I’m writing this during my busiest week of the semester. It’s so busy, my wife and I decided to give our 21-month-old son, Gavin, to his grandmother for the week. That isn’t an easy thing to do for a couple of reasons. One is that we are young parents, and Gavin hasn’t quite reached that age where we are tired of his antics, so it’s hard not to have him around. The other reason is that his grandmother works full time and has to take the week off to keep Gavin.
Perhaps I should explain just how busy we are. First of all, my wife, Melanie, works a regular job. She is in a profession that helps people and helps the community, but her job exhausts her. I, on the other hand, have a less “regular” job. I am an adjunct faculty member in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University, where I teach four first-year writing courses a semester, and I am an adjunct in the English department at Blue Ridge Community College, where I teach two more writing courses a semester. My regular classes ended last week, and this is finals week. Because I teach composition at both schools, I don’t give a final exam. I am spending the week grading about 130 essays. It’s an essay-reading, essay-grading marathon.
Strangely, I have already received my final paycheck from JMU for the semester. You see, JMU has decided to pay adjuncts over the winter break, which is great for Christmas. But when the end of the spring semester comes around, they don’t pay me after regular classes end. I have one more paycheck coming from the community college.
Then, it’s summer. (Cue scary-movie music.)
JMU’s school of writing doesn’t offer many courses over the summer. The ones it does offer are snatched up by the full-time faculty members. The community college offers a few more summer courses, but those are also taken by full-time faculty members; they get extra pay for teaching summer courses. Maybe these institutions don’t realize, or care, that the full-time adjuncts around here, like me, are out of work and out of income during the summer months.
I need a summer job. I have been applying for summer jobs since March. I had to turn down a U.S. Census position I had applied for because the job was during the semester, but then one opened up later, so now I’ve got a temp job for a few weeks. Last year I worked at a day-care center for minimum wage and 20 hours a week. Now I’ll take just about anything. In fact, I have an interview coming up for a minimum-wage job landscaping. I could also probably work at the day-care center again, if it comes to that.
Part-time, minimum wage isn’t really enough. My son is growing every day; he needs food, diapers, some clothes, and other things 21-month-olds can’t live without. My debt is starting to catch up with me. Our 10-year-old minivan is on its last leg, and our 8-year-old Civic has a warning light on the dash that we can’t seem to do anything about. My wife wears contacts but likes to put on glasses in the evening to let her eyes breathe. Her glasses broke six months ago, and we haven’t been able to get another pair. Optimistically (foolishly?), we planned an inexpensive vacation this year—our first in three years—and now we regret the money we will have to spend for that trip. Some vacation.
Things aren’t all bad, though. I have a family I love, including a healthy young son and a wife who lets me chase my dreams, as long as I don’t do anything too crazy (though this is becoming a little too crazy). I have applied for some teaching jobs semi-nearby: a full-time spot at a different community college near Richmond, Va.; a writing-tutor position at Virginia State University; and a full-time contingent position at George Mason University, in northern Virginia. Desperate, I also put in an application at the private, military high school a few miles away, where I would get to wear a uniform and students would call me captain. I don’t have a terminal degree, so it’s not as if I expect tenure—I’ll take a more permanent contingent spot. So far, I haven’t heard from any of the schools.
You can probably tell that I am baffled and angry. I’m good at what I do. I’m a good writer, a good teacher, and even a good scholar. In the last faculty meeting of the semester at the university where I teach—I get to attend faculty meetings now because of a mild stink I raised aided, in part, by my Chronicle Review piece in October 2009—there was a lot of talk about “promotable” and “nonpromotable” positions. Should faculty members in nonpromotable positions get to vote on who gets tenure? And so on and so forth. Still new to faculty meetings, I just sat there, mostly confused. Apparently there was a policy e-mail that went around to some faculty members, and the bulk of the meeting was about this e-mail. I didn’t get the e-mail.
After the meeting, during my walk to class, I came up with a brilliant and painfully obvious idea. Why do we have to have promotable and nonpromotable positions? What is the benefit to our institution? If it’s to save money, then that’s a problem that reveals the priorities of the writing school and the university. If it’s the standard “because that’s the way it has always been,” then we should change it, because that is always a bad argument. Shouldn’t incentives exist for all faculty members? That just seems logical.
So, I’m baffled and angry because the institutionalized structure of academe seems outdated and dysfunctional, specifically when it comes to adjunct, contingent, and other “nonpromotable” faculty members. As the saying goes, if you have a good horse, you run it. I know a lot of good horses who don’t get to run, or they only get to run in small, fenced-in yards. I’d like to think this problem exists only at my university, but, judging by the lack of response to my applications, nobody wants me as anything other than an adjunct unless I have a terminal degree, despite my experience and proven track record. I guess I’m good enough to teach a lot of students but not good enough to be fully involved.
As I cut other people’s grass this summer, and struggle financially even though I have a white-collar job, and as my family chooses diapers for my son over glasses for my wife, I’ll probably get angrier. Luckily, I can always write about it. Don’t think I’m not grateful.
