes. The difference would have come after you got that great education, because you would have found yourself in a position just like mine. You see, there just aren’t any full-time positions available anymore, and so you would have been forced, despite your top education and desire to teach, to work as a part-time instructor, just like the rest of us.

How long do you think you could have handled it? Something tells me you would have quit within a week and enrolled at business school.

Our month of January is named after Janus, the Roman god of gates, doors, doorways, beginnings and endings.

As January 2009 comes to a close, I find it significant how many things are both ending and beginning this month, in particular the end of George W. Bush’s Presidency and the beginning of Barack H. Obama’s.

More than just the 44th peaceful change of power for my country, this January sees both an end and new beginning to American policies, philosophy, diplomacy, and concepts of race, religion, and political will. The party that had loudly wielded power for so long now struggles to survive, while the once weak opposing party now speaks softly while carrying a big stick.

I mean this as more than just a celebration of my own political ideology taking control, although celebrate I did, but instead am simply amazed at how endings are indeed gateways to new beginnings, and vice versa.

No wonder Janus and his divine counterpart Jana, worshipped as the sun and moon, were once regarded as the highest of the gods.

How seldom we marvel at the power of a doorway, serving as exit and entrance, containing such power and symbolism. What new beginnings will comes to us all this year? What must end in order for them to do so?

Some time ago I picked up a used copy of The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success, and was sorely disappointed. Obviously, no book can sell you the secret of success in your field, but I had still hoped that it might be an enjoyable read; a book written by adjunct college instructors, for adjunct college instructors. Even if, in the end, the message boiled down to “Work hard, and be lucky” as the only true secret of success for an adjunct instructor, I had still looked forward to hearing life lessons and strange stories from my colleagues. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success was written by, Richard E. Lyons, Marcella L Kysilka, and George E. Pawlas. According to the book, Lyons is a doctoral-holding dean, while Kysilka and Pawlas are both tenured. These are hardly part-time employees. Rather, the authors of The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success were in fact the bosses of said adjuncts. This wasn’t a book so much about living the difficult life of a part-time college instructor. It was a book written by your tenured bosses telling you how they’d prefer you did your job.

It’s very difficult being an adjunct. You have the same qualifications as a full-timer, and you do the exact same job as a full-timer, but for significantly less money. You receive no benefits such as healthcare, no time off, and often not even any sick days. In order to pay the rent and keep the electricity turned on you have to work at 3-4 districts, because each will only let you teach a few classes a year. To top it all off you have to reapply for your job every three months or so, and there’s always an overwhelming chance that you’ll end up without a class to teach.

To me, a bunch of tenured deans spelling out success for adjunct instructors is reminiscent of when President Reagan sat down with a group of unemployed Michigan auto workers, and tried to offer them some advice about how to find work in a struggling economy.

Okay, fine, DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success was written for non-teaching professionals who find themselves in front of a classroom. It was not really intended for the likes of me, a professional instructor who had two years of teacher training in the rhet/comp program at the University of Arizona. It was intended more for the lawyer, doctor or business executives who finds themselves offered a class at the local community college. Kudos, I suppose, to the authors for putting together a kind of Dummies Guide to Teaching for the successful shmuck, although I am not sure if someone who is so clueless as to need a Dummies Guide should be put in a college classroom and entrusted with the educational responsibility of thirty or so students.

Shouldn’t our teachers, even the ones plucked out of the business world, be better than that? I’ll never forget the time I attended a departmental meeting and overheard one tenured professor ask another “What exactly is a C? What is that? Eighty percent? Fifty? I don’t know.” It’s a wonder I am not currently in prison, because I was overwhelmed with an impulse to beat this Professor senseless with her own exams, all the while screaming, “How the fuck can you be tenured and not know what constitutes a passing score in your own classroom?”

Obviously, I take teaching very seriously.

In spite of all this, teaching has got to be one of the most important jobs in our society. I truly believe that nearly every problem, from the economy to global warming, can be solved (or at least improved upon greatly) simply by a better-educated populace. Even if you disagree with me (it is, admittedly, a very sweeping statement), you must concede that education holds extreme importance to our well being and advancement, and thus whoever is at the wheel (i.e. the teacher) had better fucking know what they’re doing.

But it’s hard to get people who know what they’re doing, or care, when you have conditions like the ones I listed above. Often, as the insulting adage goes, those who can’t do, teach, and that’s just one reason why I am hard on The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success, because it is just encouraging more and more people who lack the most basic of concepts of teaching to pick up a piece of chalk.

So I decided to write my own thoughts about being an adjunct instructor. I don’t have the qualifications of Lyons, Kysilka, and Pawlas, and that’s exactly what makes me qualified to talk about life as a part-timer.