The Chronicle: The ‘Special Needs’ of Adjuncts
http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/08/2006082101c/careers.html
Monday, August 21, 2006
The ‘Special Needs’ of Adjuncts
By Graham Bennett
First Person
Personal experiences on the job market
Every morning I sit down at my computer, fresh cup of coffee in one hand, untoasted strawberry Pop-Tart in the other, and read through my e-mail. Included among the junk are the multiple announcements of upcoming academic conferences, most of which I delete without even reading.
But one morning a few months ago, a journal’s call for contributions to a special issue on “part-time and adjunct teaching” inspired not disinterest but indignation. On its no doubt well-intentioned list of topics: “effects on student learning of part-time/adjunct faculty,” “the quality of part-time/adjunct instruction,” “ways to improve part-time instruction, including training programs,” and “other administrative oversights of part-time/adjunct work, including those involving academic freedom.”
All fine topics, I’m sure — and relevant to me as I spent the 2005-6 academic year as an adjunct instructor at the Big Ten university where I earned my Ph.D. before taking a tenure-track position this summer as an assistant professor of English at a research university in the South. Yet — and this is a big yet — the underlying assumption that adjunct faculty members require special handling, training, and observation should give all of us pause.
Why do we assume that “the quality of part-time/adjunct instruction” is a question to be considered independently, apart from the quality of full-time instruction? And what are the dangers inherent in our easy dismissal of adjuncts as second-rate, quasi-professionals without the training, skill, and expertise we too readily assume are possessed by our assistant- and associate-professor colleagues?
But there it is — the real issue at the center of my frustration: Adjuncts are treated differently, although they are doing essentially the same work as every other member of the department. They are paid far less than their tenure-track colleagues and, even worse, there is this nagging question about the quality of their instruction and the need to specially police their performance.
Let me be clear: I have no objection to administrative oversight, regular performance reviews, or even ongoing training, but I do object to the idea that the average adjunct is more in need of such devices than the average assistant professor. After all, what separates the adjunct from the assistant professor other than the job-market lottery, which annually divides us into the two camps of “fully employed” and “still seeking a permanent position”?
As a graduate student at a Big Ten university, I did a lot of teaching. At the point at which I filed my dissertation and officially entered the profession, I had taught — by myself — 21 courses in three different departments at two institutions. So I did have some experience composing syllabi, preparing lectures, leading discussions, writing exams, grading student work, and conducting student conferences.
In fact, I began my first year as an adjunct with more teaching experience under my belt than some of the most recent hires in my department, many of whom were coming from Ivy League and other elite, private universities. Those folks are brilliant scholars who are hired on the merits of their research and publications, but who are sometimes ill-prepared and often surprised by their new classroom duties.
One of those hires, who came from a top-notch university, was so overwhelmed by the task of composing her first course description that she called on the assistance of a graduate student friend of mine. The two of them talked and wrote and revised for more than six hours to produce the single-paragraph description for the schedule of classes. Here was a person who clearly needed training and oversight, who was not at all prepared for the classroom, yet she had an impressive pedigree and, most important, that privileged title “assistant professor.” That title placed her well above the lowly ranks of her adjunct colleagues who, despite their less prestigious credentials, were in many cases demonstrably better teachers.
But no one would think of publishing a volume on the special instructional-training needs of inexperienced Ivy League graduates making the transition into the classroom. Let’s face it: No one is worried about the job those folks are doing, but lots of people are concerned about the quality of adjunct instruction.
For me, making the transition from graduate student to adjunct instructor required a bit of a mental adjustment, but it did have some perks: I finally had Internet access and a phone connection in my office, which I shared with only one other person rather than two.
But while my move from the basement to the fourth floor offered me fresher air and a new view, I still felt myself a member of a neglected underclass. My inferior status was literally stamped across my office door, in the form of a paper name tag in the slot clearly meant to hold an inscribed one. However little a plastic nameplate costs, it was clearly more than my department wanted to invest in such a dubious member of the department.
It’s not as if I had any real incentive to do well in the classroom, either. As an adjunct, my salary was determined by a mysterious and complex formula concocted by the physicists and biologists who ran the administration. My salary had nothing to do with the quality of my performance. Nor did it inspire me to great heights of teaching excellence.
At my Big Ten university, the salary of an adjunct was the same as that of a graduate teaching assistant, with one big exception: The adjuncts did not receive the university-subsidized health insurance enjoyed by the unionized graduate students. After paying for my insurance, I ended up with less in my pocket than my graduate-student colleagues.
Swallowing my pride every day, I marched into my classroom, knowing that my university set a lower value on my expertise and experience now that I had earned the highest degree it awarded its own students.
To add further insult to financial injury, I was not given access to university letterhead, which was stored electronically on a server available only to “full-time” faculty members. When my students, who knew me as “Doctor Bennett” or “Professor Graham,” asked me to write them letters of recommendation, I had to decline the request, knowing that any letter I wrote would go out on plain white printer paper. Without that official university seal at the top, my letter would do my students little good.
What bothered me most was that everywhere I turned there was the suggestion that I wasn’t worth very much, that the university was doing me an enormous favor by letting me teach its students. Students kept telling me that I was the best professor they had ever had. By every measure, I was good at my job: my students’ work demonstrated that they were actively learning the course material, while their writing and critical-thinking skills showed real improvement. My end-of-semester evaluations were immaculate, the harshest point of critique being that I assigned too much reading.
I report all of that not to boast (this piece is, after all, anonymous), but to point out that an adjunct can exceed the general standard of teaching excellence within a department or university and yet receive no reward for his or her achievement.
At the end of the day, I was still an adjunct, and my continued employment depended not on my job performance but on the availability of funds and my department’s good graces.
Clearly universities want all of their instructors — adjuncts included — to do a good job, but they put nothing in place to inspire part-timers to be anything above mediocre.
Indeed, the incentive system as it currently exists for both adjuncts and tenure-track faculty members actively works against quality classroom instruction. There’s no reward for adjuncts who teach particularly well, and there’s material encouragement for tenure-track faculty members to focus on their research over their teaching. The result is that there’s little or no incentive for anyone, adjunct or otherwise, to teach well — at research institutions, anyway.
And so I take great offense at the suggestion that adjuncts are a special category, somehow requiring more supervision and training, somehow less prepared or innately unable to do the job.
We use words like “adjunct,” “assistant,” and “associate” to denote different levels of experience and expertise, but what exactly are we measuring? We focus special attention on the adjunct, when really the question about how to ensure quality teaching extends far beyond this sadly maligned group.
Our students, none of whom care about out official titles, are the only group that really ought to matter, but the last group that seems to. I, of course, am one of the lucky few. I worked as an adjunct only a year before moving on to a tenure-track position. But let’s not forget that I landed that job independently of the quality of my teaching.
And that’s the only reward available for the average adjunct: Writing and publishing like mad so as to improve their chances in the annual lottery, hoping that this will be the year some department will acknowledge their scholarship, accord them due respect, and pay them a professional’s salary.
If they succeed, their teaching, like mine, will not change, although they will get a nicer nameplate. But everyone will treat them very differently and assume their students are getting a better education than those students whose instructors are only “part-time.” It’s a pity that we let labels, rather than actual, measured performance, dictate what we think is going on behind closed classroom doors.
Graham Bennett is the pseudonym of an assistant professor of English at a research university in the South.
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
