Thank you for printing this article. I think cost of living raises would be a very welcome addition. After working for 4 years at one institution it would be nice to have a raise. It would also be nice to have some additional pay when I am asked to train new faculty. I appreciate seeing an article that points out some of the difficulties of being contingent faculty.

Deb Eastwood

Deb Eastwood, Adjunct Faculty, at 7:54 am EDT on March 13, 2007

Not so, Tom

At my university, administrators are unabashed about the fact that our revenue model is “tuition-driven", which means admitting more and more students without hiring more tenure-line faculty. The result is that adjuncts are used as cheap labor. When the adjuncts attempted to unionize, they were met with fierce resistance from the administration. Appointment letters were often mailed out after classes had already begun. Of course, benefits and raises are out of the question.

Even in my department, which treats its adjuncts relatively well, office space and computer resources were woeful.

So, Tom, while some tenure-track faculty might see the growing numbers of adjuncts as a threat, there are legitimate concerns for their well-being. To suggest that the AAUP is mis0-stating its motives is to engage in shameless mudslinging.

Former adjunct, tuition-driven private university, at 10:02 am EDT on March 13, 2007

How to Help Yourself and Everyone Else?

Vote with your feet! Truth must be at the heart of knowledge.

Does adjunct teaching make you miserable? Is it bad for your wallet, your health, and your future? Start today to find alternative employment doing anything you may be or may want to be qualified to do under more reasonable circumstances. To continue to enjoy teaching, start a tutoring or consulting business and charge a fair market rate.

Be honest with your students about the grim prospect of making a living in academia: let them know that you can’t afford to attend conferences to upgrade your skills, that you can’t afford to see a dentist or a doctor, and that you can’t afford to travel outside your long commutes. Hold your office hours outside your car and let them know that’s where your office is. Encourage your students to pursue sustainable careers and professions elsewhere, lest they, too, become crushed under the pyramid of academia.

Dispel the many myths that surround the college process. Let your students know that educators are increasingly valued for the upper level salaries they support and for the profusion of ancillary industries that profit from their existence. Let them know how this attitude reflects a larger societal disregard for education. If a college degree merely represents institutional sanction for a quantified program of exposure to burdened, inaccessible, and sometimes under-qualified educators, what is the degree really worth to the student? Is it worth the price of tuition?

Before you quit your adjunct work, however, try to interest a local journalist to write a story about this little-known destructive phenomenon in higher education. Prepare a bulleted synopsis ahead of time, listing all of the many negative aspects of adjunct life. Finish the interview by stating that, although you love teaching and have spent most of your life preparing to be an academic, you are being forced to look for sustainable employment and to leave teaching to full-time professors, administrators, and technologists.

Taking Action, at 12:10 pm EDT on March 13, 2007

More help to adjuncts

I would add to Dr Bradley’s helpful suggestions that adjuncts new to a college should be offered a systematic induction, that adjuncts new to a course should be offered a full induction to the course and the team’s teaching approach, and that all adjuncts should have access to staff development opportunities with the program and their time while participating in the program paid by the college.

Gavin, Principal Policy Adviser at Griffith University, Australia, at 7:16 pm EDT on March 13, 2007

Many of these suggestions are good ideas, but I am not holding my breath waiting for them to be introduced, especially with the current massive oversupply of adjuncts and the shortage of available positions. The one idea that I would take issue with is the notion of “tenure” for part-time faculty, in which adjuncts with a certain amount of satisfactory service would be guaranteed continual employment. I suspect that the first result of the imposition of such a system would be a massive bloodletting, one in which most adjuncts coming up for “tenure” would likely be fired, since administrations hire adjuncts primarily because they don’t want to make any long-term commitments, certainly not any commitments in which lifetime employment is guaranteed. In the current environment, just about every academic institution probably has a whole file cabinet full of applications from fresh PhDs desiring adjunct positions, and an adjunct who is fired can be replaced as easily as you replace a burned-out lightbulb.

Joe Baugher, at 8:25 pm EDT on March 13, 2007

The common experiences of appointments made after classes start, appointments outside of subject area, and the number of adjuncts piecing together well above full-time schedules at multiple colleges suggest that the reputed glut of adjuncts is likely a myth, certainly so within some academic fields and geographical areas.

Good numbers on this matter, rather than repetition of a story whose creation is very useful to administrators, but not to anyone else, would be welcome.

Certainly there is a population of adjuncts who are adjunct by choice—those full-time professionals who teach an occasional class on the side are generally not militating for office hour pay, office space, and full-time appointments. They are already working overtime to support the university system, but the economic and research support available from the full-time jobs they do have set them apart from the remainder of the adjunct population, for whom matters like health care, pension, research support, etc. are more critical. The expanded use of adjunct labor over the past couple of decades has not been due to a huge increase in full-time professionals teaching a class apiece after work (and it is disingenuous to behave as if it has, as some do).

Setting aside this essentially constant (and more likely to negotiate higher pay because of an enhanced ability to simply laugh and walk away from ridiculous demands) portion of the adjunct population, it would be useful to have a solid investigation of the real degree of employment among the remainder. Were the Department of Education (US, or within some state) interested in the state of working conditions within higher education, it might commission a study in which as complete a data set as possible would be collected, identifying the average percentage of full-time employment of so-called part-time teachers in higher education.

Full-time faculty teaching overloads for some extra money would show up in these statistics as persons working, say, 133% of full-time: for a given semester, three courses for a regular load plus an overload course (more ideally, the study would examine a full year’s employment, but also collect semesterly and quarterly statistics). Professionals teaching after their regular jobs would similarly represent 100% for their regular jobs plus some percentage of a full-time course load for the courses they teach.

The tricky part of the statistics comes in not counting adjuncts working at multiple campuses/campi as multiple persons: A person teaching 2/3 of a full load at one campus, 1/2 of a load at another, and 1/3 at still another is one person teaching 150% of a full load, not 3 persons teaching an average of 50% of a load at 3 different institutions (as it is so convenient and useful to do if you wish to dismiss the problem: “Our adjuncts only work 50% of a full-load; if we gave half of them full-time positions, the other half would be unemployed” ignores the absence of the half now employed full-time from the campi where they have been teaching the rest of their courses, as well as the otherwise-fully-employed group mentioned above).

I often see references to the glut of teachers, but I never see a footnote documenting it. I think the study would be welcome (within at least one portion of academica) and illuminating.

Thane Doss, Tokyo

Thane Doss, at 10:25 pm EDT on March 13, 2007

Falling Farther And Farther Behind

Another thing to consider is the fact that adjuncts (especially those that are “freeway flyers” with multiple gigs) have very little time to get involved with things such as university service at their schools. Also, adjuncts are stuck in a hardscrabble struggle for economic survival and really don’t have nearly enough time to do any serious research and publication. The truth is that a teacher who has remained an adjunct for a few years is at a serious disadvantage in the highly-competitive dog-eat-dog academic job market. If a person has been an adjunct for too long, the academic search committes will start looking askance at their CV, reasoning that there must be something seriously wrong with them—if they were any good they would have already landed a full-time job somewhere. Tragically, once you have become an adjunct you are likely to remain one, and instead of an entry-level job you find that you are in a dead-end position.

Joe Baugher, at 3:02 pm EDT on March 19, 2007