Just into fall semester I lost my breath. As it turned out, a melanoma I’d undergone treatment for 12 years ago has shown up again, primarily in my lungs. For a long-term adjunct, I’m extremely fortunate: I have health insurance. I qualified for sick leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and support from family and friends freed me up to deal with the Stage IV diagnosis and a new treatment that, amazingly, should allow me to return to work in the spring.
So with the size of those fish in my pan, can you believe that what I’ve been mulling lately has been why my college denied the application for a merit-pay raise that I dropped off on my way to the emergency room?
I’m not looking for pity or tears here. The Israeli writer Amos Oz once said that the most parochial of stories have the best chance of becoming the most universal. And though some of the particulars of my adjunct career might constitute a worst-case scenario, they illustrate a dynamic of the two-tiered faculty system that goes beyond the commonly conceded wisdom that teachers with offices can do more good than teachers without.
Applicants who are denied a merit raise don’t receive any specific notification of that in the first round of the written protocol for “discretionary salary increases"—that’s the name that my state university system gives to its merit-pay program, in which the equivalent of 1 percent of each campus’s payroll is earmarked for merit raises. If you don’t hear by a certain date, you can assume you didn’t get a merit raise and can file an appeal. If that, too, is denied, the college president writes a letter informing you of the decision and thanking you “for your continued service.”
The policy for awarding merit raises states that their purpose is “to reward and encourage excellence in: teaching; scholarship or creative activity; campus and community service; professional performance.” In practice, cynics say, the key word in the discretionary salary policy is “discretionary.” They say the raises aren’t an indicator of meritorious work so much as a signal of who toes the line and who doesn’t, who makes waves and who doesn’t. In that view, the raises are an administrative tool for fomenting dissension among the ranks.
The edition of the union newsletter that publishes who got merit raises, and for how much, is said to be the most widely read issue of the year. And the process of handing out those raises is always contentious among full-timers.
It’s less so among part-time faculty members, who stand to gain or lose less than the full-timers. A former officemate who got a merit raise once told me that it amounted to an extra $10 a week; the raises are more generous for the already better-paid full-timers.
Another guideline for distributing the pay raises—"to redress base salary inequities"—is apparently less promising than it appears. Setting aside 1 percent of the payroll wouldn’t even begin to fix the inequities in adjunct salaries. Even if it could, what administration would admit that the per-course amount paid to adjuncts constitutes an inequity, or that adjuncts must apply for a merit raise to have it redressed?
Actually, I did receive a merit raise once at another campus. A department chair nominated me for a raise after I’d developed and successfully taught a new course, helped her vet a new system for evaluating adjuncts, and scored particularly well on student evaluations. Keep in mind: I receive a per-course salary, not an annual salary. The chair had promised a true salary increase, which, for adjuncts paid by the course, could have added up, especially year after year. But instead of a $75 increase in the amount I was paid per course, the $75 raise I received was a flat annual bonus which, parceled out in my checks, amounted to a whopping $2.35 more a week. The stink I raised probably figured in my nonrenewal at that particular campus, after some dozen years of service.
You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. But in my seventh or so year at my present campus, I began applying for merit raises again, partly because no other changes—like a new job title—were available to me. (Call me crazy, but even adjuncts like a little recognition for our work.) I tried various approaches to the Catch-22 of proving my exceptional performance in a job that strictly limits my contractual obligations: Even though service, publications, and other professional development can help adjuncts solidify our position in a department, none of those can be acknowledged in evaluating our work for a merit raise. Our job descriptions cover teaching only, to help distinguish us from our tenure-track peers.
So this year, my ninth as a lecturer (although, as a writing teacher, I rarely lecture), I focused my application on my teaching. I highlighted my student-evaluation scores of over four out of five in my required first-year courses. I mentioned the new pedagogies I’d been using, the all-new syllabi I had developed, and the summer work I did scoring AP essays. I included comments from course evaluations such as this remark: “Thank you for reading every sentence of every essay,” as if, in this student’s experience at least, not all teachers do.
Of the 135 students I had taught in the period under review, almost 40 percent earned grades under C, calculated by a time-consuming (for me) but transparent (for students) 1,000-point system I devised. Only 13 percent earned an A. One of the accusations commonly leveled against adjuncts in the quality debate is that our insecure positions within the institution lead us to relax standards in the classroom. But my own classroom standards have risen with experience and with increased insight into student sensitivities and capabilities (even with no increased job security for me whatsoever).
Of course I knew my application wasn’t perfect. Hints had been dropped in faculty meetings that contributing to a newsletter promoting our program might help with merit awards, and I hadn’t done that.
But in the end, it seems, merit raises to part-timers are handed out for a whole host of reasons that have little to do with our performance in the classroom. Our program is staffed by one tenure-track director, four full-time contingent faculty members on annual salaries, and 25 to 30 part-time adjuncts paid by the course. We all teach the same two writing courses, but part-timers teach three quarters of those classes—and that’s our value to management.
In the business model’s bottom-line view, our value as part-timers lies in qualities that will ensure course coverage for the program: for example, in being the spouse or partner of a tenure-track faculty member (you offer a free long-term commitment with little financial urgency); in being a retired high-school teacher, hobbyist, or field professional, with a pension and career satisfaction derived from outside academe; or in being newly credentialed, as I was 25 years ago, full of energy and happy to suffer for job experience.
Those are some of the qualities of part-time faculty members that the two-tiered system needs to reward first, especially in times of limited budgets. Not only because determining teaching excellence itself is so time-consuming and tricky, but because when part-time faculty members realize how hard good teaching can be—how much time, work, thought, knowledge, intuition, empathy, and emotional toughness it takes to do well, and how lousy it can feel to do it poorly—they might not be so willing to continue.
In fact, where adjuncts are concerned, one of the university system’s final guidelines in awarding merit raises might be the most forthcoming: “to respond to market factors in an effort to retain [my emphasis] meritorious employees.”
In my own case, given the value that academe in general places on part-time instructors, the merit-pay review committee might have simply figured that an employee like me didn’t need an incentive to stay. After all, as a nine-year lecturer on the campus, with a 25-year academic career entirely off the tenure track, I won’t be going anywhere soon (according to the common wisdom), no matter the quality of my work.
Possibly. Another dropped hint was a reduction in my contractual course load this year, from the habitual three courses a semester to two. Meanwhile, among the new lecturers introduced at our program’s fall orientation was a 2011 graduate from our very own institution.
Tears might indeed be appropriate here, but not for me. One of the benefits of having worked for my state and its university system for as long as I have is health insurance at the group rate for life, irrespective of my course assignments—which sure comes in handy now. Amos Oz also said he considers curiosity a moral value, engendering, as it does, other values, like courage. Certainly a college education should instill curiosity. But what values are engendered by a self-justifying system that, even if regretfully and for reasons of financial exigency, can reward most what helps perpetuate the system itself?
