Adjunct faculty = marginal status

A colleague at another university recently published a powerful statement about the situation of adjunct faculty in our institutions of higher learning. Her entry describes much of what I have experienced also, with the consequent feeling of frustration but also wistfulness over what our careers could be if the system were not under such heavy stresses and we as faculty members were able to build consensus as a labor group with shared concerns and equal credentials. "There is room at the top", to quote a lyric by John Lennon from his 70s song "Working Class Hero", but this rings as hallow now as it did then.

With contingency status one comes quickly to realize that we are treated as second-class faculty members, frequently not acknowledged by tenure track members and not able to count on institutional support. We are left scrambling always to find enough work to make it through the academic year.

I'm not ready nor able to abandon the classroom the way professor Shah is planning to do, but at some point, given that adjuncts constitute 75% of the total faculty and teach many of the most essential classes with the highest enrollments, and in addition we are expected to strike and support all labor actions that are called to protect the status of tenure track colleagues but can count on no similar support from them (i.e. a willingness to strike to support our attainment of full-time status), there has to be a tipping point. Maybe when adjunct faculty constitute 85% of the total faculty pool? 95%? How high a percentage do we have to reach before we can get everyone to realize that this two-track system is not working?

Professor Priya Shah's blog entry is eloquent, and can be read HERE. Here is the first paragraph of her essay:

"Today is my (Prof. Shah's) last day of teaching as a professor. As an adjunct professor to be more specific. In my classes, we talk a lot about invisibility and its effects. Within the university system today, adjunct faculty are made invisible, thereby further reinforcing their marginalization even as their labor becomes increasingly critical to the daily activity of teaching students. Some of us are invisible in hospitals, choosing to suffer in pain because we cannot afford to see the doctor; some of us are the invisible homeless, living in our cars because we cannot afford any other shelter; some of us are invisible on campus because we don’t have an office in which to meet students; some of us are invisible on the schedule because we don’t find out if and what we are teaching until two weeks before classes begin; some of us are invisible at conferences and in the pages of scholarly journals because we cannot afford to pay out of pocket to fund our own professional development. Contingency is always already the logic by which our labor is deciphered by the university: we are presumed provisional and denied those resources and opportunities which would allow us to be anything but. However, there is one space in which we are not invisible – the classroom."