True story: I was an adjunct.
My husband and I left grad school, got married, and came to the Chicago area, where he had a job waiting for him (having studied math) and I didn’t (having studied history). I knew that I wasn’t cut out for finishing the dissertation — I was at a dead end — and I didn’t really have a good idea of what I could do instead. Maybe something having to do with writing? There aren’t many jobs out their that require a background in history. I looked into getting a teaching certificate for high school, too.
But in the short-term, I found a job teaching as an adjunct at a nearby private college, as partial replacement for a faculty member who was on a sabbatical. Two sessions of the identical Western Civilization class, at $1,500 per class. It was the first time I had ever prepared for a class independently, and it was very challenging, not so much in the lecturing, but in actually working with the students on a personal level. I never expected to be able to support myself with the job, but it was a learning experience, in much the same way as an internship is supposed to be.
What it taught me was that I needed to come up with other career options, and quickly — all the more so as I read stories on the internet of the so-called Roads Scholars, who spend years cobbling together a living from multiple adjuncting jobs at different universities, and quickly figured out that even though, strictly speaking, community college teaching doesn’t require a doctorate, full-time jobs are few and far between.
So when I say that the biggest part of the solution to underpaid adjunct faculty is for the faculty themselves, to the extent that they’re trying to earn a full-time living, to re-think what they’re doing, it comes from personal experience. It’s true that I had a math background to fall back on. But, really, to wait for universities to raise wages and create full-time positions is just not a sensible personal decision. (There’s also the reality that, prior to reaching the point of finishing the doctorate, universities have an obligation to disclose to their current and prospective graduate students the realities of the job market, particularly for those who take on debt.)
In addition, there are people who legitimately choose to teach on a adjunct basis, either moonlighting, as a hobby, if you will, or as a choice for someone who simply wants to work part-time. The moonlighting component makes particular sense for those classes where it’s appropriate for them to be taught by individuals currently working in the field.
That’s not to say that I think universities have made a wise decision in relying on part-time contingent faculty for cost-saving reasons; surely it would be a better business practice to hire a smaller number of full-time faculty who have a real commitment to the institution, and use adjuncts only to smooth out variations in enrollment in a particular area.
What’s more, I don’t know what the impact of MOOCs has been and will be on adjunct faculty, since, for the introductory courses they tend to teach, it surely radically changes the way the classes are being taught. Large numbers of lecturers presumably have been or will be replaced by smaller numbers of faculty who effectively serve as tutors, individually or in small groups, and as graders, especially for writing-intensive classes.
But there’s no getting around basic supply and demand.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In