The Adjunct

“Oh, I’m not a professor.”

This is one of the most common things I used to find myself saying to students in the first few weeks of class. I always ask students to call me by my first name, but sure enough, one of them will soon raise their hand with a question and ask, “Professor…?”

While in grad school I was fortunate enough to be offered a two-year teaching assistantship at the University of Arizona. Each semester, we were given a few classes to teach while we pursued our degrees, and we also got to take part in a comprehensive teacher training program and mentorship, which covered absolutely every aspect of teaching rhetoric and composition at the college level. It was a great deal all around. We received excellent and extensive teaching training, and built up our CV by teaching freshman courses. The University loved it because they paid us in peanuts and tuition waivers instead of hiring any adjuncts, who might have demanded actual currency as pay. It was win-win…until we graduated, and were told that we were no longer hirable to teach the classes we’d been teaching for the last few years.

One day, our advisor made it clear that we were not to go around calling ourselves professors. He explained that a few GATs had once been overheard calling themselves this, and the real professors, people who clawed their way to tenure through the decade-long rigors of assistant professor, associate professor, etc., were very annoyed that some young, pimple-faced twenty-nine year olds were claiming the title as their own.

“But, aren’t we professors?” one of my fellow graduate students asked.

“No, no,” our mentor laughed. “You are teaching assistants. When you get your degrees, then you’ll be lecturers. Then, you hopefully can get on the tenure track and work your way towards professorship.”

So there you have it. Oh, and the term for us adjuncts isn’t even “lecturer, it’s visiting lecturer. That’s how they explain us disappearing after the only one semester. “He was only visiting. Let us never speak of him again.”

I stayed true to what my mentor taught us. Believe it or not, I had a great respect for anyone who had achieved the full title of professor, and I did not want to violate protocols by grabbing that title for myself before I’d earned it. Whenever students asked, “Professor…?” I would correct them by saying that I was a visiting lecturer. At that point they’d ask, “So…you’re not a real teacher?” Things would go downhill from there.

This all continued until very recently, when I was in a meeting with my department dean. One of my students was present at this meeting, and my dean referred to me as, “Professor…”

I was shocked! My dean knew exactly who and what I was. He knew that I was just an adjunct who was a new arrival to our district. I was only visiting to give a lecture, as they might say. Did he refer to me as a professor because a student was present? Was it just a slip of the lip? Did different schools perhaps have different policies about this sort of thing? I decided to investigate further.

As usual, wikipedia holds all the answers:

The meaning of the word professor (Latin: professor, person who professes to be an expert in some art or science, teacher of highest rank[1]) varies. In some English-speaking countries, it refers to a senior academic who holds a departmental chair, especially as head of the department, or a personal chair awarded specifically to that individual.

This is consistent with what I was taught at the University of Arizona. However:

…whereas in the United States, Canada and Hong Kong, the term professor is used as a form of address for any lecturer or researcher employed by a college or university, regardless of rank.

That would fit more with my situation. Further reading of the article, and a browsing of the actual job titles of my full-time colleagues, clears things up a bit. One thing to keep in mind is that most of the schools I lecture at are community colleges. So far, none of these community colleges have any of their positions or job titles listed as professor, but rather everyone who is full-time is simply an instructor or lecturer.

Here’s the key, still from wikipedia:

In colloquial language, usage of the term may refer to any educator at the post-secondary level, yet a considerable percentage of post-secondary educators do not hold the formal title of “professor,” but are instead lecturers, instructors, and teaching assistants.

So in other words, here in these United States, any lecturer, instructor or even teaching assistant can be called “professor” while not actually having the title of Professor. I think this is very similar to the naval custom of addressing any officer who commands a ship as “captain” regardless of rank.

So what do I take from all this? That I am not a Professor, and my full-time colleagues at community colleges are not Professors, but our students can address us all as professor? The capitalization alone for this particular post is giving me a headache.

Fellow teachers, I want to settle this, but I need your help.

Fill me in on your thoughts and understanding of this subject. What’s the proper way for us to use “professor”, especially for adjuncts and community college teachers? Besides wikipedia, I have not been able to find a clear guide to this on the internet. If you know of one, post it. Otherwise, post what you know, and I’ll try to create one here.