The week after Thanksgiving, at about 5:30 p.m. on a Thursday, I got an email from the chair of one of the departments where I am part of the temporary faculty pool. He asked if I was available to teach a course for the next term, set to begin in a little over a month later. Technically, I wasn’t — I’d already been offered, and accepted, a full-time course load by another department. But given my desire to feed, house, and clothe the third-grader who lives with me in this economy, I said I was available for an overload and thanked him for the opportunity.
An hour later, the chair emailed again: never mind. Turns out the course’s enrollment was too low for next term, he said, so there was no way the university would approve my hiring. For contingent faculty members everywhere, it’s a tale as old as the word “adjunct” itself: The university giveth and the university taketh away, all technically outside of business hours.
This was not an isolated incident. Back in June, yet another department asked me to teach three courses in 2023-24, only to have the fall course canceled at the last minute for low enrollment, and the subsequent two courses yanked after a tenured professor on sabbatical changed their mind and decided to teach. For two months, though, I had labored under the blissful illusion that I knew the provenance of at least some of my income for the next year. (The illusion was doubly burst after still another department also offered me, and then also rescinded, a three-course contract, before reoffering me a contract to teach one course.)
Indeed, since I returned to the classroom after relocating back to my hometown, in 2020, I think that of the 15 courses I’ve taught, seven were offered to me with less than a month’s notice.
Several of those courses were offered to me less than two weeks before I walked into the classroom. I am ashamed to say I accepted the work on such short notice, but also proud to say I managed to build and deliver a brand-new course out of the ether. One of them gave me three days. For another, I actually stepped in two weeks after the term began.
In all cases, I can say that I did an exceptional and stellar job — because nobody came to check up on me and no students complained, so I can literally tell you anything. Also I readily admit that I still go to bed most nights terrified about when, if, and how I will find employment, and there is no end in sight.
As much as I fantasize about getting a better job outside higher education, with a salary and benefits, the hiring timeline of “regular-person jobs” rarely aligns with the academic calendar. And I’m not actually going to storm out of class in the middle of a term to take a nonacademic position, should I ever be offered one. I try to honor my late father by not burning any more bridges than I already have in my ignominious life.
Plus, let’s be honest: I probably never will be offered a “regular-person job.” Of the dozens for which I’ve applied, the most common reason my résumé goes directly into the virtual trash is that — with my Ph.D. in German and years of teaching experience — I am “overqualified” (a dog whistle for “old”). At the same time, I am also underqualified, given that my last legitimate corporate position was during the George W. Bush administration, and thus I have to keep it off my résumé lest I appear to be my actual age.
Absent a truly miraculous stroke of luck, I will be a contingent faculty member for life.
Cue the gallery of the wise: That is literally what adjuncting is! Why am I complaining about a position that, by definition, is supposed to be temporary? No one is forcing me to teach, right?
I don’t disagree with you. And yet. Even if family obligations did not limit my employment options geographically, after the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting and record burnout, are you truly telling me that the notion of providing slightly less fight-or-flight conditions for contingent faculty members in the United States is impossible?
I don’t buy it. No, I think there is some other weird cognitive dissonance at play that trivializes contingent faculty labor — Schrödinger’s Adjunct, if you’ll forgive me. (It’s fine if you don’t.)
The conundrum is this: If a contingent instructor such as myself can be — indeed, is taken for granted to be — summoned out of thin air to teach a course at the last minute and then just as quickly told to skedaddle, that must mean the individuals doing the summoning (and unsummoning) assume that teaching is easy enough that any schmuck off the street can do it in a trivial amount of time.
After all, everyone surely understands that we, as people, have to pay our bills every time they come in, and thus can’t count on landing a course (or three) with a week’s notice — so any course we do accept on that timeline has to be in addition to other work.
Ergo: Teaching must be so easy as to require negligible effort. The other option is, of course, that we are independently wealthy. In which case: Teaching must be so negligible as to be a mere hobby.
Therein lies the rub. If teaching is as easy as it’s made out to be by the individuals who assume I can do it at the drop of a mortarboard, then why, pray tell, is the goal of every single tenured professor in the world to get out of it? I’m ancient and washed-up enough now that people I went to graduate school with who were lucky enough to secure tenure-track employment have been promoted twice. I have been subjected to gushing social-media posts about their well-earned sabbaticals: Finally, a sabbatical, they cry! Time to do my real work! Teaching has sucked me dry.
Well, gosh. That kind of makes me think that teaching is hard work that takes skill, time, and energy.
This conundrum brings to mind another issue that the pandemic fomented to its boiling point: The agonizing years of unseen, unpaid, and largely unappreciated labor that some partners do in the home (usually but not always women), while the other partner (usually but not always a man) leaves the house for “real” work. (In this paradigm, the first partner also usually leaves the house for “real” work, but is somehow still “better suited” to domestic labor for some reason. Unrelatedly or not, most adjunct faculty members in the United States identify as female.)
So which one is it? Is “women’s work” so insignificant it shouldn’t even be called “work”? Or is it so onerous that outsourcing the average mother’s labor to paid workers would cost over $200,000 a year? Is teaching college courses so insignificant that any rando off the street can do it with little to no effort? Or is it so back-breakingly exhausting that, in order to do any “real” work of scholarship, one can’t do much teaching at all?
I’m all for chiasmic unity, but those things cannot be true at once. Apologies to science (and cats), but the cat has to be either alive or dead.
The solution here is not just to pay more money to contingent faculty members, although more is always welcome. (To be fair, unionization has helped adjunct compensation tip toward respectable, including in the departments where I often teach.) The solution is also not for every adjunct everywhere to “just get another job,” if we even could.
The solution is to remember that adjunct teaching is the exact same teaching that tenured faculty members do, and should be treated as such. The powers that be need to stop using contingent instructors like inanimate pieces in the puzzle of the course catalog, magically conjurable to fill any blank that may appear at any time.
The solution is simply to remember that contingent faculty members are, in fact, human workers who are doing the same instructional labor done by tenured professors, and are entitled to the same consideration that academe offers full-timers. That means a reasonable lead time, firm course offers, and acknowledgment that teaching is, indeed, real work that cannot (or at any rate should not) be offered at the 11th hour — and then taken away at half past midnight.
