Let’s set aside the doomsday talk. It’s 2014, and the baby boomers’ babies have swarmed the gates of academe. Over the last decade, the number of college students has risen by more than 5 million. Likewise, the employment of adjunct lecturers has skyrocketed. While other professions verge on obsolescence, the adjunct option seems more visible and attainable than ever. Its door remains wide open to anyone with a master’s or a Ph.D. Anyone like us.
The word adjunct comes from the Latin adjunctus, meaning subordinate. An adjunct is “joined or added to another thing but is not an essential part of it.” Not an essential part. The definition points to the problem. We are made to believe adjunct labor is a throwaway, replaceable. But as we all know, in any healthy relationship, both parties need to feel valued.
Since we are creative writers by trade—and not Marxist agitators—we’re more comfortable quoting from Tobias Wolff’s short story “The Liar” than from Das Kapital. After all, great fiction is the lie we use to tell the truth. In Wolff’s story, the narrator James takes after his late father (a “curser of the dark”) rather than his still-living mother (a “lighter of candles”). At the risk of sounding like Pollyannas, we’re going to spend more time burning our fingers with optimism than unleashing eff-bombs into the darkness.
Now, for the true story of two adjuncts in love.
Alison: Our first stop was Tucson City Hall. The finance department. If all went well, we would celebrate with dinner at Reilly, a mortuary turned pizzeria. We were hoping for a similarly dramatic transformation of our own. As we walked downtown, Joel and I discussed our plans with the glow of newlyweds, though we hadn’t tied that knot. Our goal was to untangle ourselves from a life of adjuncting. And we’d found the perfect loophole to do it.
At the time, Joel and I had been living together for three years and, since finishing our M.F.A.’s at the University of Arizona, we’d taught eight semesters as adjunct lecturers for the English department. We’d officially entered our late 20s, and the early returns weren’t promising.
With the low cost of living in the Old Pueblo, money wasn’t the problem, at least not the only one. We’d earned nearly $50K between us that year, so while adjunct gigs had sustained us, they weren’t sustainable.
Joel: We were seeking stability, contracts longer than four months, schedule continuity. We were seeking benefits. And on a fundamental level, we wanted to feel valued in our work, rather than expendable. Alison and I loved teaching at Arizona, but if doing so meant sacrificing the modest goals listed above, we agreed to give it up.
The thing was, jobs outside adjuncting proved difficult to snag, too. After several sleepless weeks of witching-hour deliberations, we decided to go back to graduate school to pursue additional master’s degrees. Sometimes you have to go deeper into the labyrinth to find a way out.
But enrollment in two new master’s programs did not fit into our budget. At the time, Alison received benefits (unlike me and most other adjuncts), so she was eligible for cheap tuition. If she wanted a master’s in counseling, she could pursue it debt-free.
For me, however, a master’s in public administration would cost upwards of $30,000—more than an entire year’s salary. I couldn’t do it without loans. Marriage might solve the benefits issue, but leveraging marriage for benefits felt wrong.
Alison: Talk about unromantic. Our mutual career anxieties were coupled with the unspoken competition brewing between us. Sure, I was set, but what about Joel, who, like many of our peers, was just as hard-working and deserving of benefits, yet went without? They weren’t part-time employees enjoying semi-retirement. They were full-time teachers—many with children, mortgages, and student loans. We all deserved benefits.
Joel: Such is the adjunct life. Each win for Alison or one of my dozen adjunct friends was a loss for me, and vice versa. It’s gross, this zero-sum game. We smile and act congenial, and pretend there’s enough slices of pie for all.
The status quo produces jealous adjuncts, desperate adjuncts, worn-out adjuncts. Who does that benefit? Not the students. It didn’t do much for Alison’s and my relationship, either.
Alison: I like to think it made us stronger?
Joel: We’re stubborn, so giving up wasn’t an option. Luckily, since we live in a political speck of blue in red-hot Arizona, Tucson offered us a way out. We found our loophole at City Hall: a domestic partnership intended for same-sex couples.
Alison: “Domestic partnership?,” I remember asking Joel. “Are we really jumping into this?” Turns out I didn’t need convincing. When you’re an adjunct, you don’t have much to lose.
Even if domestic partnership wasn’t designed for us, the policy can’t discriminate, unlike state and federal marriage laws. If we were domestic partners, Joel would have access to my benefits and, in turn, the tuition reduction for his new degree program. All we had to do was sign the papers.
Joel: Over the next eight hours that day, we jumped through countless hoops, and we still didn’t know if our plan would work. Between financial services, the registrar, human resources, and the bursar’s office, we expected someone to tell us no. We could hardly believe it when no one did.
We signed the papers at City Hall. As planned, Alison and I went out that night to celebrate. Pizza in a former mortuary never tasted so good.
Alison: Then, the next day, Joel received a call from the English department. They’d caught wind of our scheme. We held our collective breath and hoped we wouldn’t be fired. It’s easy to cut an adjunct loose. Just don’t rehire him.
Joel: Luckily (again), the call wasn’t termination, but an offer: Yes, you guessed it, a full-time, one-year contract, with benefits, including the holy grail of tuition reduction. I felt like Coronado stumbling into the Seven Cities of Cibola. Or some other person with a comparable stroke of good luck.
Alison: The whole saga seemed absurd. Despite the chance that Joel’s new contract was just a coincidence, we doubt it. We like to think that we took control, that control was ours for the taking.
Joel: Every adjunct can make waves, however tiny, to pressure universities to change. Granted, the process isn’t one-size-fits all. If adjuncts are going to be treated like commodities, then we might as well be entrepreneurs, and beat the administrators (with a smile) at their own game.
Alison and Joel: As bad as things are, we can’t just quit en masse, can we? We are educators first, and our students deserve more than two weeks’ notice.
Colleges and universities aren’t the enemy, either. Here at Arizona, adjuncts receive more and more support each year. That has allowed us to move through the system with something like ease, and we are grateful. Aye, but here’s the rub: The adjunct life is one we must move through, not build around.
What irks us is when people blame the victims: overworked, underpaid graduate students with few teaching options and no shot at tenure who become adjunct mules, trapped in the career equivalent of a genetic dead end.
That’s how adjuncts sometimes appear—as naïve children who’ve chosen the wrong career path, who deserve their fate like the trouble-making donkey-orphans in Pinocchio. The Island of Pleasure, the adjunct life is not.
We may be offered little, but that does not mean we have little to offer.
The current system wastes a lot of talent. How many talented voices are being atomized and marginalized? Consider this list of recent accomplishments of some of our adjunct friends. Keep in mind it isn’t exhaustive:
- T.C. Tolbert edited an anthology called Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013) and has a new poetry book called Gephyromania (AHSAHTA press, 2014).
- Matthew Conley heads up the Tucson Poetry Festival.
- Lisa O’Neill curates a literary blog called “the dictionary project.”
- Melissa Buckheit runs a reading series for young and emerging writers.
- Maureen McHugh co-created The Destroyer, a literary magazine.
If you walk the halls of Arizona’s English department, you won’t see much evidence touting these folks’ good work. Unlike tenure-track faculty members, adjuncts toil away in the shadows. We’re ready to be larger assets, if only the university would let us.