Posted recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education was a quote by the Provost of Boise State University, as he spoke to a local newspaper. The Provost said "The goal is not to hire adjuncts who are doing this for their living. The goal is to get the practical experience in the classroom from someone who is out working in their field".
Having recently been with some fellow adjunct faculty members at a local university, the nature of such a statement lit a serious discussion with one of my colleagues. In fact, I had stated pretty much the same idea as the Provost to him. I had obviously hit on a very sensitive part of his personal life. He, like many of us, was teaching as a part time faculty member while trying to maintain a decent salary to meet his family financial situation. His true love, also like many of us, was to teach; hopefully full time some day.
Admittedly, he and I are in very different stages of our academic careers and because of that, our goals related to teaching were clearly not the same. That conversation gave me pause and when I saw the quote from the Provost at Boise, I was immediately taken back to my interaction with my colleague.
What that situation exemplifies is that we adjuncts come to our contingent lives with our own stories, and while others would like to see us all the same way, we adjuncts like our full time counterparts, teach for very different reasons.
As part of a team of authors writing about the needs, the demographics and personal goals of adjunct faculty, I saw that in a group of 1600 contingent faculty in Maryland, few were teaching to make a living. Very few were teaching at more than one school and relatively few were aiming at becoming full time faculty members via the adjunct route.
That study was a follow up of one done five years before and though the first survey was based on only 800 respondents, the results were pretty consistent over the entire 10 years. That does not negate the personal plight of my colleague and it certainly does not put all adjuncts in the same boat with the same oars. We do indeed bring that practical experience to the classroom and perhaps that is akin to our greatest strength. However, we are a diverse group and colleges have diverse needs which we are available to meet. So, some of us do our teaching to "make a living", even though the Provost would rather hire faculty for their experience in the work force.
So why do you continue to teach as an adjunct faculty member while being paid wages that are not even close to full time faculty? Visit this site for adjuncts' stories.
As the adjunct to whose family situation you refer, I can only say that of course the provost quoted says, "The goal is not to hire adjuncts who are doing this for their living. The goal is to get the practical experience in the classroom from someone who is out working in their field." At the tail-end of that statement, he might have added the words, "as cheaply as possible," for this is the bait-and-switch: flatter people for their expertise, then buy it on the cheap. This is the business world's way of making an end-run around the ethical implications of not paying people equally for equal work, which in a just society would be prohibited by law, and it has become the preferred mode of operation even for non-profit institutions of learning, which by a short route are running themselves (as institutions of learning) right out of business, if only because the business of institutions of learning is not business, but learning, which is not a business. Education aims at preparing people for making a life, not just for making a living. The differences among adjuncts and the variety of their experiences, though important, are strictly irrelevant to the question whether they should be paid on a different scale from that upon which others who teach the exact same courses are paid. If colleges and universities do not get a handle on this problem, they will cease to be colleges and universities; they may continue to survive as institutions and they may continue to be called by those names, but by destroying their own souls they will cease to be worthy of the names.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, to give a little context, I taught secondary school full-time for a number of years, and although miserably paid there, too, I was proportionally far better paid than I am as an adjunct; I now work full-time on the non-academic side at another university, so although I need the adjunct income, anemic though it is, strictly speaking I am not trying to make a living from my adjunct teaching. What I am trying to do, unsuccessfully thus far, is cobble together a living from my two jobs, which, when combined, and even when added to my wife's two part-time jobs, are still not up to the job of supporting a family above the level of near-poverty. (Until very recently, and then only because our youngest child is too old for them, my wife was receiving WIC benefits for the entire period during which I have worked full-time at the one university and taught at the other. During the whole of that time, more than seven years now, all of our kids have been on state insurance.) It's worth pointing out that another recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education raised the question of the necessity (moral, institutional, and academic) of affording full-status treatment to adjuncts, even though they are not full-time.
So, why do I do it, i.e., continue as an adjunct? Well, aside from the partial answer already given, namely that I badly need the paltry income I get from it, I do it not because I am an adjunct, but because I am a teacher, a pretty good one according to the university that so shamelessly exploits my labor -- at public expense. Is it moral, is it sustainable, to hold people's virtues against them in the way that colleges and universities now do? Is it moral -- no other word will do -- for a provost to speak with such dastardly honesty as did the gentleman quoted at the outset of your post? To consult the most recent public information is to learn that the president of the public university where you and I have taught, who went on local radio last fall to extol the virtues of the humanities even in a time of great economic misery, is paid $330,000 a year; the provost, $220,000; for teaching Homer, Plato, Shakespeare, Ralph Ellison, etc., to thirty undergraduate upperclassmen per section per term, I make just over $2,800. Nice work if you can get it?
Eric