The New Proletariat:
Adjuncts, Part-Time Professors, Contingent
Academic Laborers In Their Chosen Fields
A primer written by Jill Carroll, herself a veteran adjunct, for
fellow Ph.D.'s facing the challenges of their trade bears a
telling title: How to Survive As an Adjunct Lecturer.
A recently published collection of essays on the harried
practitioners of their erstwhile noble calling refers to them as
Ghosts in the Classroom.
Survival indeed is the name of the game unless, of course,
adjuncts' attachment to the teaching profession is a mere
past-time or sideline. Ghost status, too, is endemic to many.
Given the absence of designated offices on campus, and their
need to work elsewhere to satisfy the Darwinian imperative,
adjunct faculty have an ephemeral on-campus presence at
best.
At many universities and colleges, part-timers now carry half
or more of the course load. Ubiquitous and indispensable to
the achievement of their schools' educational mission, and yet
invisible, unknown, and unrecognized. Not even listed in
faculty directories. Their physical presence often consisting of
no more than a mail box with a name label on it,
supplemented, if not supplanted, by an "edu" email address.
Because of their itinerant and rubber-burning work-lives which
have them rushing from campus to campus, they have been
dubbed roads scholars by some. Gone from the classroom,
they can be found on the net or on the air (via their own cell
phones) at best. -- Cyber-mirages of college professors.
Part-time professor is a misnomer for many. To be sure, there
are those who do well in another industry and lecture at night
for extra change, or teach a course or two for personal
enrichment and to break out of the rut. But then there are the
legions of true believers in their chosen avocation: the
committed teachers and dedicated intellectuals. Those who
after many years of drudgery and deprivation as graduate
students aspire to become professors themselves.
They view teaching, and the pursuit of knowledge, as a noble
calling. They love what they do. They wish they could make a
living doing what they love.
Barely able to earn enough to make ends meet after years
buried in books researching and writing their dissertation, they
work their way toward inevitable burn-out as the toiling
teachers in the trenches.
These professionals with advanced degrees work full-time, or
even over-time, by combining anywhere from two and five
contemporaneous engagements at different community
colleges and universities. They have no job security and no
claim to seniority. Most get no medical insurance and are not
eligible to participate in employer-sponsored retirement plans.
In the name of efficiency, their employers keep their
assignments (and corresponding FTE shares) below the level
that would make them eligible for benefits.
Universities' move toward staffing with contingent professors is
a nation-wide trend. It is driven by the inexorable logic of
higher education budgets. Tenured professors are expensive
and difficult to dismiss. Adjuncts are cheap on a per-course
and per-credit-hour basis. Unlike tenure and tenure-track
faculty, they can be contracted, and laid off or cancelled with
the ebb and flow of student enrolment and the concomitant
fluctuations in semester-credit-hour volume.
The basic commodity traded in the contingent labor market is
the semester-course. Although they are technically employees
rather than independent contractors, adjuncts are paid by the
piece. Rates range from $1,000 to $3,000 per section,
depending mostly on the type of institution, and the discipline,
and is split into 4, 4.5, or 5 monthly instalments. Adjuncts'
aggregate salaries add up to less annually than what public
school teachers earn in their first year, even though their
educational credentials are in most instances far superior.
Adjuncts are the new temps in the fields of higher education,
the highly educated equivalents of migrant farm workers,
moving from campus to campus, and from contract to contract.
As is true of their full-time colleagues, adjuncts' employment
contracts are not enforceable in Texas courts due to
sovereign immunity. But it does not matter much. For adjuncts
are given appointments of short duration, often no more than
one semester. They have no vested right in reappointment,
and thus no legal protection. Their unenforceable contracts or
letters of assignment typically state that the appointment
carries with it no expectation of renewal. Employers thus
preempt any claim to a right to reappointment or de facto
tenure by adjuncts who have served for a number of years.
Adjuncts can be let go, or simply de-scheduled, for any
reason, or no reason. Employment at will. Which is also why
enforcement of high academic standards and expectations of
students is folly, and why adjuncts do not in reality partake of
what is held up as an lofty ideal in institutions of higher
learning -- academic freedom.
The economics and politics on the issue are easy to grasp.
Resources are saved by replacing retiring professors with
part-time adjuncts. A portion of the money can be used to
fund raises for tenured and tenure-track faculty (or to reduce
their course loads), which makes full-time faculty beneficiaries
of the emergence of the two-class system and thus unlikely
advocates for their part-time colleagues.
As for the adjuncts themselves, they have no leverage
individually, and neither voice nor vote in Faculty Senates or
decision-making organs of shared governance.
Traditional forms of collective action are unlikely to make a
difference in Texas. State employees may not strike. Nor do
state universities recognize unions as collective bargaining
agents. While part- time professors, just like janitors and
cafeteria workers, have the "right to work," that right does not
amount to a right to be paid a living wage.
The powers that be are not likely to end the plight of the
adjuncts. Nor is the solution going to come from the market,
given the glut of hungry Ph.D.'s. nation-wide. In order to
receive more than crumbs from the pie, adjuncts will have to
find more innovative means to exert leverage over budgeting
and employment practices. The first step will be the sharing of
information and experiences, and perhaps e-organizing.
* * *
The Status of Adjunct Faculty
in Texas
