Adjunct Earns $62.50 per Hour! Film at 11!

Apparently, no matter how often we talk about it, many people still believe that teachers are actually working only during their classroom hours.

In an email that went through a real university email system, it was suggested that adjuncts earning $2818 for a three-credit course were earning $62.50 per hour: 15 weeks, 3 hours per week equals 45 hours - divide that into 2818 and voila! $62.50! (I get $62.62 - perhaps the writer was no better at math than at having a clue what teachers do.)

There are two egregious errors in logic being made here. The first is that even if you are earning $62.50 per hour, if your entire income is $2818, you are not exactly rolling in cash. And  many contingent faculty members are assigned only one or two courses per semester - at the institution paying $2818/course, that would be an annual high income of $11,272. You would earn more in 40 hours a week at a minimum wage job* (assuming you could find a full-time minimum wage job).

The more serious problem is the assumption that face-to-face time with students in the classroom is the sum of the work of a teacher.

Why, as a profession, do we need to continue explaining this? No one believes that a surgeon only works when he is in the operating room, or that a lawyer only works when she is in the courtroom. And yet, here I go again: Prep time! Grading time! Individual conferences with students! Committee work! Advising! Scholarship! We do it all!

Hello? Hello? Anybody out there?



*I will address the question of Why not? Why not go for the minimum wage job! in a later post.

More of This, Please!

Point Park University students have formed a Student Solidarity Organization to demand fair labor practices. Point Park was one of the three colleges that I taught part-time for, and while I had a great relationship with my department chair (I still count him as a friend), I received the lowest pay there - and since it was downtown Pittsburgh, I often had to pay outrageous parking rates, adding insult to injury.

It was the only school where I frequently had students who had no full-time faculty members teaching them in any given semester. There was no office space, not even the usual tiny room with one computer to serve a dozen adjuncts. And this is a private university with full-time tuition ranging from about $25,00 - $32,000 per year. Just tuition - not room and board, not any of the dozen fees that colleges add.

On the plus side, the students were bright and interesting - with majors ranging from musical theater to mortuary science/business, and it was the only school that offered undergraudate tuition benefits for adjuncts and their dependents. Sadly, I could not avail myself of that.

Student activism is crucial to changing the system. If administrations are going to insist on considering students customers, they will have to give the customers the product that they claim to be selling them: a quality education. And students, parents, and other key players are going to have to step up and demand that they do. Congratulations, Point Park students - this is a great start!

Awareness? Raised. Action? Not So Much.

Since I last wrote, at least half a dozen new adjunct blogs have begun. Several "I Quit Academe" essays have surfaced, and one "Academe Quit Me" essay roused some interest.

It's beginning to feel a lot like October.

Not the weather. It's a seasonal 32 degrees and lightly snowy here in Central West Virginia.

But in the conflict between awareness and action.

I know I've mentioned this before. October, as we all know, is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Pink ribbons appear on products. NFL players wear fuschia shoes and gloves. The City of Pittsburgh dyes the water in the fountains pink.

But seriously. You'd have to have been raised by wolves, born in a barn, AND living in a remote cave not to be aware of breast cancer. Awareness is no longer the issue. Why can't we put all the money that goes into pinkness into research for prevention and cures? (And, yes, I know - some of the profits from these programs does go into those things, as well as providing mammograms for uninsured women. But still.)

Besides, I don't like pink much. When my sister and I were young, our mother often bought us almost-matching outfits - hers was blue; mine was pink. I've had enough.

The public conversation about working conditions for college and university faculty is feeling very pink to me now. There is no one with a pulse over 20 in academia who is not now aware of the problem. The road we are on - the road to all part-time faculty with low wages and no benefits - will destroy higher education in America sooner rather than later.

So what now? Do those of us actively working to improve working conditions in academia need to adopt a color and campaign for a month? I think blue would be appropriate . . .and how about February - we don't want people to be aware for too long.

Or is it time for those who have been lying low - administrators who believe that by hiring several adjuncts they're actually increasing the number of available jobs; tenured faculty near enough to retirement that they don't care; parents who believe that part-time faculty somehow means lower tuition*; students who don't know if their faculty members are full-time or not, simply because most adjuncts show the same dedication to their learning as tenured or tenure-track faculty members do; politicians; voters - is it time for them to add their voices and demand that some action be taken?

Yes.

*For the record, there is a definite correlation between increasing tuitions and increasing pat-time and contingent faculty. Not a causation perhaps, but definitely a correlation. Hmmmm . . ..

No Room on the Back Burner

Happy New Year, everyone, and Happy Epiphany.

Epiphany is the celebration of the arrival of the Wise Men at Jesus' home - historically figured to be about three years beyond the manger scene where their figures are so often placed.

The word is used by fiction writers - their main characters must have an epiphany! And by self-help gurus - you realize that if you eat a bag of chips every day, you will continue to gain weight and feel crummy? Epiphany!

My Epiphany epiphany is that I will never, ever finish the work I have to do.

I return to school Friday. I have not written my syllabi. I have not written a book review - and, in fact, I have not even finished reading the book, which seems to be some sort of requirement. I have not completed - or even worked on - three other projects.

Part of this is because I came down with a miserable fluish thing right after Christmas that I am still fighting. Part of it is because I taught an overage, directed a play, and otherwise overworked myself in the fall semester, and somehow thought I deserved a rest.

And part of it is because I've always had faith in an infinite back burner, where projects would happily simmer until I had the time to pull them forward and finish cooking them (to extend the metaphor to an annoying degree). Sadly, my projects will soon be falling off the back of the range as I push more and more tasks to those overburdened back burners.

My epiphanic* wishes for my readers, both real and imagined, are health, energy, and a much bigger stove in 2014.

*Yes, epiphanic. I looked it up.