Maneuvering in the Realm of the Possible

In his essay "Days of Future Past," Michael Bérubé writes, "I am really quite tired of having my profession . . . called a laughingstock because the faculty at certain elite universities cannot agree on new hires, on new departmental leadership, or even on what hors d’oeuvres to serve at the fall faculty reception." I agree wholeheartedly, but I feel compelled to point out that the faculty at many of our universities and colleges apparently do agree that their perks - travel money; merit pay raises; food and beverages, and sometimes even an expensive meal, at their committee meetings - should continue even at institutions where the exploitation of adjuncts is most shamefully visible and rapidly accelerating.

During my two years as the associate director of composition at Penn State University Park, I developed a clear understanding of the difficulties of bringing about lasting improvements in the working conditions for adjunct faculty members. We had roughly seventy full- and part-time adjuncts, and both directors that I served under were genuinely committed to improving the quality of undergraduate education and the conditions for our adjuncts. But the lack of true allies among our tenured and tenure-line peers certainly hampered our efforts.

While short of a national mobilization of these exploited laborers and their successful organization of protective unions, which I believe is the only reliable solution to the problem of adjunct exploitation, the tactics we discovered do minimize the damage inflicted on our adjunct lecturers.

First, we instituted "soft" enrollment caps on our required writing courses. The official enrollment cap for our two required writing courses was twenty-four. It was already too high but was rapidly becoming a fictitious maximum as pressure from graduating seniors forced us to add additional students to classes that were already full. In other words, we were increasing the workload of our adjuncts, those who were teaching our labor-intensive writing courses. By placing a soft cap of twenty on our courses, which we then filled to twenty-four, and only twenty-four, with graduating seniors, we deflected the sophistry of some of our more unethical provosts and deans. These collaborators were using our commitments to students and to teaching, which were centered in our composition program, against us, so we figured that turnabout was fair play.

Second, we identified our best part-time lecturers and full-time lecturers who were already working under one-year contracts and made every effort to ensure them semi-regular advancement opportunities. This policy generated heated confrontations with some of our department’s senior faculty members, particularly those who cared less about the quality of undergraduate education and more about finding a full-time placement for the carnage-inflicting teachers among our recently graduated doctoral students. Without the real possibility of reward, only saints will long endure the brutal workload we heaped on our adjuncts. Nota bene: You will lose your best teachers if you offer them only a dead end.

Third, at every opportunity we challenged the toxic definition of adjunct that was often unspoken but frequently operational in our department. An adjunct is not a warm body that fills a hole in the schedule. An adjunct is a trained professional who often will serve his or her institution well if used wisely. In practice, challenging this definition meant paying more attention to the strengths, interests, and prior work experience of all of our adjuncts. We tried to match our adjuncts with the courses they were best suited for or we invented a course that still met a requirement but also engaged the adjunct’s enthusiasm. A former assistant prosecutor, for example, won rave reviews in a second-level required writing course tailored specifically for pre-law students.

Make no mistake. These measures are little different from throwing a few pieces of meat into a watery broth, but they did result in substantial improvements in morale and performance for at least some of our adjuncts.

Work Cited

Bérubé, Michael. "Days of Future Past." ADE Bulletin 131 (Spring 2002): 20–26.