Last week I went to a conference in Chicago for the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). This annual event is attended by roughly 1500 theatre academics from around the world, although the vast majority of attendees are from the U.S. I saw a lot of people that I went to graduate school with at some point in the last seven years.
It's taken most of them at least three years to find a steady job. Several are still piecing together adjunct appointments at three or four colleges a semester. The only ones with tenure-track jobs are those who were willing and able to do a nationwide job search, then pick up and move wherever they were hired, a few with less than a month's notice. One or two of my friends have been on the job market for a solid five years, always at the ready for that chance to land a permanent job.
Plenty of other articles have been written on the woes of the adjunct life, on the difficulties of teaching six or seven classes a semester without health insurance, other benefits, or the chance to play a significant role in an academic department. For those of my readers who aren't academics, a typical adjunct teacher gets paid between $3000 and $5000 per three-credit-hour class depending on the school and the discipline. Contracts are by the semester, and often notification of one's teaching load isn't settled until just a few weeks before classes begin each semester. So, in order to make a living this way, most adjuncts need to teach at least four classes a semester. Because most schools have to start offering benefits for employees who are teaching more than half-time, though, it's very difficult to find a department that will allow you to adjunct more than two classes a semester. This means that most adjuncts are working at more than one school, some with hellish commutes, others lucky enough to live in an urban area with multiple colleges and universities.
Adjuncts are hired at will, which means they have no job protections. When their contracts run out, they are no longer employed. This makes maintaining health insurance over the summer very difficult, just to give one example of an important benefit that most employed people have access to. While they're affected by departmental politics, they usually have very little say in department decision-making and often aren't invited to department meetings.
It's worth pointing out that adjuncts teach the majority of lower-level undergraduate classes at the vast majority of public universities. So, although they have all the responsibilities of instruction for less than half the pay of their tenure-track colleagues, and none of the benefits of full-time employees or the protections of academic freedom, most of the responsibility for student retention falls squarely on their shoulders.
When my friends and family ask me why I chose a job where I'm not teaching, I have a hard time giving them a straight answer. Truth is, I think dependence on a nation of adjuncts is a bad approach to higher education for a host of reasons. I refuse to adjunct because I believe my degree and my skills are worth more than that market pays. I believe the two-tier system of tenure-track over adjunct is creating an educational system where teaching is devalued even though it's what we are all supposed to be doing, first and foremost.
But mostly, it is because some of the smartest, most talented, and best teachers I know have really suffered while pursuing the adjunct life. There is no easy solution to the growing economic dependence on adjuncts--I know that from sitting on the administrative side of the table. There are also a lot of people who would argue that universities are turning out too many Ph.D's which is creating a glut of people who are overqualified to do all but a very few jobs, which they then compete intensely for. I'm looking forward to hearing all your comments on this subject as I'm hoping someone will have some good ideas.
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