Letter to the editor: Adjunct faculty must stand up, speak out

To the editor:

By writing this, I fear I am burning bridges. Yet, by writing this, I hope the flames will light the way for the changes we so desperately need.

Some terms we need to define:

Administrative bloat: the trend since at least 2001 (as documented by federal agencies) in higher education for schools to hire approximately 50 percent more administrative personnel than educators.

Adjunct/contingent faculty: an educator employed by a college or university for a specific purpose or length of time and often part-time. In this letter, the term adjunct is used.

Bumping or being bumped: when an adjunct instructor’s course assignment is “bumped” to a fulltime or tenured professor so the tenured faculty has the required load of classes.

Pool: a group of adjunct instructors’ names and qualifications that can be drawn upon or added to at will by colleges and universities

There are many nationwide news stories now about teacher strikes or other demonstrations. Non-tenure track (NTT) and contingent faculty are fed up. Two members of two different Iowa universities recently made nearly identical statements. One talked of being treated as ”disposable,” and the other spoke of being treated as ”nothing.”

The sad part is adjuncts and other contingent faculty are disposable. There are always plenty of others ready to step into any vacancy created. Sad, but just a fact.

Also a fact: administrative bloat is a nationwide problem. An apt description is the old idiom of too many cooks spoiling the broth. Hiring too many administrative positions results in busy work, leading to too many hands in too many fires — which creates absent administrators when they are needed, as they are busy elsewhere — and the bloat increases overhead costs, which are then passed on to students as tuition and fees and to the faculty ranks in terms of pay freezes or hiring freezes while increasing workloads, among other burdens.

No wonder enrollment is down across the board: incoming students are hearing via many, many sources about all the negatives of colleges and universities. It seems those in charge forget how fast and freely information flows in our society today.

And adjuncts definitely feel the burden. We have no job security. Some contingent faculty may get nine-month contracts. Others, like myself, are offered term-to-term contracts only. The reason is based on enrollment. Lower enrollment means fewer classes offered and fewer instructors are needed, which means we may not get a course assignment or, even if we do get a course assignment, we can be bumped.

We are offered few or no benefits. No health insurance, no paid leave, no anything. Some lucky places do offer some avenue for adjuncts to voluntarily contribute to some sort of 401K or other retirement plan but without any employer-matched contributions. In the end, we are left to fend for ourselves for health insurance and so many other benefits.

We are not paid very well either. Adjunct pay across the nation runs a range from $1,880 to $3,300 per course section per semester, with a national average of about $2,700. Please realize a semester lasts around 4 to 4.5 months or so.

We earn this by doing the same things full-time instructors do: we prepare courses, track student information, grade, meet with students as needed, attend meetings, grow professionally and have regular communication otherwise with students.

We usually do not get office space or allotted time to do these things. It’s just factored into our wage and like any educator, the work often follows us home. Average salary for a first-year, full-time instructor is approximately $50,000 annually plus all the benefits. No wonder so many schools are hiring more adjuncts. We’re far cheaper workers.

Many adjuncts work more than one job, whether outside academia or at some other institution. This means we run the risk not only of not having enough courses to support ourselves but of overloading ourselves if suddenly all of them “go.”

It’s a precarious balancing act. Even with working multiple jobs, we have to evaluate our resources just like everyone else. We, too, have families and lives beyond our jobs. Add to this the very real and regular concern over being bumped or having a class canceled at the last minute, and our income is never secure.

As an example, I have been assigned two classes this summer. As of now, their enrollment is low and the classes may be canceled. If they are canceled, I am out that projected income, which could happen during any term and not just summer.

Classes can and do get canceled after the semester starts. Yes, we are paid for class sessions that have already met but not for the whole semester.

Or I could get bumped. This is less likely for my summer courses because they are at the Perry VanKirk Center of DMACC, which is staffed solely by adjunct instructors. I believe the Perry Center’s only fulltime employee is the administrative assistant. We share the director with Hunziker in Ames and the coordinator with Ankeny.

I’ve also been assigned two new-to-me courses for the upcoming fall term. I will need to spend time this summer, whether I have other classes or not, preparing to teach these courses. I will not be paid for that time.

If both of those classes “go,” I will be paid my adjunct pay for teaching the courses for the term, which is divided into eight paychecks. If one or both of the classes are cancelled or I get bumped for a fulltimer, I will not be compensated in any way for the time I have invested in preparing to instruct these courses.

Adjuncts also do not get regular raises. I have tried to discover when DMACC last increased adjunct pay and been unsuccessful. This coming academic year will be my third with DMACC and unless DMACC increases the adjunct pay rate, I will be paid the same rate as when I was first hired.

Adjunct instructors receive no higher pay for their teaching experience prior to coming to DMACC, no increase for being with DMACC for two years, no other pay increase in sight — not even a cost of living increase.

And we don’t have much other safety net except what we can create for ourselves. We do not qualify, except in very rare cases — of which I have personal experience — for unemployment benefits and with our income so unstable, we can experience difficulty saving or investing for retirement or emergencies.

Though we are in essence seasonal employees, we do not meet those requirements for unemployment or other similar programs either.

Adjuncts do not seem to get official observations either. At my previous place of employment, at every adjunct training we were told, “We’ll get to you this semester. We promise.” I actively worked there three years — I’ve been pooled at that institution, coincidentally right after winning two unemployment claims — and never had an observation so much as scheduled even though I was nominated by students for Outstanding Teacher of the Year.

At DMACC I hear the same thing: We’ll get to you this semester. However, I had one observation during my first term teaching — at Ankeny, though I also teach at Boone and Perry — which I never got any feedback on. While I welcome feedback regarding my instruction, it seems hard to come by, except from student course evaluations, and students frequently ignore or fail to complete them.

And the student evaluations do not seem to matter. I’ve never received feedback from DMACC or my previous employer regarding student evaluations. In fact, my previous employer admitted to us at a staffing meeting that they were great at collecting information but never really putting it to use.

I try to put student feedback to good use because I want to be the best instructor I can be, and I am constantly looking for ways to improve my skills and my courses. Yet as the system is set right now, I will be paid the same — unless and until DMACC raises the pay for all adjuncts — whether I’m an excellent instructor with years of experience, a new instructor or a horrible instructor.

Stories from across the country can be found about other defects in adjunct positions, from fewer professional development opportunities, to colleagues who shun or even bully adjunct employees, to having courses handed to adjuncts with a sink-or-swim mentality: “Here’s your stuff. Go teach it and if it fails, it must be your fault. No one here will help you.”

Then there are the stories of retribution. Allegedly illegal, it still happens. Regularly. The most common form? The pool or pooling, the infamous adjunct pool. Colleges and universities — even though many have publicly stated recently in light of budget cuts, as has DMACC, that they will not fill open positions — still keep accepting adjunct applicants.

Why? In order to fill the pool.

But they also fill the pool by relegating to it any adjuncts who are problematic in some way. Did an adjunct win an unemployment claim? Add them to the pool. Oh, is one in a grey area for real termination? Add that one to the pool as well. The legal term for this practice would be “constructive termination,” but colleges get away with this because the pool technically keeps adjuncts employed by the institution, just not actively instructing at the moment because adjuncts come and go, leave and return, and this legal loophole allows the practice to continue.

It’s a pernicious form of retribution and nearly impossible to prove, though most in academic jobs are aware of its existence.

And so we sit here, we adjuncts. We hear fulltimers trying to sympathize with us and sometimes saying, ”Oh, I understand your struggle. I did the adjunct gig for 20 years,” and they remind us an adjunct position is a foot in the door.

So we wait. Hoping for positions to open up. Hoping we can ride it out, keeping ourselves afloat and waiting. And watching. And seeing hiring freezes go into place and wage freezes go into place. Watching as fulltime positions are suddenly magically created — but not posted for other applicants — and filled while we struggle and feel the drain of job and income insecurity.

We feel the same amazement as our fulltime counterparts that our government, even with recommendations from many sources, refuses to believe educators are working as much as we are: the U.S. government has stated that to track all the time teachers use in the course of teaching would be too complicated and confusing, so they “guesstimate” (made policy) that teachers spend 1.25 hours prepping for instruction for every hour spent in class when most data demonstrates it’s two hours at least.

We adjuncts struggle with the same issues as fulltime educators: student involvement and investment in work, technology battles, professional growth, paperwork and the list goes on. Yet we are not given the same considerations. And we are afraid to speak out.

It is past time for change. Colleges and universities admit they rely on adjunct faculty to serve their student’s needs, yet they treat adjuncts almost as second-class citizens and serfs. There has to be a better way.

Yes, education is underfunded. We have also undervalued the idea as a society for quite some time. This does not mean it has to continue that way. Cut your profit margins somewhat. Stop the bloat. It isn’t just the public as a whole who has created this mess. Higher education itself has helped build this bubble, which is about to burst, and the ones suffering from it aren’t the ones secure in their administrative positions – it’s the students who are suffering and the contingent faculty you rely on to exist and yet treat so poorly.

We’ve been seeing students’ opinions reflected in lower enrollments over the past several years. Now we’re beginning to see adjunct faculty dissatisfaction as well. We are not being unreasonable in our concerns. Like so many in my position, I may be afraid, but I will no longer be silent. I encourage all adjunct or contingent faculty to speak out. Remaining silent and plodding along is not serving any one — especially ourselves.

Wendy Jo Taylor
Jefferson