Washington Monthly - September/October 2015 - 78
or traveling across town to teach at campus number
three. As JJ commented, "Did making so little money
affect my job performance? Yes. I missed a week of class
once due to being hospitalized for stress and exhaustion.
Working 40-50 [hours a week] for a grand total of $4000
over four months . . . working extra jobs on top of that
to cover my rent and to buy my health insurance and
taking other extra jobs to cover my student loans nearly
killed me."
The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, based at the University of Southern California, studies the recruitment and hiring process for ad-
If the rationale for using
low-wage professorial labor
is affordable college, it hasn't
worked. Tuition at public
universities has tripled
since 1980, and doubled
at private universities.
junct instructors. Adjuncts are often hired just days before a class begins, giving them little time for preparation
or orientation to the school, the students, or the policies
on grading and faculty-student interaction.
My neighbor Mitch Tropin argues that "the problem
is that most adjuncts do a good job, but are put in an unfair situation." In addition to poverty wages, long hours,
and lack of office space, the isolation from other teachers can be a real problem. Naomi Winterfalcon at Champlain College told me that she knew few people in her department until the adjunct instructors unionized. Champlain, she explains, uses "lots of adjuncts," but she had
never met most of them, even those in her department.
Once they organized, however, they began to meet each
other in union meetings. "It makes a big difference if you
are able to talk to each other. It allows us to improve ourselves academically as well as our working environment,"
she says, and it "facilitates better teaching to have others who are in the same circumstances to talk through
problems, share experiences, and strategize how to solve
them." Champlain itself has done nothing to support the
adjuncts' efforts to integrate into the faculty.
What makes the situation even worse is that adjuncts are often disproportionately assigned the courses filled with the students who need the most assistance,
such as introductory courses, freshman writing classes, or
remedial education. Incoming students often need basic
grammar and composition skills, which requires the kind
78
September/October 2015
of intensive hands-on teaching that is difficult for a parttimer with full-time teaching hours and insufficient support to provide.
And there's a more subtle danger lurking in contingency: with no job security, precarious financial situations, and weak institutional support, adjunct professors
may lack the independence and status they need to challenge students by presenting unpopular positions, critiquing commonly accepted ideas, or even giving out poor
grades. Academic freedom doesn't mean much in these
circumstances. And while we tend to see academic freedom as protection for provocative scholarship, it also performs the even more important function of facilitating
discussion and debate in the classroom. Greg Lukianoff,
the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, finds the potential for censorship
and self-censorship in the adjunct system "troubling,"
and adds, "I think at minimum adjuncts should have contracts with both terms of several years and promises of
academic freedom."
When professors know that students' assessments
may be the only evaluation they receive and thus are the
most significant factor in whether they will be hired for
another semester, they have little incentive to grade critically and instead may grade to please, resulting in grade
inflation and permissiveness of students' wrong-headed
ideas or disruptive behavior. The system gives students
leverage to attack a teacher they may not like or to avoid
the consequences of their own academic failure.
T
enure also has its critics, and not without reason.
Compelling arguments that the decisionmaking
process is opaque, allowing bias to go undetected,
and that safeguarding positions allows dead-wood professors to keep their positions, all make tenure worth a critical second look. My father's experience reflected the upsides of the old regime: a young professor moves laterally to get a tenure-track position, gets tenure, and then
jumps again for more prestige, in my father's case an endowed chair. He had an office, kept office hours, prepared
his own curriculum, was invited to faculty seminars and
programs on pedagogical advances, and had staff support
and other resources so he could focus on teaching and
scholarship rather than on seeking the next opening to
teach a course and driving between campuses. My father
served as mentor, emotional support, and intellectual
guide for several generations of young scholars, while at
the same time pursuing his own cutting-edge scholarship.
Even among those academics who didn't share this trajectory, 80 percent were still full-time and eligible for tenure. While there are still professors who enjoy the benefits of tenure and the emoluments that go along with that
status, many of their colleagues make up the proletariat
of the ivory tower, with no hope of advancement, abysmal
wages, and no job security.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2015
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