Welcome to Adjunct Nation!

If you spent tens of thousands of dollars on your advanced degree, Congratualtions! You are destined for a life of slave wages and debt that is virtually unparalleled among your highly-educated counterparts... More likely than not, you will become an adjunct and join the ever-growing ranks of academe's proletariat.

If you hadn't guessed, I am an adjunct. Don't get me wrong: I love teaching. There is nothing better than teaching college students, especially when you can truly reach one and make him or her think critically about whatever subject you're teaching. It's a great way to earn a living.

The problem is that so many of us are not earning a living.

This morning, I read Barbara Ehrenreich's essay entitled "CEOs vs. Slaves," in which she points out the growing division of labor in America between the top wage-earners and the bottom wage-earners. She specifically mentions the plight of adjunct teachers, as well as other highly-educated, under-paid workers, in her article. She says:

"Top ranked college professors ... enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5,000 per semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure."

She goes on to mention an adjunct in New York who commuted every day from a homeless shelter. The fact is that many highly-educated, brilliant teachers, with expensive student loans to pay off, get the short end of the stick every semester in the academic world. For many of us, it doesn't matter that we get stellar student evaluations, or that we have earned the respect of the full-time faculty for outstanding teaching. We continue to "toil" at wages far below the poverty level, often out-earned by waitresses and bartenders everywhere.

Even the best adjuncts have no job security. This goes far beyond the problem of not having a "tenure-track position." Most of us don't know from one week to the next whether we still have a job. When teaching is our primary means of making a living, this can be frustrating to say the least. For example, the head of your department might offer you a class for next term, maybe even two classes (aren't you lucky!), but the day before the new term begins, your classes are snatched away by Joe Full-Time Instructor, leaving you with no job for the next four months. This has happened at least once a term to me or someone I know.

The problem here is wide-spread. Universities depend significantly on part-time labor, especially for required, general-education courses. In many cases, this spells doom for students, since there is typically very little coordination among adjuncts in a given academic department, so the "general" courses become disparate. When a general course is a pre-requisite for a more advanced course, the students are literally at the mercy of an under-paid, over-worked, under-appreciated, and usually unobserved teacher.

Since I am sick of all the crap, I'm starting this blog to monitor the daily crises of typical adjuncts. I invite you all to post your horror stories, or your wonderful, redeeming stories, if such stories exist.

Until next time, hang in there.