Jill Carroll, a Proud Part-Timer, Thinks Many Adjuncts Need a New Attitude

For Sale: One class. Covering Western-civilization texts from Plato to Marx. Taught by experienced

Ph.D. with top-notch student evaluations. Slightly used. $2,500 or best offer.

Yet another example of the corporatization of higher education? Just more talk of maximizing earnings, higher productivity, and brand management? Exactly. Only this time, it’s not the administrators doing the hawking -- it’s the professor herself. Jill Carroll wants adjuncts to think about themselves as entrepreneurs selling a product to a client.

Ms. Carroll’s perspective has transformed a job that most in academe would see as low-grade torture -- teaching 12 courses a year at three institutions -- into a small-business success story.

After helping a few friends into the adjunct game, she has written a manual that encourages part-timers to turn their worldview on its head. Don’t be a victim. Don’t let others define you. With a bit of Stephen Covey cheerleading and a dash of drill-sergeant discipline, she encourages adjuncts to deal with the system that exists, rather than pine for an adjunct utopia that isn’t even on the horizon.

“Yeah, it sucks,” she says. “But OK, now what?”

Today, she stands at the head of a prison classroom a half-hour south of Houston, teaching The Communist Manifesto to 23 white-clad “offenders,” as they’re called in Texas. She has walked through six doors and past three guards to get here. The strong smell of ammonia wafts into the room as two prisoners mop the hall. It’s one of the 12 courses she’ll teach this year. That doesn’t count the continuing-education classes or the literature course for convicts on probation. She’s also at Rice University and two campuses of the University of Houston, teaching basic humanities courses as well as philosophy and religion. Add it all up, and last year she pulled down $54,000.

So stop telling her that adjuncts get paid no better than teenage fry cooks. “Hogwash,” she’ll tell you. “Hogwash.”

The adjunct problem is well-worn ground in higher education. You know the conventional wisdom: They’re cheap labor, they get treated poorly by their institutions, they have little contact with the wider university, and they aren’t on campus long enough to help students. In general, the thinking goes, the growing use of part-timers is destroying much of what once made an academic career special.

A survey released last fall found that part-timers are teaching more than one-quarter of the introductory courses in many fields. Also, the low-paid adjunct is no myth: Almost three-quarters of them get less than $3,000 per course, and less than a quarter of departments offer health insurance to their part-timers.

The lack of benefits and poor pay are fueling union efforts to organize adjuncts, in some places riding the momentum of graduate-student unionization.

For her part, Ms. Carroll agrees that the plight of the adjunct isn’t imaginary. They should get paid more. They should be treated better. But for now, part-timers have to live with higher-education reality. “You can still send in money for the unionization,” she says. “You can still protest. You can still sign petitions. But that’s not going to pay your bills. That’s systemic change, and it takes time.”

Until the revolution comes, Ms. Carroll is driving her pickup all over sprawling Houston, teaching some Hegel here and a little Ayn Rand there.

After this afternoon’s class at the Ramsey II Unit, she parks her silver Nissan Frontier just outside the prison gate at Susie’s Corner, passing on the “famous” jalapeno burger for a Diet Coke and an aspirin. The prison almost always gives her a headache.

She drives on, down country roads, past the skydiving center and the Yellow Rose Tavern -- “it’s a dump, but they’ve got the best barbecue.” A few miles later, she approaches the new house she and her partner are buying in a few weeks.

It’s a house paid for by lots and lots of teaching. Since 1995, she has run what she thinks of as a full-time adjunct practice. That first year, she earned about $20,000, and the money has climbed steadily since then.

After six years, she has fallen into a predictable rhythm of classes. She teaches four courses each year at Rice, for which she earns $5,500 apiece. She teaches six for the University of Houston-Clear Lake, including the one at the prison. And she teaches two more at the main campus of the University of Houston. Those public institutions pay considerably less, about $2,400 per course. Add in several continuing-education courses, and she has earned more than $50,000 for three years running.

Does 12 courses sound like an unbearably heavy teaching load? “I think I have a very cushy job,” she says. “Sometimes I work a 10-hour day, sometimes a two-hour day. And I still get about eight weeks of vacation a year.”

The key, she says, is to develop courses like products: Systemize their production until you can reap the benefits of economies of scale. Make them classes you can teach over and over, without mountains of preparation each time. Her self-published book, How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An Entrepreneurial Strategy Manual, is filled with stoic advice about playing the hand you are dealt. “Accept your destiny and you will be tranquil and happy,” she writes. “Or, choose not to accept it and you’ll be miserable and wretched, and still have to go to the same destiny.”

The manual tells aspiring adjuncts to find a suitable market, be willing to teach the “grunt” courses, and consider nontraditional venues, like continuing-education programs. It’s geared for people in the humanities, although she says scientists may find it useful as well.

At her rate, she has taught as much in six years as many full-timers have in 18. And yes, there’s a reason those star professors don’t want to teach “Introduction to Western Civilization” every semester. Even Ms. Carroll acknowledges that boredom has started to creep in. “The thought of teaching Augustine’s Confessions again makes me go into a coma,” she says. “But I get in there, and after two minutes, I’m back into it.”

Throughout her adjunct guidebook, she implores part-timers to change their mind-set. “Adjunct lecturers will not succeed if they perpetually think of themselves as victims of the academy, or the market, or capitalism, or university corporate interests, or whatever,” she writes. “Such thinking is a recipe for failure.”

At her dining table in her three-story Houston loft, nestled between a used-car dealership and a mattress warehouse, she repeats the message. “It all starts with how you think,” she says. “I know it sounds very pop psychology, sounds like Oprah. But it’s true.”

So far, she has sold few manuals, and she is not a voice in the national debate over adjuncts. But in humanities departments around Houston, they know where she stands. Each year at Clear Lake, she declines to distribute to students the nomination forms for teaching awards -- honors not available to adjuncts. She returns the forms to the dean with a note saying that any award that excludes half the teachers is a sham.

Eric Boynton, a former classmate of Ms. Carroll’s at Rice, applied many of her ideas to snag teaching gigs at three institutions in the Seattle area. He supported a wife and young child on the $38,000 he earned before landing a full-time, nontenure-track job at Colgate University.

“Fundamentally, she’s proposing an attitude that turns the table,” he says. “It might only be psychological, but it feels like you possess the power, that you’re out there peddling your wares.”

Ms. Carroll’s magical mind-set may be great for an individual adjunct, but it won’t change the system. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a labor economist at Cornell University who specializes in higher education, says that if the supply of willing adjuncts swelled, it would merely increase the incentive for universities to use them, while not giving them any more clout.

The path to adjunct contrarian began in Shreveport, La., where Jill Carroll was raised, the daughter of a beat cop and a registered nurse. Father had an eighth-grade education. Grandfather was an Arkansas sharecropper. Reared in a charismatic Pentecostal family, she was at home with evangelists and speaking in tongues.

At 18, she went 280 miles northwest to Tulsa, Okla., and Oral Roberts University, which seemed about the only option for a girl who felt called to the ministry. After graduation and two years of playing drums in a Christian rock band, she returned to Oral Roberts for graduate school. Lost her faith, got her master’s degree, and came out of the closet.

She hunts birds, mostly waterfowl, but believes that nothing makes a finer dinner than three freshly killed mourning doves with a little couscous and cabernet. Sleeps with a 16-year-old rat terrier who hobbles around her loft on three legs. Somewhere in there, she earned a Ph.D. in religious studies at Rice, with a dissertation criticizing traditional feminist models of God.

As a little girl, Ms. Carroll sat raptly in church, watching preachers who commanded an audience. These were not five-minute sermons, where ministers might offer a scriptural reading and a homily before sitting down. These were hourlong performances, during which they paced back and forth, their voices rising and falling, their arms flailing.

Three decades later, that is how this 38-year-old woman, a lesbian who says the only religion she practices now is hunting, teaches: like a television evangelist. She roams the front of the classroom, voice rising to an occasional frenzy. During her lecture on The Communist Manifesto, Ms. Carroll steps out of her role as a cog in the higher-education assembly line and pretends to be a mindless factory worker, tightening the same four screws over and over. This is her stage.

Her Pentecostal background has infused more than just her classroom persona. It has helped her ignore what others think about her personal and professional lifestyles. “They’re going to think you’re a wacko,” she says she learned as a child. “But don’t let them define you. Don’t be afraid to go against the crowd.”

In 1995, with her fresh Ph.D., she went on the job market. Lots of applications led to a few shortlists, which led to no offers. Recently, she was a finalist for a full-time job at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, but she withdrew, deciding that being a full-time part-timer was better. Like a diversified investment portfolio, she says, multiple clients confer stability.

And tenure, she says, is overrated. Her colleagues who have it spent seven neurotic years griping about the system. And for what? “I don’t think insurance is enough of a reason to put up with it,” she says. She’s even more blunt in her manual: “All this fear and trembling about lack of tenure for adjuncts is really unnecessary. Everyone else in America apparently functions well without it; why can’t we?”

Teaching 12 courses a year at three institutions shows pluck, but is she any good?

“She’s phenomenal,” says Deborah Harter, a professor of French studies at Rice and co-director of the university’s program in the humanities. Ms. Carroll is in the upper echelon of all teachers at Rice, she says. “She’s someone who turns them on to learning without gimmicks, tricks, or easy grades,” she says. “We at Rice get a huge, almost unfair deal. We’re paying her as an adjunct and getting the quality of a first-rate professor.”

Her students may not know the difference between tenured full professors and adjunct lecturers, but they like her classroom style. When Cheshe Langford was completing her master’s degree at the University of Houston, she passed on a class 10 minutes away and chose to drive 45 minutes to an extension campus to take the course with Ms. Carroll. Such repeat customers are common. At the Women’s Institute of Houston, a continuing-education venue, she has even developed a few “groupies,” who take almost anything she teaches.

She’s not humble about her teaching skills either, repeatedly asserting that she can “teach circles around many of the full-timers.”

The notion that full-time faculty members are somehow automatically better teachers infuriates her. Like adjuncts, they rarely have any training in classroom teaching.

Unlike adjuncts, she says, their employment for the next semester isn’t hanging by the thread of decent student evaluations. “They can suck just as royally as any adjunct with 17 classes,” Ms. Carroll says. “And they can suck with just one.”

But even people like Ms. Harter, who can’t say enough good things about Ms. Carroll, question whether adjuncts can duplicate her success by reading a manual. Ms. Harter says that Ms. Carroll is doing adjuncts a service by encouraging them to take control of their professional lives, but notes that she’s an extreme case. Many adjuncts are in that spot because they really are second-tier, she says.

Mr. Boynton, the Colgate professor, emphasizes that Ms. Carroll succeeds because she is both a likable, easy-going extrovert and a disciplined multitasker who never loafs. Others might not be able to land as many jobs or handle them as well, he says.

Ms. Carroll brushes off such complaints. Sure, she says, not everyone will get four high-priced courses at Rice that help bring in $50,000 a year. But $30,000 or $40,000 is certainly attainable for anyone who wants to do the work. And being organized isn’t innate.

“I don’t think time management is a gift,” she says. “I understand that to be a skill you can learn.”

She has an answer for one of the other criticisms she’s sure to hear. “I know some people will just see this as Protestant work ethic run amok. ‘Oh, she just works herself down to a nub,’ ” she says. “That’s so not true.”

All her teaching doesn’t consume every moment. She rarely works on weekends and usually doesn’t work at night. On September 1, she will cancel classes for the first day of dove season. She holds season tickets for the local professional women’s basketball team. She has found time to publish an academic book: Savage Side: Reclaiming Violent Models of God, a revision of her dissertation, is due out this fall from Rowman & Littlefield.

And she’s kicking around another advice book for adjuncts.

This one would be a kind of “Machiavelli for Adjuncts,” with pithy wisdom based loosely on The Prince. An example: Don’t wait for the perfect job, take what you can get. Waiting, she says, means “just more time you won’t be making any money.”

BEFORE YOU HANG OUT YOUR ADJUNCT SHINGLE

Jill Carroll’s manual on how to be a successful adjunct says you’ll need the following:

A love of teaching: “Part-time lecturers teach. Period. Anyone working a successful career as an adjunct must love to teach; otherwise, they will be miserable and won’t have the necessary drive and energy to build their teaching business.”

A healthy disregard for money: “Making peace with the financial realities of this career choice will help you maintain your confidence, self-esteem, and overall happiness if and when you find yourself in part-time positions indefinitely. As a lecturer, you will stand before classrooms of students who, at graduation or soon after, will make double, even triple your salary with only a third of your education and training.”

A willingness to toil in the trenches: “You just received your degree, or just won an award for your dissertation. You’re feeling pretty good about yourself and your intellectual abilities. And you’re insulted at the prospect of teaching three sections of ‘Beginning Spanish’ when, after all, your thesis was the best one to come out of your department in decades. Well, get over yourself. Go for the promising, tenure-track positions that seem to match the quivering power of your C.V., but if you don’t make the short list, you’d better start polishing up your Spanish verb conjugations.”

A marketplace: “Simply put, a small town with only one major education facility will not provide enough of a market for your services. The typical small ‘college town’ may seem like an obvious teaching opportunity for freelance lecturers. As a market for a successful teaching practice, however, such a town may be too limiting.”

http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Page: A12