Teaching is Virtual Slave Labor at Many Colleges: Adjunct Instructor — ‘I was practically giving my work away. It was charity.’

(Yassie / Wikimedia Commons) 

By Rebecca Burns
For three years in the early 1970s, journalist Studs Terkel gathered stories from a variety of American workers. He then compiled them into Working, an oral-history collection that went on to become a classic. Four decades after its publication, Working is more relevant than ever. Terkel, who regularly contributed to In These Times, once wrote, “I know the good fight—the fight for democracy, for civil rights, for the rights of workers—has a future, for these values will live on in the pages of In These Times.” In honor of that sentiment and of Working's 40th anniversary, ITT writers have invited a broad range of American workers to describe what they do, in their own words. More "Working at 40" stories can be found here.

In the 1970s, communications professor Jack Hunter told Studs Terkel that his was an “invisible industry.” “Since the Second World War,” Hunter explained, “We’ve had phenomenal growth. There are seven-thousand-plus strong teachers in this discipline.” The centrality of communication and persuasion to human society meant that “communications specialists do have a sense of power,” said Hunter. He was “high on the work.”

Forty years later, Maria (a pseudonym), who until recently taught English composition classes at a Texas community college, similarly describes her work as invisible. But she does not have the same sense of power—as an adjunct professor, she says that she is treated as disposable, even though her work teaching incoming students communication skills is still just as crucial. Maria says that drastic changes have occurred in higher education since Hunter’s day—most notably, tenure-track faculty now constitute just 24 percent of the higher education workforce, according to the American Association of University Professors.

Before I started as an adjunct, I was in publishing for 20-odd years. A long time ago, I was getting my Ph.D, and I had finished everything but my dissertation. I had gone out for a job, and I was in the final group out of three hundred applicants, but I was pregnant at the time and they didn’t pick me. So I went into publishing. But I always loved teaching, and when my kids grew up, I knew I wanted to go back into it.

I started teaching two classes at the local community college as an adjunct. When you first start teaching, you are very idealistic. You think that it’s all hunky dory and things will work out. The following year, a full-time position opened and I applied for it. It seemed to go well, and then all of a sudden I didn’t get it. After my second year, I realized that I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

Adjuncts get paid nothing here in Texas. In places like New York and Boston, and other places where you have unionized schools, you have a better chance at increasing your pay. In places where you cannot have a union [under state law], the pay is abominable. The average pay for adjunct faculty right now, according to the Coalition on the Academic Work Force, is $2,700 per course without healthcare. That’s not a living wage. Here in Texas, the average pay for community colleges is $1,791 per course. With Ph.D. A.B.D. [“all but dissertation”], I was getting $1,800.

I didn’t usually tell my students about what my working conditions were like. When I did tell them how much I made, they were shocked—“You mean a week? A month? Really, a semester?” They couldn’t believe it. “But I make more than that!”

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