While in the middle of my Ph.D. studies, I was on my way back to La Guardia airport after a conference when I had a long discussion with a cab driver. It turned out that he had been a medical doctor in his home country but his qualifications were not recognized in the United States. He had no choice but to find any job he could to make ends meet, even though he had worked as a specialist in pediatric care for years. I remember feeling immense frustration for the waste of his gifts and knowledge.
Back in Dallas, things were going well for me as a graduate student. I was reading and developing theories related to dialogue, poetry, and social change. I was honing my skills as a researcher, writer, and scholar. I moved quickly from teaching first-year writing classes to teaching more advanced classes in my areas of poetry and 20th-century literature. I was asked to be on committees and met regularly with the department’s top professors, had travel money to attend and give papers at conferences, and basically enjoyed a poverty-stricken but rewarding intellectual life.
And I knew poverty. I was a single mother of two daughters without child support for a good part of that time. I know what it’s like to be on food stamps. I also know what it’s like to pick up adjunct work and writing-center work to make ends meet. But like most graduate students, I expected the period of personal and financial sacrifice to be temporary—a struggle that would yield greater rewards in the long run.
And it did. While still A.B.D., I landed a tenure-track-equivalent job in a two-year (now four-year) college even though well over a hundred people applied for the position, many with Ph.D.’s from prestigious universities.
From my first day on the job, I was treated as a valuable member of the faculty. I was given my own office with state-of-the-art computer equipment and my name on the door. I had my pick of classes, most of which were directly related to my studies and scholarship interests. I was instrumental in creating liaisons with university humanities programs and was involved in a host of writing and visiting-speaker series. Sure, we had a heavy course load, but we had a tremendous amount of support alongside generous travel money ($2,500 a year), a decent paycheck, and full benefits. The college even paid for the rest of my Ph.D. studies. Best of all, I had found a truly collegial atmosphere in which I felt appreciated and respected and where I could grow as an educator and a scholar.
But so much is about perspective. Fast forward to 2008. I received my Ph.D. at the same time that my partner was offered a job in Chicago. I would have to leave my teaching position, but there were many universities in Chicago, and I had a strong vita, a growing list of publications, and experience in a core faculty role, alongside great recommendation letters.
In 2009, I was offered a visiting lectureship at a state institution in Chicago that served the kind of population (first-generation college students) I enjoyed teaching most. The job even sounded relatively good compared with other contingent faculty positions. I was offered a one-year contract with a 3-3 course load and benefits. But the pay was shockingly low: $26,000. Not only a great deal less than the job I had just walked away from but significantly lower than my salary as a primary-school teacher in England in the 1990s.
But this was temporary, right?
That taxi driver? I soon began to know how he felt.
I spent the first term at my new university trying to figure out where I fit in. What I found was bewildering. The day I arrived to work, no one greeted me or even came by my office to say hello. (Within a few days, I did meet my two office-mates, who were in the same position as me.) Students couldn’t find any of the lecturers’ offices because they were anonymous workspaces with no nameplates on the doors, and that was the case even with lecturers who had been there for a decade or more. Lecturers were all listed as “staff” and not “faculty” on the university website.
The blurry-screened computer in our office was built in 2001, so I would have to lug my own laptop into work. We had three people and three desks in our tiny office, which made meeting with students on the same day virtually impossible. I had never liked “titles,” but I had been called professor only a few months before and now that title suddenly seemed out of my league. The most disconcerting part, though, was that 95 percent of the doors around the English department seemed to be permanently closed.
I started going to the weekly colloquia at which students and professors presented papers, thinking that might provide the intellectual stimulation that I missed from my old campus. These sessions were generally dominated by a handful of tenure-track professors whose questions circled back to their own work and theories, with graduate students making up almost all of the tiny audience. Although I did enjoy listening to the speakers and hearing the opposition to their work, I also began to think that this time might be better spent on my own scholarship and writing.
Then, of course, there was the problem with class assignments. No matter what our level of skill, experience, or expertise, we were given no choice in the classes we taught. In five years of teaching in this position, I taught only three classes on subjects other than first-year writing. I hadn’t taught a class schedule entirely made up of composition courses since I was a master’s student, so this was particularly difficult for me. At first, I was sure that I simply needed to make more of an effort to get to know some of my tenure-track colleagues, and for them to get to know me.
I told my tenure-track colleagues about courses I had designed in the past, retention strategies I had worked on for nontraditional students, and hiring committees of which I had been a part. But I was told there was no money and no real way to apply my skills in this department. I was told that graduate students had priority over instructors in distributing teaching assignments. I was also told that the tenure-track faculty members were worried about their own jobs, which I knew to be true. Those who wanted to help genuinely felt powerless to do so.
What struck me first about all this was just the sheer waste of human resources and talent not only at my home institution but across the country. Like so many other contingent faculty members, in no way did I feel I belonged to, or was needed by, the university.
But something else dawned on me. I had truly believed in my previous job that I had been progressive in my support of adjuncts. After all, I had invited them to faculty functions and treated them as equals, right? Only now did I realize how blind I had been when I sat on the “right” side of the track. There was so much more I could have done to help my contingent colleagues. Why didn’t I?
I resigned myself to this new system in which I not only didn’t have a voice but seemed to be downright invisible. I was bored, underpaid, and underemployed.
Just as I was about to quit altogether, the head of the first-year writing program asked if I’d like to be part of a design group for “blended” (half-online) courses. Even though I wasn’t sure then if I believed pedagogically in online teaching, I was hungry to try something new. Of course, there was no extra pay involved, but I was grateful to be part of a new initiative and to use my skills in ways that might be beneficial in a larger sense. Short as it was, that project was my most stimulating experience in five years at the institution.
But involvement in the effort also meant that I became known for teaching first-year blended classes, and those were the only classes I was given, term after term. Suddenly I found myself grateful for one literary-theory class that I was unexpectedly asked to teach one term.
That is part of my point: I was “grateful” for being given one class—a type of course I had taught numerous times before. And afterward, I went back to a schedule of all first-year writing courses.
Being a taxi driver does have its benefits. It doesn’t demand the same kind of responsibility or commitment of a tenure-track position. I really could go into work for my two or three days a week and be “off” the others. Minimal preparation is needed after many years of teaching the same classes. I was able to use the same syllabi term after term. No one in the department wanted or needed my experience or expertise. There was no committee work or extra responsibilities. There’s a certain amount of freedom as a writer in this dumbed-down schedule.
And in fact, in my five years in this contingent position, I’ve had my first book of poetry published as well as scholarly essays published in both university and nationally recognized presses, alongside a host of journal publications. I’ve become an editor at two respected Chicago journals. I’ve been paid to do readings on other American college and university campuses. I’ve been a judge in regional and statewide poetry contests. I teach workshops at the Chicago Public Library and other venues. And yes, I attend and give papers at many of the same conferences that the tenure-track faculty attend (but on my own dime).
None of those activities have helped me move into a tenure-track job. As I was limited to the Chicago area, I began to realize my chances of securing another tenure-track position were almost nonexistent.
More worryingly, though, I know all too well that my “part-time” approach to my career was only possible because I was in a two-income household. Other lecturers held second and even third jobs in order to make ends meet. When I saw one of our award-winning lecturers working behind a bar after a reading one night, I realized the more serious implications of the contingent-labor problem.
The divide between the haves and have-nots on a departmental level became more and more clear even as, somewhat ironically, we began to create a combined union for tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members at our state university. And we’ve made progress in ways large (lecturers won pay increases and the right to be partially represented at department meetings) and small (nameplates on our office doors). Moreover, some faculty members are finally aware and supportive of change in the working conditions facing adjunct instructors.
It became painfully obvious that there had to be “buy-in” by tenure-track faculty for even the smallest of changes. I’ve been on the inside and I know that tenure-track professors can and should do more to create change. Like what? Well, for starters:
- Seek to phase out contingent-labor positions altogether. Devise the titles any way you like. but somehow incorporate the title “professor” into all university teaching positions, thus demonstrating that academics are a group of colleagues and not divided labor. Design these new positions to incorporate both teaching and research in varying ratios. There are some faculty members, of course, who would prefer focus on teaching, and positions should be created accordingly, but these, too, need to be career-oriented, permanent jobs. The point is to make these positions different but equal.
- Strive to pay all faculty members a minimum salary that at least matches the salary of a starting high-school teacher. Although some department leaders might feel this is beyond their control, they should demand it anyway at each and every turn. And if that means a redistribution of other department salaries, then so be it.
- Give all faculty members multiyear contracts that allow them a measure of job security and the ability to grow in their careers.
- Make everyone accountable. Find ways to eliminate the “dead wood” phenomenon that happens with some tenured professors.
- All professors should teach regularly, although the allocation of course-to-research ratios can and should change according to proposed research projects and needs.
- Find fair and ethical ways to distribute course-release time, sabbaticals, and professional-development opportunities among all faculty members. Provide options for mentoring and team leadership to all.
- Give all faculty members a full presence in the department. The MLA has some very good and practical recommendations on that front. They include attendance at meetings and department events, involvement in committees and planning, recognition in the department, nameplates on doors, and a presence on the department website. Introduce all new faculty members to the department when they are hired. Allow all faculty members full knowledge of and access to departmental decisions, budgets, and grant opportunities.
- Give all faculty members an equal vote in departmental matters. This one is essential.
Contingent laborers are not a threat. They can be colleagues in a joint mission for academic excellence and teaching. This really is an internal class issue and requires the tenure-track faculty to relinquish some of its power in order for all to survive. Departments would not only be stronger for it but would also be in better positions to work with and not against the administration.
For many contingent faculty members, though, these sorts of changes don’t appear to be anywhere on the near horizon. And my story is far from unusual. The fact is, our talent and expertise is going to waste in these jobs, and for many of us, it is time to look for a career that allows us to use our skills and experience in new ways.
Maybe we won’t opt to drive a taxi, or maybe we will. But the question remains: What is lost if talented educators, academic specialists, and scholars disappear from the profession altogether?
