About last week, Hazelnut wrote about leaving the legal aid profession. By chance, he wrote that three days after I had a telephone conversation that changed my career plans, semi-permanently. I don't have quite the experience that Hazelnut has, so instead of giving a write-up explaining the entire industry, I will just talk about my personal experiences.
I had previously worked as adjunct faculty at a community college, and in the past year, I had sent out applications to every institution in five states where I could get a similar job. The wheels of higher educational bureaucracy grind slowly, so I didn't mind too much that it wasn't until late August that I got a phone call. The job was nine hours a week, for what would be maybe a $1000 dollars a month. It was at a satellite campus of a community college, in a town some 700 miles away, and I would have to move inside of six weeks. But, I thought, some sacrifices had to be made.
I had my telephone interview on a Thursday. At the end, they told me that they would hopefully know by the start of the next week. Monday and Tuesday passed, and finally on Thursday I called to ask if they had made a decision yet. They said they were about to have a meeting. A three day weekend followed, and that Tuesday I called up and asked (more or less):
"Well, it has been two weeks now, and I am guessing since you haven't called me back, I was not at the top of the list."
To which the woman on the other end of the line just laughed and said "No, you weren't at the top of the list."
Perhaps she was just enjoying a moment of good humor with me, but...it struck me as a little unprofessional, and unappreciative of the fact that I, as a person with a Master's Degree and with experience teaching, was willing to relocate on a month's notice to a small town for a job that would probably not pay my basic living expenses.
And that was when I decided that my career plans were going to change a bit. There are three reasons why adjunct teaching doesn't seem like an attractive field to me, despite the fact that I like the actual teaching and seem to be okay at it.
- Money. The pay for adjunct teaching is really bad. Well, it can actually be really good, as long as you don't need the money. For nine hours a week of teaching, I would be making around 1000 dollars. This is pretty good money, but even in a small town with low rental prices, it isn't enough to live on. The theory behind adjunct teaching is that it is adjunct. In reality, most adjunct teachers teach as their only job, but string together several jobs at different institutions.
- Location, location, location. At least in the Pacific Northwest, most community colleges operate satellite campuses in smaller towns (<10,000 people), and these are usually the places that will hire people without experience. Living in a small town has a few advantages, like lower rents, but they also have much smaller pools of housing and finding a second job (to support the teaching job) is much harder in a small town.
- Lack of respect. As my hasty and unprofessional treatment show, community colleges treat their adjunct instructors as a resource to be used and then replaced. While the financial situation can't be approved, there are many things institutions can do to cultivate their adjunct faculty, such as communicating expected workloads, offering professional developments and references, and giving teachers more lead time to adjust.
One question that people might ask (and that I've asked many times myself) is whether it is true that adjunct faculty have it so bad, when colleges (community and otherwise) often have very cushy jobs for administrators and permanent faculty. If a community college can offer a diversity coordinator 80,000 dollars a year and benefits in a tenured position, can it be that the people who are actually teaching the students are making under 20,000 dollars a year without benefits and face the prospect of unemployment every ten weeks? I don't actually understand the economics and politics of it, and I've decided it is not a system I wish to spend more time trying to outwit.
And as a final note, while there is much noise made about the undermining of teaching and the teaching profession, especially in the "war" against public sector unions by astroturfed right-wing groups...there is also a lot of internalized self-disrespect by members of the educational establishment. It wasn't one of the Koch Brothers who laughed at me and told me that "I wasn't at the top of the list". It was another teacher, who didn't take my skills and education as a teacher seriously.