Dear
Universities,
This
spring, I will have reached the culmination of my job search in academia. For
three years, I have prolifically applied to faculty positions all over the
country. I have reached the pre-interview stage with three universities: Eastern
New Mexico, Southeastern Louisiana, and Bowling Green. The majority of this
year’s applications have been for community colleges, and often not
tenure-track, but full-time and acceptable nevertheless. Alas, it seems I am an
adjunct (or contingent instructor, otherwise known as a ‘lecturer’), and an adjunct
I will stay. On the one hand, I love
this job. LOVE it. But I would have loved to write and publish more fiction,
and I would have loved to pursue further scholarship on flash fiction, the
notion of the hidden/revealed text, and the Midwestern gothic as well. As I
will point out, the life of a contingent instructor doesn’t quite foster those
possibilities.
So.
You don’t like hiring tenure-track professors. At this point, most of you rely
on contingent and/or part-time instructors for the majority of instruction. I
get it. I think you’re in a race to the bottom, but I get it. You don’t want to
pony up the pay and benefits that full professors demand. They don’t get THAT
much. They can afford nice homes and a yearly vacation – that’s the extent of
their vast wealth. But you don’t want to pay it. Fine. But meet an adjunct
halfway will you? Most of them pull in about half of what I do, and don’t get
ANY retirement or benefits. I make about 35K, and as long as I get a 75% load I
get health insurance as well. (Was 50% before Act 10. Thanks Scooter.) This
makes me, a lucky member of the humanities team at UW-Milwaukee, better
compensated than the vast majority of my brethren. (Oh UW-system, how do we
love thee? Must you change?) We can come down a little from the 70K-100K that
profs make, but how stingy MUST you be? Can we get just 40K-50K? Use some of it
for our health insurance and retirement even. We’re worth that at least.
And
you don’t like tenure I suppose. Can’t wait to rid yourselves of the
institution which allows professors the freedom to pursue study without
unreasonable censure by colleagues within the competitive, political, and let’s
face it, often downright catty sphere of academics. Whatever. But it would be
nice to have some small modicum, just a teensy iota of security. If we write a thesis
on how Hitler was right (or something that outshines the head of the department
meow) by all means, can us. But contingent instructors are constantly subject to elements out of
our control that could make us lose work. Enrollment. Budget cuts. Whatever it
is, it looms over our employment every semester. As long as you’re saying
goodbye to all these prof positions, can’t you guarantee us something?
Anything? Wouldn’t that be better to foster some sense of stability and
community? Otherwise, we’re driving all over the state to this college and
that, trying to patch together enough work to pay the rent…if we’re lucky!
You
also might have a problem with the smaller teaching load profs enjoy, and with
the concept of sabbatical. Most profs I know come back from those hiatuses with
books written and huge national or international projects completed…or they
spent the time as a visiting writer somewhere else. But you don’t care. To you
it’s just some paid vacation is that right? Okay. But you need to allow a
contingent instructor some time to do professional development. Adjuncts and
non-tenured lecturers have heavy teaching loads, especially if you consider
that they commute from school to school, and are expected to provide service as
well. My employer is gracious – a 4/4 is considered full time, and my largest
classes get to about 25 and that’s all. But
a lot of adjuncts aren’t so lucky and it seems some of you find it
excusable to increase the load more and more. If you’re going to do that, you
can’t expect us to serve on committees and develop and assess curriculum in
order to keep the job, okay? There are only 24 hours in a day, darn it. Shouldn’t
your students get more time with their instructors, not less? This is not to
say that adjuncts aren’t efficient as hell. An adjunct instructor can make the
most out of one comment on an essay. We can make one hour count like 20.
Imagine what we could do though if we actually had 20. Or at least got paid
during our summers off instead of having to work the grill or the steamer forthree months.
Because
adjuncts, even despite the hardships of the job, are the BEST. I bet many
students will say that their favorite and best professor wasn’t a professor at
all. And the students don’t know the difference, at least not initially. A
teacher is a teacher is a teacher. But there is a difference, and you know it.
You want to be a business – not a garden of knowledge. You’ve abandoned
academic excellence for the bottom line. The problem is that the product you’re
selling should be knowledge and excellence. If it seems to you that the
Humanities in academia exist just to create jobs in the Humanities in academia,
what’s wrong with that? Since when does a self-sustaining economy present a
problem? And you know what, don’t accept grad students into programs if you don’t
plan on replacing full faculty. Oh you’ll
find a job somewhere…just not here. Not ethical.
You
do a disservice to your undergrads as well, though they may not see it at
first. You offer nice dorms, and a pretty campus, and great sports teams, but
not tenured faculty. (Yes, I know that budget cuts and lowered public fundingaren’t the only reasons for all this faculty downsizing.) That stuff will get
students on the floor, but it won’t help them win the game and you know it. I
know perfectly well that my acceptance into grad school, and maybe even my
editor job, had absolutely everything to do with my having a degree from the
University of Michigan. Your advancement in the world of academia and outside
it has more to do with the University you came from than maybe it even should.
That I worked with people like Lorna Goodison, Ralph Williams and LindaGregerson mattered and still matters.
If
you aren’t offering academic excellence, or the pursuit of new knowledge, you
are not giving the students what the university is supposed to be selling. Where to find the newest ideas about paranoia and conspiracy if not from my old prof Tim Melley? I know what I know about women in the public sphere because of what I learned from Kristie Hamilton. My scholarship on the Midwestern Gothic will have everything to do with what I learned about women's anger from Gwynne Kennedy. Innovation. The birth of a conversation about human beings. This
is why you have full, tenured profs. At the very least, you offer employment to
scholars that makes them active contributors, not only to the growth of
knowledge, but the economy. If you aren’t doing any of those things, what are
you for? Job qualification? A student can get that from any number of perfectly
serviceable community and vocational colleges, and for much, much cheaper.
True,
at Michigan, I had some great grad instructors too. In fact, I first understood
what a union was when the grad instructors at Michigan started picketing. (The
grads at UWM had a union too, still do, though decertified and voiceless thanks
to Scooter.) Now, adjuncts are getting noisy too. This is the worst time ever
to organize, but you can only push people so far. Tell you what, if you’re
super nice to us, who make up half of your teaching staff, we’ll not only teach
like rock stars, we’ll serve the growth of the university too. We’ll publish
and do research when we can (summer maybe?), and we’ll do our students proud.
If not, we’ll go seek jobs in the non-profit and/or private industries. Not
because we want to, but because we have to. Have fun finding someone to teach
those classes at that price.
Face,
Ann
Stewart McBee, PhD
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