Adjuncting in the tar pits
[Update: Greetings to everyone visiting from How the University Works, and thanks to Marc Bousquet for the link. If you’re new to my blog, you might want to check out the “Academia” category archives.]
Via Timothy Burke comes a thoroughly depressing story from Inside Higher Ed on adjunct pay in the Tennessee state college and university system. Adjuncts there have been unable to get the system to to raise their maximum pay to $20,000 a year for a 5/5 teaching load, with no benefits. As Tim says:
5-5 load with any degree of focus or attention to students, but
$15,000? No benefits? Seriously, Tennessee: just close down your
university system. Or just be honest and make public higher education
in the state into a volunteer system, like getting people to work the
line at a soup kitchen. And adjuncts there? Seriously, there has got to
be a better way to make ends meet, whatever your circumstances and
aspirations might be.
Indeed. Really, I can’t complain that much about my own year of adjuncting after I finished my Ph.D; I made a living (though not what one would call generous) wage, and I taught a 3/2 load. I had health insurance. I was part of a large and active union, as I’d been when I was a grad student. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to earn $15,000 a year, with no benefits, for teaching five courses a semester.
A lot of the commenters on the Inside Higher Ed story can’t understand why the adjuncts would let themselves be exploited so thoroughly and ruthlessly. But I can remember that headspace very clearly. It was a weird state of learned helplessness, based on a set of assumptions that everyone took for granted—many of which were part of our socialization into academic culture:
- The job market in the humanities is notoriously arbitrary and capricious. Getting a job is, to a large extent, beyond one’s control.
- There are no worthy, interesting, or rewarding careers outside of academia. You either have a faculty job, or you have to become a corporate drone (or else consign yourself to a life of flipping burgers).
- If you don’t get an academic job, you’ll not only be a failure, you’ll have wasted your youth getting the Ph.D. [A.K.A. the sunk costs fallacy.]
- Being an intellectual (and having an academic job) is more important than anything else. If you put a higher value on choosing where to live, or having a life outside of work, or earning enough money to raise a family, or not spending your weekends grading papers, well, maybe you’re not serious enough for an academic career. Maybe you don’t deserve a faculty position. Maybe you’re just not smart enough.
- Not being smart enough is a fate worse than death.
- Unhappiness is a normal part of the scholarly life. What are you complaining about? Smart people are naturally melancholics, alcoholics, tortured geniuses, and/or brilliant depressives.
- Academics are completely impractical people anyway. They don’t value money, and they’d be hopeless at any other kind of career. So why bother?
When you spend years working to become part of a culture where all of those assumptions go without saying, it’s hard not to wind up immobilized. Pulling myself out of that mindset was like trying to escape from the La Brea Tar Pits.* I still don’t quite know how I managed it. Unfortunately, short of starting a deprogramming service for adjuncts, I don’t know how one would even begin to persuade people not to work under such conditions.
Not for the first time, I miss the Invisible Adjunct. (And I hope she’s doing well, wherever she is.)
* My mother and I lived in Santa Monica for a year when I was 13. One day we went to visit the La Brea Tar Pits museum, where you can see the fossilized skeletons of all kinds of extinct animals—and one human, an apparent murder victim—that were found in the tar. There was also an exhibit where you could see what it was like to get stuck in the pits; it consisted of a vat of hot tar with levers protruding from it, and when you pulled up on one of the levers, you could feel the immense weight of the tar dragging it back down again. I’ve never forgotten the sensation.
You describe it so well. And lots of the people who get graduate degrees are timid and shy of change — that’s why they just keep going to school: it’s what they already know how to do, and what they’ve gotten praised for, and they harbor deep doubts about whether they can do anything else. They’re ripe for exploitation. But man, 5/5 for 20,000 and no benefits? That’s not exploitation, it’s abuse, plain & simple.
I’m on my third and hopefully last year of adjuncting. I usually teach two to four sections of writing each semester, and I get paid $2,500 per class per semester with no insurance or other benefits. I have to have a second job (tutoring online 12-15 hours a week) to pretend to make a living. In previous years, I applied to over 50 positions per year; this year, because of the hellish economy, the pool dwindled to 15. If this last year of tenure-track-job-seeking fails, I’m hoping to find a job teaching at a private high school, mainly because I always told myself that three years was long enough to spend on this ridiculous roller coaster of the academic job market; I want to work a single job and be able to go to a doctor and imagine some form of retirement! But I have three main observations: 1) In a recent newsletter, the MLA recommended that adjuncts and lecturers in English and modern languages receive “$6,400 to $9,200 per course section, with fringe benefits and cost-of-living increases, as reasonable minimum compensation.” Sadly, I know some of my tenure-track assistant professor colleagues who would happily relinquish their $50,000 salaries for that kind of adjunct pay if they could also give up research and service responsibilities–except that all of this still points to the basic devaluation of teaching. 2) I am constantly told by other faculty members (not the ones mentioned in #1) that I should just “hang in there” until a job materializes, no matter how many years it might take. I find this terribly frustrating given that these professors are usually those who have never lived on such meager wages without benefits. I find even more frustrating those fellow adjuncts who say that the way we work and are paid is actually not that bad–but of course these lecturers are married to spouses who earn enough income to solely support both of them with maybe a kid or two thrown into the mix. 3) A graduate student acquaintance of mine wondered why students would put up paying the tuition they do while receiving their educations from adjuncts. There seem to be so many problems with this kind of thinking, one of which is that it assumes adjuncts are not as qualified as those who earn tenure-track positions. This is an idea I find personally insulting, but that’s another soapbox. It also implies that students can distinguish among the ranks of professors who teach their classes, which, at least in my experience, they cannot (or do not care enough to know the differences). It also suggests that students would actually take some sort of action if they did understand the faculty divide. When I was a GSI (TA), I knew some undergraduates who supported lecturers in their strike at U-M, but most of my own students at the time expressed more annoyance at the movement than understanding (even despite my explanations). Students at my current university will protest the locking-down of fraternities and sororities for committing illegal activities, but on most other matters, they do not bother to take a stand on issues that actually affect their educations.
It’s all an evil business, really. I’m looking forward to finding my way out of the murk! (Super-psycho-long rant endeth). 🙂
Dale, yes, I vividly recall the “but I’ve always done well in school! What else could I do?” feeling you describe. And the fear of doing anything different even when it was clear that that was what I needed to do.
{{{Meilee}}} The “just hang in there” message is particularly galling, isn’t it? And I remember the same mixture of student reactions to lecturer job actions at U-M as you do — some were sympathetic, others just weren’t sure what the fuss was about. If there’s ever a change in the situation, I don’t think students or their parents will be the ones driving it. I suspect it’ll only happen if adjuncts start refusing en masse to work for insultingly low wages.
I hope you find your way out of the murk, too. We should catch up — I’ve owed you an e-mail since forever, I know!
I suppose part of the reason why I never considered a career in academia is that I am the child of an adjunct. My father was teaching at three different institutions when I was small, and later, as he gained more seniority, he was able to teach at just one. He teaches at a community college, and he was *finally* made a full-timer this year, at the age of 63, thanks to the union. The only reason we had (barely) enough money or health insurance growing up is that my mother taught in the local public schools. And funny enough, my mother is the one who went to a state school and my dad is the one who went to the Ivy. Dad’s employer, and lots of others are making more and more use of adjuncts and driving wages down to a despicable level. I don’t know why more people aren’t outraged.
Maybe the other reason I didn’t even think about academia is that I always felt I wasn’t good enough. I always did well in school, but after a particularly traumatizing experience with English class my junior year of high school, I simply don’t have confidence in my writing. At all. So maybe it was a bit of self-preservation.
I also was one of those rare high school seniors who chose her undergrad institution for the fact that it is a teaching and learning institution, not a research institution. The reason I wanted to be taught by faculty instead of graduate students was not because I thought them less capable, but I had this notion that graduate students are there primarily to work on their own degree, and teaching is secondary, whereas faculty are there to teach first and foremost. Sadly, what with the publish or perish treadmill this view is mistaken, but I did think about it. And I knew that if I wanted to teach, I’d teach and therefore would teach in school setting where I wouldn’t be torn away from teaching to research and publish. Some of the aversion to publishing is no doubt due to the lack of confidence in my writing, but some is also due to being the child of two teachers, one of whom actually had education classes and values teaching and learning far more than most institutions do. I find it ironic that we entrust students to people who are experts in their field, but most of whom have no idea how to teach.
I hope things look up for Meilee and others. I won’t think any less of you for teaching high schoolers; in fact, I will respect you more for doing what you need to do for yourself, and refusing to be abused by the system.
Has the Invisible Adjunct ever told us she’s doing ok in her new life?
Don’t ever let the privileged faculty tell you you’re a failure if you just leave…pre- or post-Ph.D. I left, some 20 years ago, and have just kept an eye on the profession to see how long it would take for some movement on the adjunct scandal. It’s taken a generation, and now the big boys are beginning to discuss the “problem” because the public has finally caught on. But it’s taken that long. The tenured faculty are either oblivious or in denial; neither says much for their powers of analysis. Only a few of them have spoken up and the number has not been large enough for them to be anything but a voice in the wilderness for years. Am I contemptuous? You darn right!
The sweet women who feel “lucky” to adjunct are either M.A.’s married to a male income or trust fund babies who don’t know what it is to earn a living by themselves.
Any thinking woman would just shove off and let her old professors think whatever they think.
I think they have irresponsibly used their graduate students to ensure good working conditions for themselves. And much of the “research” in the humanities just wastes paper and time. More attention to students at all levels and less of that research might make honest academics of many of them.
But, of course, the management of universities have been the real whip weilders, and they themselves cater to the trustees who are business people and who think like same: productivity, free markets, the bottom line, useless tenure (which “productive, competitive” people don’t have so they need losts of personal money and then need to be told they are philanthropic).
Don’t put up with it. Find something or somewhere that values you and your abilities and tell the adjunct exploitation to go whistle. They wasted your time and money in training you for exploitation. Throw it in their faces and leave.
Jay
“I don’t know how one would even begin to persuade people not to work under such conditions.”
make them a better offer.
the way everybody goes on
about “love it or leave it”
you’d think there were jobs
falling from the sky or something.
i was hoping that with the meltdown
in the world economy we’d start seeing
somewhat less of this kind of thing ….
i keep adjuncting because i’m *afraid*, okay?
i’m not crazy and i’m not stupid.
i *am* terrified: job hunting eats the soul.
it really *is* a jungle out there
and they’ll mess up your whole life
just for fun. everybody knows this.
i’m-alright-jack rhetoric about how
anything in our whole lives that
we don’t think is just peachykeen
must obviously be our own fault
isn’t very helpful to anyone
as far as i can see.
sure is common, though.
Johanna, I’ve heard from other people that the IA is still commenting in other fora, but I haven’t heard any details. I think of her blog often, even several years after she closed up shop.
Jay, I’ve met quite a few women adjuncts. All of them had Ph.D.s. Few were married. None (that I knew of, anyway) were “trust fund babies.” And all of them were “thinking women,” whose reasons for sticking with it were a lot more complex than the ones you cite. I don’t think it’s entirely helpful to suggest that they just walk away, even though I’d love to see every underpaid adjunct instructor in the country quit simultaneously. But, as vlorbik points out, where would they go, exactly?
vlorbik, thank you for saying that about the lack of other jobs. I hope you didn’t think I was dismissing adjunct-exploitation as the fault of individual adjuncts — I don’t mean to downplay the structural issues by talking about the psychological ones. And I hope a better offer materializes, for you, for everyone.