I’m Professor Nobody

For a while you rationalize the situation: It’s temporary. It gives you flexibility. It makes sense to work like this:

• While the kids are young;

• While you write more scholarly articles;

• While you write your novel;

• While your spouse finishes a degree;

• While your spouse has a postdoc;

• Until the job market improves.

It gives you some income while you look into other options. It’s not such a bad deal when you consider what you make on an hourly basis, and the long vacations.

And you like teaching, you find interaction with students meaningful, and, honestly, your work is quite fine. Great student evaluations every semester count for something, right?

So there you are, eventually -- semesters, years, decades later (although it seems like no time at all) -- 40 or 50 years old, still doing the temporary academic gig, even though it’s not “really” temporary, since the department rehires you consistently, albeit sometimes as late as two weeks before the term begins. But you’re an old hand at Comp 101, so that doesn’t really matter. And certainly you don’t mind teaching four courses in one semester and only one course the next. (Because, you know, there were never any guarantees.)

You don’t mind teaching three courses back to back on the same day during one semester, or teaching two courses during the next semester that meet on the same day, one at 8.30 a.m., the other at 4 p.m. After all, in the long run, your teaching load probably averages out to the same as what a full-time professor carries, right?

Well, yes, your pay is a third that of your full-time colleagues, but don’t you have other meaningful compensations in life? And are you really that interested in knowing your colleagues, or in attending faculty meetings, or jumping through all those scholarly hoops so you can endure a tenure review?

Fortunately the department has given you an office that’s virtually private. The two people you share it with are there only at night, for their evening courses, so you probably will never even see them. And it’s hardly an inconvenience that you can’t have a key to the office because the department secretary doesn’t have time to have a copy made, so whenever you want to open your door you have to get the key from her.

The long-term trend, as we know from myriad articles in myriad national publications, is that the ranks of part-time college instructors have been swelling exponentially. The reasons all basically boil down to the pinchpenny economics of higher education. And we all know (choose your favorite cliché) that it’s survival of the fittest, that it’s the law of supply and demand, that life is unfair, that beggars can’t be choosers, that nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to write a dissertation, that sanitation workers earn more than most academics, and that people who can’t write teach. Those shopworn explanations, whether or not they hold a kernel of truth, provide only some of the background noise of adjunct life.

My interest at the moment is in the foreground material. Let’s consider issues of civility, respect, and decency within academic departments, issues of appreciation and inclusion, honesty and luck.

I’ve been ascending the adjunct ladder in slow motion for more than 20 years. Three years ago, after 13 years as a “visiting lecturer” at the research university where I teach (the whys and wherefores of “visiting” were never explained), I finally achieved the non-tenure-track status of “lecturer.”

I was only vaguely surprised to find that my rise into the bottom of the professorial hierarchy has in no way affected the attitudes of my tenured and tenure-track colleagues toward me. They continue, as always, to pass me in the halls with their customary distant gaze, and to peruse book catalogs with passionate intensity as I retrieve my stuff from the mailroom. If I greet them with words like “Good morning,” or “How are you?” they regard me as vacantly as a New York City subway rider fending off a pervert.

In some ways their behavior is understandable. After all, during my 13 years as a marginal presence, I appeared only erratically and ephemerally in their lives. I had never been invited to a faculty meeting, and, because of my status as a single parent, had been able only occasionally to socialize at the departmental holiday party, always held in the evening. Therefore any act of familiarity generated by me toward them undoubtedly seemed eccentric, if not inappropriate.

Now that I’ve been promoted -- and just like the other professors, I am paid on the basis of an annual contract rather than by the semester, receive benefits, and even have my actual name listed in the actual course catalog next to the actual courses I teach -- I am still barred from faculty meetings. Short of wearing one of those “Hello, My Name Is” tags, there seems no way to silently introduce myself to others in the department, so as to be acknowledged.

Acknowledged ... for what reason? Should I even care?

I asked the department chairman why, given my new rank, I was not invited to attend faculty meetings. “Because in your position, you have no voting power,” I was told. “So every time we had to vote on something, you would be asked to leave the room. This would happen frequently, you see, and it would be embarrassing to you.”

How thoughtful to spare me such humiliation.

A professorial friend who holds an endowed chair at a state university likens the process of academic job hunting to theatrical cattle calls. “You stand on stage, you sing your song, the auditioners interrupt and say, ‘We’ll call you,’ and you never hear from them again. This happens over and over; the net result is that you are demoralized or bitter, if not worse. Then one day someone tosses you a bone -- you get a bitsy, teensy part -- and it magically erases the angst of the past. You feel disproportionately grateful. You’ll do anything to prove to your beneficent employer that this estimation of you was correct.”

Here is where the issue of luck comes in. Yes, I was unlucky enough to finish graduate school in the early 1980s, at the start of the Great Academic Job Shrivel. But conversely, I have been lucky to have any teaching job at all. Except for a few months, long ago, when I cared for my (then) very young children, I have never been unemployed in academe. I am lucky that my credentials are excellent. I have publications, I have an Ivy League Ph.D., I am a well-regarded and versatile instructor. And luckily for my employers, I have always been available for bargain-basement prices!

So for a long while I floated along, teaching, publishing here and there, thinking that my dual part-time positions at the research university and at Generic Urban College would keep me competitive in the market. But hindsight is 20/20; no one could have known then that tenure-track positions would become so rare and so hotly contested; that the market for adjuncts would escalate; and that part-time positions which seemed like temporary stopgaps would develop into modes of living for me and many like me.

But finally my research university kicked me up a rung -- even gave me my own office -- and I was pleased to be an adjunct no more. My job was now “guaranteed” by an annual contract, endlessly renewable.

By the time that happened I had long abandoned ambitions to add to the annals of literary criticism or teach graduate seminars. It was enough that I thoroughly enjoyed my undergraduate teaching and believed my students gained from my courses.

Thus I continue. I teach for them. I write and publish for myself and for mainly nonacademic readers. And my friends in the department are the part timers, those Professor Nobodies like me. We are a stolid band of “others,” like the proles of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not particularly of interest to the inner circle of the party, but we dutifully teach introductory courses, freeing the professorial elite to expound on Important Topics.

And we are dispensable. If one of us makes noise in the form of, say, daring to ask to be invited to a faculty meeting, we may be labeled as “abrasive” or as a “troublemaker.” We may not be “renewed” the following year. Because, don’t forget, there are many people just like us who would give anything to have our special little jobs.

It has often been remarked of college teaching that in no other profession do people compete so ardently for stakes that are so low. One might add that in few other professions do employees behave as if those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy are Untouchables. What will it take for powerful people in academic departments to acknowledge that their humanity, their core decency, would be enhanced if they practiced the liberal values they espouse so passionately in the classroom? If the literary canon can be expanded to include the work of women and minority writers, why can there not be a seat at the table for adjuncts and lecturers at faculty meetings?