The Adjunct

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.