Why Do Adjuncts Put Up With Their Conditions?

These days the unattractions of the adjunct professorship, and certainly teaching as an adjunct "full-time part-timer" in the way so often seen in, for example, English departments, are pretty well known these days. There is, most obviously, the contingent nature of the work, the adjunct hired by the class with no security existing whatsoever against termination that is the extreme opposite of the tenure that is for many one of the attractions of an academic career. There is the notoriously dismal pay relative even to other educators in a country notorious for not paying them well, and the lack of fringe benefits in an economy where workers are highly reliant on job-connected health, pension and other protections. (Indeed, rather than getting health insurance they may find that if they take a sick day they are billed the fee for the substitute for that hour, which is likely to be more than they would have made teaching that hour--and rather than getting a pension they may even be cut out of the Social Security system if state law allows it, their contract instead shoving them into a privatized arrangement all too likely to be a simple forced savings scheme to which their employer will contribute absolutely nothing.) There is the fact that in return for this lack of protection and compensation they do the grunt work of the college--teaching the classes the better-protected and remunerated full-time faculty do not want because of the subject (first-year courses, grading-intensive courses, like English composition 101--yes, faculty hate it as much as students do) and the timing (early morning classes, evening classes), a situation the more exploitative as these classes are likely to be the department's great financial justification (as composition certainly is for English departments). There is the fact that they do all this with less access to facilities and support generally. (They may have to do office hours without having an office, or even a cubicle, maybe not even able to find a spare chair to sit in when they are obliged to be there--all of which makes a most dignified impression when a student comes to see them, of course. The situation which also necessitates their carrying all they might leave in an office with them--in a briefcase or backpack. They get the classroom assignments others don't want, too--like the one where the audiovisual equipment is apt to be busted, or which may be subject to noise from construction just next door.) There is the fact that an adjunct paying their bills in just this way is likely to need more than one such job, forcing them to commute between far-flung campuses, perhaps on public transport in an area poorly supplied with it because they cannot afford a car (with their office strapped to their back as they stand on that overcrowded bus). And there is the fact that there is no pathway leading from all this to anything better within the system. (After all, the reason there are so many adjuncts is that the corporatized university is less and less inclined to hire full-time faculty with all the privileges pertaining to them generally.)

What has been much less discussed is why adjuncts tolerate all this for the years and decades and even whole careers they so often do; why they do not take their degrees elsewhere, not least because, much as STEM cultists sneer at English degrees as worthless from an employment perspective they are not wholly without options, perhaps not enviable by the standard of the American professional, but still better than this. Indeed, even the proverbial barista job may look better than what an adjunct has from the standpoint of pay, security, demands, while someone with a graduate degree in English and years of teaching experience can always seek a job within the K-12 teaching system. I suppose that when people who are far removed from that world think about the matter they chalk it up to those who do this work for long being obtuse or impractical in these matters--for instance, a newly minted English Ph.d doing the job as they search for a more permanent position, and then failing to find one sticking at it for year after year, even after they should have realized the pursuit is hopeless and that they ought to go do something else. Perhaps, they think, these people are afraid of leaving the familiarity of the college campus for the "real world." Perhaps especially where adjuncts eschew public school teaching they may think the adjunct a snob who feels that it would be déclassé to go from teaching people who were in high school four months earlier to teaching people who are still in high school (an adjunct professor still a "professor," as against a mere "teacher"). There is a certain amount of caricature here, and not a little unkindness, but I will not wholly deny that all of these factors may be operative to some degree in particular cases, and perhaps many of them. However, I think that focusing on these factors overlooks a good many factors that are probably much more important in their tolerating their condition. Not the least of these is that as an adjunct they have a measure of control over their time such as they are unlikely to have in another line of work. They can, for example, accept or refuse particular assignments. And when they do accept an assignment they teach their classes, if they are required to do so put in their office hours, and then having done their duty, go. They may have to take with them a stack of papers to grade, but they get leeway regarding exactly when they have to deal with that chore. This matters the more in as for many of them teaching is just a day job, the adjunct having another activity they consider their real vocation--in the English department, quite likely as a writer of some sort. It is also the case that teaching as an adjunct spares the teacher some of the annoyances that go with most other jobs. Certainly they are not unsupervised, department heads mandating curricula, requiring the submission of syllabi in advance, getting student evaluations, conducting classroom observations, etc., but it is a different thing from the minute-to-minute everyday oversight characteristic of so much white collar work, while they need not involve themselves with colleagues and, for example, the office politics that go with them. This makes for a relatively solitary existence, but the introvert, made especially uncomfortable by authority and eager to avoid peers generally, may prefer it to the alternative, and writers are far from unknown to be that.

Is this really satisfactory compensation for the lack of security, pay, benefits, etc.? No, especially because in practical terms the "compensation" tends to be slighter than those who go down this path tend to hope. If they have more control over their time than they would in a "regular job" they probably do not end up with much more control, given the labor-intensiveness of the courses they pull, and the inconvenience of the time slots they draw and all the commuting they have to do, and the fact that simply trying to get by on little money means a more harried life in innumerable ways, with the extra hours the transit-riding adjunct holding down even one teaching job, let alone two or three, must spend commuting compared with someone who had a car telling. (Going anywhere else, after all, is similarly inconvenient.) Equally if they get to avoid many of the annoyances of other jobs, and an introvert often finds this attractive, teaching is hardly an ideal career for a person with such a personality, and teaching on these particular terms still worse. After all, teaching is not only intensively interpersonal, but often rancorous, with this especially the case with those first-year courses that get dumped on adjuncts, which have them dealing with students barely out of high school over whom they are required to exercise authority from a position of no security whatsoever--any complaint, however unsubstantiated or unjustified, potentially a firing offense. (And there is of course what poverty means for the introverted. Few people would consider being cooped up in an overcrowded bus for hours each day pleasant. For the introvert it is that much more of a hardship.) And indeed I suspect that most adjuncts would prefer many another teaching position to their present lot, the measure of control they lose taking on a tenure-track job, or even a lectureship, the measure of sociality demanded of them in it, the measure of added obligation they take on doing it--unattractive, but not so bad as in, for instance, the typical office job--would be worth giving up in exchange for the advantages of pay and security and the rest.

Altogether this makes adjunct teaching not a question of their "best" choice, but merely their "least worst" choice from a very limited and generally unappealing list of options testifying to how very unattractive the world of work is in our time--how little freedom it affords people in arranging their lives, certainly if they work to live rather than live to do the kind of work for which an employer is willing to pay them, how few are the options for those who are not naturally extroverted in the way that "society" so snarlingly demands of its members, and certainly how little support society provides those who want to participate in intellectual or cultural life, precisely because those in charge so little value those things. The result is that its being slightly less forbidding and onerous in ways that some will find hard to give up in turning their hand to something else--something, again, likely to be other than what they really want to be doing (again, this is the day job)--really just leaves them susceptible to extreme exploitation. Indeed, considering the situation I find myself reminded of something Upton Sinclair wrote in Mammonart, that culture is not for the "peasant slaves" in this hierarchical order, and if they endeavor to attain to it, to participate in it, "it is at the cost of health of mind and body." So does it go with many an adjunct in this corner of the teaching world, with the situation all the sadder because, here as elsewhere, very few of those saying to themselves "This is just a day job" are likely ever to find the measure of success in their true vocation that will make them no longer need to endure the drain on them that is having a day job, the belief in the end just another iteration on the cruel lie that the chase after success forced on everyone not born to a "competence" has always been, and the ways in which it makes those disadvantaged in the game acquiesce in their own ill use.