I'm Professor Nobody
Personal experiences on the job market
For a while you
rationalize the situation: It's temporary. It gives you flexibility. It makes
sense to work like this:
¥ While the kids are young;
¥ While you write more scholarly articles;
¥ While you write your novel;
¥ While your spouse finishes a degree;
¥ While your spouse has a postdoc;
¥ Until the job market improves.
It gives you
some income while you look into other options. It's not such a bad deal when
you consider what you make on an hourly basis, and the long vacations.
And you like
teaching, you find interaction with students meaningful, and, honestly, your
work is quite fine. Great student evaluations every semester count for
something, right?
So there you
are, eventually -- semesters, years, decades later (although it seems like no
time at all) -- 40 or 50 years old, still doing the temporary academic gig,
even though it's not "really" temporary, since the department rehires
you consistently, albeit sometimes as late as two weeks before the term begins.
But you're an old hand at Comp 101, so that doesn't really matter. And
certainly you don't mind teaching four courses in one semester and only one
course the next. (Because, you know, there were never any guarantees.)
You don't
mind teaching three courses back to back on the same day during one semester,
or teaching two courses during the next semester that meet on the same day, one
at 8.30 a.m., the other at 4 p.m. After all, in the long run, your teaching
load probably averages out to the same as what a full-time professor carries,
right?
Well, yes,
your pay is a third that of your full-time colleagues, but don't you have other
meaningful compensations in life? And are you really that interested in knowing
your colleagues, or in attending faculty meetings, or jumping through all those
scholarly hoops so you can endure a tenure review?
Fortunately
the department has given you an office that's virtually private. The two people
you share it with are there only at night, for their evening courses, so you
probably will never even see them. And it's hardly an inconvenience that you
can't have a key to the office because the department secretary doesn't have
time to have a copy made, so whenever you want to open your door you have to
get the key from her.
The long-term
trend, as we know from myriad articles in myriad national publications, is that
the ranks of part-time college instructors have been swelling exponentially.
The reasons all basically boil down to the pinchpenny economics of higher
education. And we all know (choose your favorite clich;eacute;) that it's
survival of the fittest, that it's the law of supply and demand, that life is unfair,
that beggars can't be choosers, that nobody held a gun to your head and forced
you to write a dissertation, that sanitation workers earn more than most
academics, and that people who can't write teach. Those shopworn explanations,
whether or not they hold a kernel of truth, provide only some of the background
noise of adjunct life.
My interest
at the moment is in the foreground material. Let's consider issues of civility,
respect, and decency within academic departments, issues of appreciation and inclusion,
honesty and luck.
I've been
ascending the adjunct ladder in slow motion for more than 20 years. Three years
ago, after 13 years as a "visiting lecturer" at the research
university where I teach (the whys and wherefores of "visiting" were
never explained), I finally achieved the non-tenure-track status of
"lecturer."
I was only
vaguely surprised to find that my rise into the bottom of the professorial
hierarchy has in no way affected the attitudes of my tenured and tenure-track
colleagues toward me. They continue, as always, to pass me in the halls with
their customary distant gaze, and to peruse book catalogs with passionate
intensity as I retrieve my stuff from the mailroom. If I greet them with words
like "Good morning," or "How are you?" they regard me as
vacantly as a New York City subway rider fending off a pervert.
In some ways
their behavior is understandable. After all, during my 13 years as a marginal
presence, I appeared only erratically and ephemerally in their lives. I had
never been invited to a faculty meeting, and, because of my status as a single
parent, had been able only occasionally to socialize at the departmental
holiday party, always held in the evening. Therefore any act of familiarity
generated by me toward them undoubtedly seemed eccentric, if not inappropriate.
Now that I've
been promoted -- and just like the other professors, I am paid on the basis of
an annual contract rather than by the semester, receive benefits, and even have
my actual name listed in the actual course catalog next to the actual courses I
teach -- I am still barred from faculty meetings. Short of wearing one of those
"Hello, My Name Is" tags, there seems no way to silently introduce
myself to others in the department, so as to be acknowledged.
Acknowledged
... for what reason? Should I even care?
I asked the
department chairman why, given my new rank, I was not invited to attend faculty
meetings. "Because in your position, you have no voting power," I was
told. "So every time we had to vote on something, you would be asked to
leave the room. This would happen frequently, you see, and it would be
embarrassing to you."
How
thoughtful to spare me such humiliation.
A
professorial friend who holds an endowed chair at a state university likens the
process of academic job hunting to theatrical cattle calls. "You stand on
stage, you sing your song, the auditioners interrupt and say, 'We'll call you,'
and you never hear from them again. This happens over and over; the net result
is that you are demoralized or bitter, if not worse. Then one day someone
tosses you a bone -- you get a bitsy, teensy part -- and it magically erases
the angst of the past. You feel disproportionately grateful. You'll do anything
to prove to your beneficent employer that this estimation of you was
correct."
Here is where
the issue of luck comes in. Yes, I was unlucky enough to finish graduate school
in the early 1980s, at the start of the Great Academic Job Shrivel. But
conversely, I have been lucky to have any teaching job at all. Except for a few
months, long ago, when I cared for my (then) very young children, I have never
been unemployed in academe. I am lucky that my credentials are excellent. I
have publications, I have an Ivy League Ph.D., I am a well-regarded and versatile
instructor. And luckily for my employers, I have always been available for
bargain-basement prices!
So for a long
while I floated along, teaching, publishing here and there, thinking that my
dual part-time positions at the research university and at Generic Urban
College would keep me competitive in the market. But hindsight is 20/20; no one
could have known then that tenure-track positions would become so rare and so
hotly contested; that the market for adjuncts would escalate; and that
part-time positions which seemed like temporary stopgaps would develop into
modes of living for me and many like me.
But finally
my research university kicked me up a rung -- even gave me my own office -- and
I was pleased to be an adjunct no more. My job was now "guaranteed"
by an annual contract, endlessly renewable.
By the time
that happened I had long abandoned ambitions to add to the annals of literary
criticism or teach graduate seminars. It was enough that I thoroughly enjoyed
my undergraduate teaching and believed my students gained from my courses.
Thus I
continue. I teach for them. I write and publish for myself and for mainly
nonacademic readers. And my friends in the department are the part timers,
those Professor Nobodies like me. We are a stolid band of "others,"
like the proles of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Not particularly of interest to the inner circle
of the party, but we dutifully teach introductory courses, freeing the
professorial elite to expound on Important Topics.
And we are
dispensable. If one of us makes noise in the form of, say, daring to ask to be
invited to a faculty meeting, we may be labeled as "abrasive" or as a
"troublemaker." We may not be "renewed" the following year.
Because, don't forget, there are many people just like us who would give
anything to have our special little jobs.
It has often
been remarked of college teaching that in no other profession do people compete
so ardently for stakes that are so low. One might add that in few other
professions do employees behave as if those who are at the bottom of the
hierarchy are Untouchables. What will it take for powerful people in academic
departments to acknowledge that their humanity, their core decency, would be
enhanced if they practiced the liberal values they espouse so passionately in
the classroom? If the literary canon can be expanded to include the work of
women and minority writers, why can there not be a seat at the table for
adjuncts and lecturers at faculty meetings?
Lucy Snowe is the pseudonym of a
lecturer at a major research university in the East.