Move over Willy Loman: My life as English Adjunct Faculty

In the early 1980s, in an English Department office space at The Ohio State University, then a graduate student, I met my future self.  That future self, like Arthur Miller’s famous creation, Willy Loman, had a face full of care and weariness and shoulders slumped from bearing the burden of broken dreams and toting a heavy valise.  Only unlike Willy Loman whose bag was filled with his wares, this other man had a book bag stuffed with papers to grade.  Having just taught at OSU, he discussed the remainder of the day’s itinerary, traveling to other schools to teach. He was what I would later hear referred to as a “Roads Scholar.”

            “Poor bastard,” I thought, “how did he get himself into that situation?”  In the years ahead, I would find out.

            I had discovered my career path relatively late in life, entering graduate school at the age of thirty after having worked to put my wife through law school.  I had graduated with a BA in psychology, like about a zillion others, and had been unable to find employment in my field. While doing clerical work, at night, I nursed the ambition of teaching English and prepared to take the GRE by reading the Norton literature anthologies that I had ignored as an undergraduate when I was assigned readings out of them.

            Now you may be thinking that going from psychology to English was not a wise career move, given the marketability of the degrees, and you would be right.  Libertarians might think, “Why couldn’t you just become a tech billionaire or venture capitalist?”  In my defense, I would say that from my early years I had been corrupted by a love of literature and writing and the desire to inflict its blessings on others.  A bad seed.  Also, like Willy Loman, I probably had an idealistic view of my profession.  I knew that English teachings jobs could be scarce, but, like a man buying a lottery ticket, I thought, well, someone was going to win.  Most importantly, though, I didn’t know that the whole college teaching profession was undergoing a structural transformation that would considerably raise the odds of having a winning lottery ticket, the increasing use of adjunct faculty.

            I didn’t start my grad school quest thinking that I would teach college English.  No one in my working-class family had an undergraduate degree let alone a graduate school degree.  When I went to meet with an advisor, I went to talk about a BA in English, but she said that I already had an undergraduate degree so why not go to graduate school in English?  Even in 1980, English degrees were not exactly a sure path to career success.  She tried to reassure me: “Just the other day, I met a student with a MA in English who has just become a manager at K Mart!”  I was not reassured, but, ignoring this red flag, I took the GRE and was accepted into the graduate program at OSU, receiving free tuition and a stipend in return for teaching a course in first year English. 

I enjoyed the teaching experience and my graduate school classes.  I found comradery in a group of older grad students, for the first time in my higher education experiences finding a circle of friends and developing a social life with them.  My teachers were encouraging in their feedback, and I aced courses, ignoring the fact that all my fellow grad students were acing theirs.  In my entire time in grad school, I only knew one of my fellow students who got a B.  She went on to become a dean.

One fellow student transferred to the University of Chicago because she said that The Ohio State Program didn’t have enough prestige to get one a job in a tight labor market.

Undeterred, I entered the PHD program after getting my master’s degree, finished the coursework, and obtained an advisor for my dissertation.  Then, after we bought a new house, my wife, our main financial support, became ill, too ill to work, and I had to enter that labor market without the benefit of gaining my PHD, now one among many seeking a teaching post. It was time to hit the road.

To make ends meet over the years, I had to put together a patchwork of part time teaching assignments, in various school terms hitting all points of the compass.  Within the radius of my home in central Ohio, I would drive north to teach at Marion Technical College; drive west to the Ohio Reformatory for Women, the Delaware campus of Columbus State Community College (CSCC), the school’s Dublin branch, and Madison Correctional prison in London, Ohio  (this last trip an hour drive); drive south to the nearby CSCC branch in Westerville, Ohio, and Otterbein College, also in Westerville, further south to the CSCC main campus in Columbus, and DeVry Technical Institute (now DeVry University), and farther still to the CSCC branch at Bolton Field airport ; and finally drive east to the CSCC branch in Gahanna, Ohio, and the Ohio State University campus in Newark, Ohio.

Of all these trips, the one that was the most exhausting for me was the return from teaching a night course in Newark.  The course lasted until ten in the evening, and the campus was 40 minutes away.  The drive home was through sleepy little towns closed up for the night, passed long stretches of backroad bordered by featureless dark farmland on either side.  The drive sucked something out of both my spirit and my flesh.  One night I detoured for groceries, arrived home and took one bag in, and then fell asleep with the other bag still in the car and its back door wide open.  Another night I stared at a distant car and struggled to recall if its red lights meant it was coming toward me or away.  Still another night I just sat for a few minutes at a stop sign waiting for a light to change before it registered that, oh yeah, there was no traffic light at this intersection.                                    Although I did teach at private colleges, most of my experience was at Columbus State Community College, a school that was typical in its overreliance on part-time instructors. To those outside academia, the thought of a college teacher may conjure up an image of a distinguished looking man or woman, nicely dressed, perhaps with a bohemian flair, sitting behind a broad desk in a book-lined office, the image propagated on television and in the movies.  But this media image is far removed from the life of an adjunct faculty member, the faculty that make up a large portion of college teachers and well over half of community college teachers.

I used to read the comic strip Dilbert, that satire of the cubical work life, I used to envy the characters their cubicles.  At Columbus State, adjunct English faculty share a common work area with conference tables in the center and file cabinets or common use computer hutches lining the walls.  You are assigned a file drawer.  Go ahead and knock yourself out decorating it if you want a sense of personal space.

Then there’s the pay.  Colleges and universities like to point to the high hourly rate, but for most of my teaching career, that rate was only for your contact hours, the hours that you are in the classroom. Most of an English teacher’s work is done outside the classroom in course preparation and grading, and then you are limited in the number of those contact hours you can find available.  When you average that seemingly high hourly rate across the number of actual work hours, you arrive at a rate little better than that of a fast-food worker.

And benefits?  Well, at Columbus State, we did get a few sick time hours.  That’s it. In fact, what ended up restricting the available courses for an individual instructor was the arrival of Obama Care.  State schools began to limit the total number of courses you could teach across their public institutions to avoid incurring the obligation to provide you with medical benefits.

Although department chairs would try to meet your desired number of courses, there was never a guarantee and enrollment would rise and fall.  In summer, enrollment was at its lowest level, and you were lucky to get a course or two.

Your college level teaching experience was actually a negative when looking for summer retail work because it was always assumed that a highly educated person would be dissatisfied the job and be a less than ideal worker.

The state schools always took out a sizeable chunk of your pay for their state teacher retirement fund.  Reaching retirement age, I soon learned that at the end of spring term, I could raid the fund for my living expenses as long as I was not state school employed for the summer term.                                                                                                            

Nothing gives you a greater feeling of being an interchangeable part in the education machine than a pay system that doesn’t recognize your work experience.  At Columbus State, all English Department adjuncts were paid the same, no matter whether you had been teaching for 30 years or were just out of grad school.  Of course, there were the meaningless gestures marking how long you had been part of the machine.  One time it was a chintzy looking clock; my last one was a cubic chunk of plastic with an engraving.  You always hoped that they would give you something you could sell at a pawn shop, but no such luck.                                                                                           

College teaching is a two-tier system:  the full-time faculty and the mass of adjunct teachers.  It should be said that part-time teaching works well for many people: the retired teacher who wants to keep involved in education, the high school teacher who wants the extra income and different experience of teaching college kids, the mother or father with young children trying to balance work and home demands, the teacher who only wishes a little supplement to a spouse’s earnings.  But a great portion of these adjuncts want full-time work, and these teachers are looking for a way to distinguish themselves from their cohorts and merit elevation to full-time employment.

Given the nature of the profession, you already have a dedicated group of workers.  I remember one aging teacher who dreamed of getting a full-time teaching position with health benefits to cover her medical needs.  She came in on a day off to meet with a student who needed help and slipped on the ice, injuring herself.  The school fought her work comp claim because, they argued, she wasn’t being paid to be on campus that day.  Another older teacher was divorced and raising a handicap child.  She was a ball of fire when it came to involvement in extra efforts like volunteering to help organize a department writing conference.  She got sick near the end of a fall term but pushed and pushed herself to finish grading all her student papers before seeking medical attention.  She went right from turning in her grades to the hospital where she died over the holiday break.

My effort to distinguish myself was to volunteer to work on a department textbook.  The rationale for its creation was that the composition teaching texts (rhetorics as they are called in our profession) were not well-suited to the needs of our community college students and that a group of department teachers could collectively write a more useful text.  We would build on an older text written by a faculty member, one used for years in a research writing course.

I volunteered to write the section on argumentation and logic, what is often, in my view, the weakest part of writing textbooks.  So I’m busting my butt researching and writing on my own time.  Full-time faculty can use the project to fill their required time on the job.

In addition to this situation, a full-time faculty member has suggested that rather than have our names on the chapters we individually authored, we would only have all our names on the title page, a suggestion that was adopted by the text writing committee.  This group authorship credit masked who was working hard on the project (like yours truly) and who wasn’t.

Now where am I going with all this bitching?  Well, to a story and a point.

After all my work on the project (including writing the portion another adjunct was supposed to write but whose contribution I rejected because it was all plagiarized), I found myself in the office of the full-time faculty member in charge of the project.  It was a Thursday.  The final draft of the book was due at the publisher the following Tuesday.

Full-time faculty member: “You know so-and-so [name lost in the mists of time] says the book has no chapter on evaluating research.”  She sighs and says, “Maybe we should just ditch the whole project.  Let’s just forget about it and use one of the standard textbooks.”

I was stunned, but not speechless: “I will write a chapter on research evaluation and have it by Monday.”  I had used enough textbooks with research evaluation sections to have formed my own opinions of their strengths and weaknesses and to be able to write something to save my more well thought out and well researched work on logic and argumentation. And so I did.

My point is that full-time faculty live in their own world.  Most are kind, helpful, and collegial, but they have their own separate academic sphere.

Sometimes it’s the little things that bother you.  Like when it was announced the department newsletter would each month, by name, wish happy birthday to all teachers born in that month – well- all full-time teachers.                                                                                 

So now put yourself in the torn and faded driver’s seat of some many-a-mile manifestation of racket, rumble, and rust.   You have been travelling from school to school to teach, buying the cheapest fast food to eat as you drive, always without condiments so there’s nothing to drip onto your pants.  If it’s the first week of the term, you may be hoping you have enough students to avoid having the course cancelled and that bit of your meager income disappear. 

As you drive you think about lessons and students, but as you get increasingly tired there come the financial worries, the fears for your insecure future, the thoughts about the indignity of your professional status.  If you’re an English teacher, a certain classic American play may come to mind, about another road warrior, a low man on the totem pole, that Loman.  Willy.  I would have the recurring recollection of one of the play’s famous scenes.  Willy is meeting with his boss, Howard, trying to convince Howard to give him a desk job to take Willy off the grind of the road.  Howard tells him there is no spot for him and is eager to dismiss him.  Willy loses his calm; his desperation erupts into anger, and he shouts at Howard: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit!”

That’s the sort of thing you think about sometimes, on the road, when it’s been a long, hard day, when you’re exhausted and stressed, feeling used up and discardable.

            I know what you’re thinking:  Cry me a river.  How many other workers -- temp workers, gig workers, armies of the underemployed and poorly employed and harshly employed have it worse than I had it?  Yeah, true.  I think it was the humorist Roy Blount Jr. who tells of being outside on one of those sweltering Southern days.  He strikes up a conversation with a farmer.  The farmer asks, “What do you do for living?”   Blount says, “I’m a writer.”  Farmer says, “I suppose you can do that in the shade.”  Yeah, there are lower circles of hell.  I once read an ad for a janitor at an X rated movie house.  There is a special aggravation, though, to being adjunct faculty.  First, your plight is nearly invisible to the public eye.  When the public thinks of underpaid teachers, they think of an elementary school teacher working long hours and paying for the kids’ crayons out of her own dime.  Second, there’s the image of themselves that universities promote:  we are citadels of high mindedness, far removed from problems of labor exploitation. 

Anyways, that’s the end of my griping.   My work woes ended like a Victorian novel.  Your hero inherited money.  I could now be philosophical about life and finally pay more attention to the end of Arthur Miller’s play.  As the main characters stand around Willy’s grave, his son Biff says, “There were a lot of nice days.  When he’d come home from a trip; or on Sundays, making the stoop; finishing the cellar; putting on the new porch; when he built the extra bathroom; and put up the garage…. [T]here’s more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made.”  Willy failed in this career, but he also failed to work at something that he loved.

Despite all my difficulties with teaching, at the beginning of every term, I would be as excited and hopeful about the teaching itself as I was that first day, long ago, when I headed down the hallway to my first ever day of teaching, nervously but happily walking down that hall, pumping Tums into my mouth as I went along.  (Well, every term but my very last.  But that’s another story). I guess that I’m saying you can have a failed career but a successful vocation, and, in that way, avoid one type of tragedy.

THE END