Hiring adjuncts to teach university courses is big business. In the 1970s, adjunct instructors made up a tiny fraction of university and college faculties, mostly teaching specialty courses or teaching as guest lecturers (including filling in for professors on sabbatical). By the 1980s, according to Elaine McArdle in “The Adjunct Explosion” (University Business, 2006), adjuncts made up 20 percent of all courses. By 1998, according to the US Department of Education, as cited in McArdle’s article, adjuncts made up 43 percent of faculties across the nation. From 1970 to 1998, the article cites an increase in community college adjuncts from a low of 20 percent to a high of 60 percent. At New York University, adjuncts fill a whopping 70 percent of core courses.
Adjuncts serve at the whim of the institution in which they teach. McArdle quotes Professor Larry Gerber, and associate professor of history at Auburn University: “Adjuncts are thought of as disposable.” To stitch together what constitutes making a living, many adjuncts teach at several institutions at a fraction of the salary of a full-time faculty member, while being granted absolutely no medical, pension, or vacation benefits. As has been my experience as an adjunct at a community college, although I’m expected to maintain office hours, I’m not paid for that service, but I belong to (and pay into) the union that represents all university faculty members.
There is no mistake about what’s happening on US campuses: there are very few exceptions to the explosion of adjuncts. Just as US corporations began outsourcing labor in the late 1970s, and followed labor to its cheapest locations throughout the world, so did colleges and universities follow suit, and at the same time.
I had my first adjunct experience at my alma mater in Providence, Rhode Island. I taught a course in reading education each semester, including summers, for six years. I was dropped from the faculty with the specious reason of having had my course switched over to a full-time faculty member as a money saving measure. Of course, the opposite was true since adjuncts are cheaper than full-time faculty members. I suspect the real reason for my dismissal was my left points of view being totally unacceptable to the administration at this Catholic college.
I began working at community colleges in 2005 following a 30-year career in public schools. I eased into the community college environment in Florida working as a reading and writing tutor. The job was a fairly good one with ample hours and decent colleagues. Most of the students I worked with in the learning labs there were academically needy, most often newly arrived immigrants who needed serious remediation in reading and writing skills and strategies. The college itself was a fairly reactionary place with religious influences everywhere on campus and an ultraconservative administration.
Leaving Florida, I began working at a community college in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, a small campus compared to the school I had left in Florida. I performed the same roles in Massachusetts as I had in Florida, but the learning lab in Massachusetts was somewhat of a joke. Tutors were paid for each student, and if the student didn’t show up for a session, the tutor was left waiting and denied pay for that time slot. The environment at the community college in Massachusetts was stifling, with higher-level faculty jobs (even for adjuncts) granted on the basis of who the applicant knew in a position of power. I thought that I had left the system of nepotism behind when leaving the public schools of Rhode Island years earlier!
After two years in Massachusetts, I was hired as an adjunct to teach two sections of a remedial reading course in upstate New York, where students who tested poorly on a post-secondary test were placed into reading, writing, and math remedial courses much as they had been in Florida and Massachusetts.
Students in remedial courses often (but not always) have negative attitudes about college course work, as they wrongly believe that they are being forced to take courses they don’t need to take. In New York City alone, in excess of 70 percent of students entering college are in need of such help. Other students are in school because they don’t know what to do with themselves in the dreadful economic environment in which we all now live. A small minority of students are in school because that is what their families expect of them. Others are there to collect federal aid. A very small minority of all community college students have behavior problems. Other students have learning disabilities, although some learning-disabled students can succeed in a college environment. After my second year in the community college classroom, I believe that perhaps three to five students out of a each class of 20 that I teach will be able to go on to succeed in regular college classes with continued academic assistance.
Though the odds for success are neither with me nor most of my students, the atmosphere of the community college classroom can be rewarding. If only several out of each course succeed, then I believe that the investment made is worth it. I don’t generally find problems with support from administration in upstate New York, but my membership in the union seems a complete waste of money to me, although I’m a strong supporter of unionism. My major concern with the community college environment as an adjunct instructor is that I have absolutely no chance at tenure, have no benefits, and could be fired at the whim of administration if I said anything that could be considered controversial in class, and since I’m politically progressive, the chance of that happening is not remote.
A final note. An e-mail appeared in my community college inbox during the last academic year. The e-mail was from a faculty member of a department at the college to his department chairperson. In answer to the chair’s complaint that he was overworked, the faculty member recommended that he go out and hire some adjuncts. It sounded as if the faculty member placed adjuncts in the same category as buying a cup of coffee.
Howard Lisnoff is a college instructor and freelance writer. He can be reached through his blog howielisnoff.wordpress.com.
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Colleges and universities fuel the race to the bottom with adjunct faculty
Posted on November 15, 2011 by Howard Lisnoff
Hiring adjuncts to teach university courses is big business. In the 1970s, adjunct instructors made up a tiny fraction of university and college faculties, mostly teaching specialty courses or teaching as guest lecturers (including filling in for professors on sabbatical). By the 1980s, according to Elaine McArdle in “The Adjunct Explosion” (University Business, 2006), adjuncts made up 20 percent of all courses. By 1998, according to the US Department of Education, as cited in McArdle’s article, adjuncts made up 43 percent of faculties across the nation. From 1970 to 1998, the article cites an increase in community college adjuncts from a low of 20 percent to a high of 60 percent. At New York University, adjuncts fill a whopping 70 percent of core courses.
Adjuncts serve at the whim of the institution in which they teach. McArdle quotes Professor Larry Gerber, and associate professor of history at Auburn University: “Adjuncts are thought of as disposable.” To stitch together what constitutes making a living, many adjuncts teach at several institutions at a fraction of the salary of a full-time faculty member, while being granted absolutely no medical, pension, or vacation benefits. As has been my experience as an adjunct at a community college, although I’m expected to maintain office hours, I’m not paid for that service, but I belong to (and pay into) the union that represents all university faculty members.
There is no mistake about what’s happening on US campuses: there are very few exceptions to the explosion of adjuncts. Just as US corporations began outsourcing labor in the late 1970s, and followed labor to its cheapest locations throughout the world, so did colleges and universities follow suit, and at the same time.
I had my first adjunct experience at my alma mater in Providence, Rhode Island. I taught a course in reading education each semester, including summers, for six years. I was dropped from the faculty with the specious reason of having had my course switched over to a full-time faculty member as a money saving measure. Of course, the opposite was true since adjuncts are cheaper than full-time faculty members. I suspect the real reason for my dismissal was my left points of view being totally unacceptable to the administration at this Catholic college.
I began working at community colleges in 2005 following a 30-year career in public schools. I eased into the community college environment in Florida working as a reading and writing tutor. The job was a fairly good one with ample hours and decent colleagues. Most of the students I worked with in the learning labs there were academically needy, most often newly arrived immigrants who needed serious remediation in reading and writing skills and strategies. The college itself was a fairly reactionary place with religious influences everywhere on campus and an ultraconservative administration.
Leaving Florida, I began working at a community college in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts, a small campus compared to the school I had left in Florida. I performed the same roles in Massachusetts as I had in Florida, but the learning lab in Massachusetts was somewhat of a joke. Tutors were paid for each student, and if the student didn’t show up for a session, the tutor was left waiting and denied pay for that time slot. The environment at the community college in Massachusetts was stifling, with higher-level faculty jobs (even for adjuncts) granted on the basis of who the applicant knew in a position of power. I thought that I had left the system of nepotism behind when leaving the public schools of Rhode Island years earlier!
After two years in Massachusetts, I was hired as an adjunct to teach two sections of a remedial reading course in upstate New York, where students who tested poorly on a post-secondary test were placed into reading, writing, and math remedial courses much as they had been in Florida and Massachusetts.
Students in remedial courses often (but not always) have negative attitudes about college course work, as they wrongly believe that they are being forced to take courses they don’t need to take. In New York City alone, in excess of 70 percent of students entering college are in need of such help. Other students are in school because they don’t know what to do with themselves in the dreadful economic environment in which we all now live. A small minority of students are in school because that is what their families expect of them. Others are there to collect federal aid. A very small minority of all community college students have behavior problems. Other students have learning disabilities, although some learning-disabled students can succeed in a college environment. After my second year in the community college classroom, I believe that perhaps three to five students out of a each class of 20 that I teach will be able to go on to succeed in regular college classes with continued academic assistance.
Though the odds for success are neither with me nor most of my students, the atmosphere of the community college classroom can be rewarding. If only several out of each course succeed, then I believe that the investment made is worth it. I don’t generally find problems with support from administration in upstate New York, but my membership in the union seems a complete waste of money to me, although I’m a strong supporter of unionism. My major concern with the community college environment as an adjunct instructor is that I have absolutely no chance at tenure, have no benefits, and could be fired at the whim of administration if I said anything that could be considered controversial in class, and since I’m politically progressive, the chance of that happening is not remote.
A final note. An e-mail appeared in my community college inbox during the last academic year. The e-mail was from a faculty member of a department at the college to his department chairperson. In answer to the chair’s complaint that he was overworked, the faculty member recommended that he go out and hire some adjuncts. It sounded as if the faculty member placed adjuncts in the same category as buying a cup of coffee.
Howard Lisnoff is a college instructor and freelance writer. He can be reached through his blog howielisnoff.wordpress.com.