commissioner.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 02/07/22/21:37 |
| Professor of Desperation
Bad pay, zero job security, no benefits, endless commutes. Is this any way to treat PhDs responsible for teaching a generation of college students? By Eric L. Wee Sunday, July 21, 2002; Page W24 As dreams go, Larissa Tracy's is simple. She'd get up and head to work at Georgetown University. She'd stroll to her wood-paneled office lined with her medieval literature books. Light would stream in through the windows as she'd wait to teach one of her classes later in the day. But before that she'd have time to chat with colleagues about work and teaching and life. Maybe she'd get lunch with one of them. Or maybe she'd work on an article about the lives of female saints in the Middle Ages, her specialty. In the summers, she'd travel and attend conferences. Life would be good. She often thinks about that dream on days like this. On this chilly October morning she's merging onto Interstate 395, near her Shirlington apartment, and heading south on her daily 50-mile trek to Fredericksburg. It's 7 o'clock as her black Mazda Protege slides into the fast lane at 80 mph. She pushes hard on the accelerator and begins eating her toast. She needs to pass her first marker, the Quantico Marine Base, by 7:30--otherwise, she'll be late for her first English composition class at Mary Washington College. The clock doesn't stop ticking after that: She'll teach four classes at three different colleges today. And those are just some of the six classes she's teaching this fall term, double the normal load of a college professor. Or what used to be normal. Tracy's itinerary today has the precision of a train schedule: English 101 at Mary Washington from 8 a.m. till 8:50 a.m. Office hours from 9 till 10 a.m. Another English class from 10 until 10:50 a.m. Back in the car by 11 a.m. Up I-95 to George Mason University. Another class from 12:30 p.m. till 1:20 p.m. Talk to students for a few minutes. Back in the car by 1:45 p.m. and race to Georgetown University. Grade papers and prepare for class while eating lunch. Class on Shakespeare and film from 3:15 p.m. to 4:05 p.m. Back in the car before the meter expires and head home. Then she grades more papers until midnight. Six hours later it all begins again. It's not what she hoped her life would be like, but it's what she's gotten used to since finishing her PhD in medieval literature two years ago at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Since then she's become an academic nomad. Unable to find a full-time job in one place, she needs to do this if she wants to teach and pay her bills. She tells herself that it's temporary. But in the new academic job world, she's running out of time. If she doesn't find that increasingly elusive full-time job soon, she could live this transient life for the rest of her academic career. There once was an unwritten deal. If you were smart and willing to devote up to 10 of your most productive years studying for a doctorate, certain things would likely happen. A college or university somewhere would hire you. And if you did well there, there was a full-time tenured job in your future. The money wouldn't be great, but you'd be part of an academic community. You'd do research in your field. You'd live a life of the mind. Then the deal changed. States started to cut their higher education budgets. Costs at all universities began to rise. And as a growing percentage of the population began attending college over the past few decades, universities changed the way they operated. Critics call it the corporatization of higher ed. Colleges prefer to call it a shift toward greater efficiency. Either way, colleges started looking for places to make budget cuts. With personnel costs consuming a huge chunk of a university's budget, administrators across the country found their money problems solved by a type of teacher few people have heard of: the adjunct professor. Adjuncts originally were local professionals who would teach an occasional college class on a part-time basis. The journalist would teach a course on news writing, a retired judge would speak about jurisprudence. Then colleges saw them as something else: cheap labor. Many had doctorates and were willing to teach a class for as little as $1,500. Often they'd accept less. They got no health benefits, and they were hired by the term. Colleges could let them go at any time. And they taught the general education courses the full-time faculty largely dreaded. Colleges across the country, primarily in urban areas, hired them in droves. Outsourcing and higher education teaching had finally met. At the same time, universities have been cutting back on the percentage of full-time tenure-track professors on their faculties. With each one often costing more than $1.5 million over a career, colleges began to balk. Why pay a full professor $80,000 a year with retirement and health benefits when you could hire a part-timer at a fraction of that? Many universities concluded there was no reason. In 1970, part-timers made up 22 percent of higher education teaching staffs in the United States. By 1999, they were 43 percent, as their numbers swelled to 437,000. And one recent national survey of humanities departments found that about one-third made less than $2,000 a class. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the number of new humanities, language and literature PhD graduates flooding an already saturated market grew by more than 50 percent. The result: Too many PhDs and not enough real jobs. A new underclass of college teachers emerged. The "freeway flyers," like Tracy, turned their cars into mobile offices. Since each college offers them only a few classes, they cobble together four, five or even nine courses a term at two, three or even five campuses. They might be classified as part-timers, but their teaching loads are very full time. The new deal is a crapshoot. You might make it to academic nirvana, but you could end up trapped as a permanent adjunct forever fighting traffic before the next class. Still, each year new graduates like Tracy come onto the market, thinking they're the ones who'll get lucky. "I ultimately believe that I will get a job when I'm meant to," says Tracy. "If I felt that this was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my life, I'd probably go crazy." She once imagined she'd land a full-time job as soon as she graduated. Along the way, she did everything she could to improve her chances. She focused on the more marketable Anglo-Saxon rather than Irish medieval literature. She made women saints her specialty, an added bonus in a field that currently prizes all things female. She applied to 20 colleges for teaching jobs as graduation neared. They all rejected her. The next year she applied to seven more places. Seven more rejections. After a while, all the letters started to sound the same. They wrote about having to make difficult decisions. They wrote about how it wasn't a reflection on her qualifications. But, in the end, they all said no. "I have a degree from Trinity College Dublin, and my supervisor is one of the most well-known people in my field," she says. "I'm 28. I have an article published already, and my first book is coming out this year. What more do they want from me?" Two years ago she showed up in person at Mary Washington and started knocking on doors like a cold-call saleswoman. The approach paid off--sort of. The college hired her as an adjunct professor. Georgetown and George Mason did the same. So she hit the road. The wheels haven't stopped spinning since. Each day she drives at least three hours. In fact, she frequently spends more time in the car than in the classroom. This past academic year she taught 11 courses, memorized 250 students' names and graded a thousand papers. At Mary Washington, she's grateful to have her own desk in a small, shared office with no window. But after teaching there for a year and a half, she still doesn't have a clue where the campus library is. There's no time. When she's done teaching, she's off to George Mason, where more than 20 adjuncts share a communal room with a few desks. Or to Georgetown, where she squats in other people's offices, often working on the edge of a desk because she's afraid she'll disturb a faculty member's papers. As Tracy finishes her classes and office hours at Mary Washington today, she's running behind schedule. She tears out of the parking lot at 11:20 a.m. and soon merges onto I-95. But at Quantico she sees her nightmare unfolding before her: cars at a dead stop and a backup for miles. Slowly the traffic starts inching along. It's 13 agonizing miles before she finally veers onto Route 123. She checks her watch. It's already 12:15 p.m., 15 minutes before class at George Mason. She weaves along the two-lane road as fast as she can but still arrives 15 minutes late. She parks, then runs across campus. When she arrives at her classroom door, panting, she sees half her students at the board scribbling their names before they leave. The others have already gone. "I'm here! Sit down," she says as she tries to compose herself. Somehow she gets the remnants of her class to take their seats as she begins her lesson. A few students linger afterward to talk about an upcoming paper. One student seeks her advice about transferring to another college. When she finally gets back on the road it's 2:30 p.m. In 45 minutes, she needs to start her next lecture at Georgetown. But the bad dream won't stop. In front of her on I-66 she sees more cars backed up bumper to bumper. When she finally gets to Georgetown, she circles frantically for a parking spot. Maybe they waited, she thinks as she dashes to her building. Maybe they waited. She pushes out of the elevator and into the classroom. This time, the chairs are empty. On the chalkboard she sees the only message her students left her: WE WERE HERE. WHERE WERE YOU? She picks up the eraser and clears the board, then heads out the door to get ready for another day. The growing reliance on adjuncts, critics say, cheats the most vulnerable of students: freshmen. They're the most likely to wash out of college from a bad experience, the detractors argue. They're also the ones most likely to have a harried part-timer teaching them History 10 or English 101. Even though there are some excellent adjuncts, people worry that the overall quality of teaching suffers. Can someone like Tracy, they ask, teach five, six or more classes a day consistently, spending hours a day in a car, and not cut corners eventually? Tracy says she hasn't, but those who've seen overworked teachers like her before say youthful diligence lasts only so long. Eventually adjuncts with such loads might start replacing essays with multiple-choice tests. Or start assigning books they haven't had time to read themselves. And then there's the dislocation and disorganization that comes from lecturing minutes after fighting traffic. "The system is created to exploit people just like this," Richard Moser says about Tracy's situation. As a representative with the American Association of University Professors, he's focused on the plight of adjuncts. "You get some young PhD that's all eager and up to date and strong. You get to use them for a few years, and then sooner or later they'll get frustrated and angry. Then they get another fresh piece of meat to fill the slot and then use them for a few years and then they get burned out. You get rid of them, then you get another one. Is this the way to run a university?" Many in teaching circles worry this is just the beginning. At some point, they fear, entire departments will be made up of part-timers hired by the term or by the year. The result, they say, would be the end of the traditional college faculty. Many of those same educators think that outcome ultimately may be decided by parents, who could revolt against paying $30,000 a year to have their kids taught by someone who's also toiling at the local community college. Students, meanwhile, seem largely oblivious to the difference between full- and part-timers. "Someone had to explain what an adjunct was," says Valerie Sprague, a freshman who had Tracy for two classes at Mary Washington this year. "It's not even an issue . . . Do they get paid less?" She wouldn't need to ask that if she'd seen a documentary called "Degrees of Shame." The film, by Barbara Wolf, came out five years ago, comparing adjuncts to migrant farm workers. There's also a book, Ghosts in the Classroom, that compiled essays from adjuncts with titles like "Adjunct Apartheid," "Adjuncts Are Not People" and "Adjunct Misery." Despite all their angst, adjuncts are notoriously fearful about speaking out. They're afraid that one wrong word, in or out of the classroom, will mean that they won't be hired back. And they know they're particularly vulnerable when it comes to student evaluations. If they receive too many low marks, they'll be gone. It's a frequent adjunct dilemma: Be an easier grader and likely get better reviews, or stick to your standards and risk not teaching at that college again. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho