Invisible Adjunct

Since I don't have trackback, here's a link to my post on the same article. I think you've mostly covered it though!

http://frogsandravens.blogspot.com/2003_07_20_frogsandravens_archive.html#105890231308841787

There's a difference in the lines of argument between you and Carroll, but I'm not sure it's the one you want to make. If it's simply a matter of providing more support for adjuncts, then the argument is over a management problem, not a labor problem. That is, academic administrators (full disclosure: I'm sort of one, a department chair in a school where chairs have the standing of eunuchs) have not mixed enough other inputs with labor-hired-on-piece-rate to create the optimal amount of educational output. I know, that sounds really economic-ky, but I'm trying to figure out what the argument is. You've said it's not a labor problem, so the fault has to be elsewhere -- but where?

I think the way to defeat Carroll's argument is to find what else it is that faculty bring to students beyond time, and whether or not that is better delivered by full-time, tenurable or tenured faculty than by adjuncts.

And just why is she so eager to defend it?

Before you start beating your head against the wall, I think it's helpful to note that Carroll is probably not arguing in good faith. If you look at her web site

http://www.adjunctsolutions.com/

you'll see that she is in fact "adjunct as entrepreneur," except she's not selling her services as an educator but as an enabler of adjuncts. A vested interest, to be sure. The "compensatory fiction" of committment that you object to here is precisely what she's selling.

Last week we had happy martyr couple, this week (this year, apparently) it's Jill Carroll plugging her business. The real question is, what's up with the Chronicle?

"Before you start beating your head against the wall, I think it's helpful to note that Carroll is probably not arguing in good faith. If you look at her web site

http://www.adjunctsolutions.com/"

Ah yes, the adjunct as career coach. I did know about this site, but must have blocked it from conscious memory. $65 an hour for telephone coaching!? Maybe I should set up my own adjunct coaching service, perhaps undercutting her by 5 dollars an hour?

Maybe I should set up my own adjunct coaching service, perhaps undercutting her by 5 dollars an hour?

I don't see how she could complain.

"What's striking is her tendency to individualize and psychologize large-scale structural problems."

That's exactly what bugged me about Carroll's column. There's a difference between the kind of positive thinking that keeps one's head above the water when one is struggling to teach under subpar conditions and the kind of positive thinking that makes larger issues (i.e. the subpar conditions) all a matter of one's own attitude and therefore not to be dealt with on a larger, systemic scale.

One could say (in response to kb's comment) that the intangible factors, apart from time, that faculty bring to their students could include the kind of security and stability that comes from knowing they'll be hired next semester. I'm not yet at the adjunct stage of the game (I will be in the fall, unless I find other work before then), but I'm already feeling less than sanguine about working with the possibility of nonrenewal hanging over my head. And that's got to have some impact on even the most Oprah-esque.

(There are probably better terms than "stability," but it's late and I've been slinging words around all evening!)

Amanda, that sounds like the professional athlete asking for a long-term contract because the possibility of not re-signing with the club is "messing with my head on the field/floor/ice". The evidence from sports economics is that if anything, players playing for a new contract perform better than those in the middle of long-term contracts. It's known as the "salary drive".

You can draw your own conclusions on whether there are parallels with academia.

I have sympathy for 'invisible adjuncts' like yourself, but haven't teachers in many historical eras (e.g. Plato vs the Sophists) had to compete for students, often rather directly? This may seem distasteful to those of us who have done our formal learning in the US's educational behemoth, but the world is changing . . .

KB is right.

KB, here are two clear disanalogies between adjunct teachers and professional athletes:

(i) Adjunct teachers are getting paid in the neighborhood of a subsistence income. Most professional athletes are paid substantially more than that. One might suspect that different sorts of anxieties and insecurities come into play in the first case that don't really arise in the latter.

(ii) The system is set up to reward increased performance by athletes. And, indeed, the system is set up to reward increased performance by tenure-track academics (though this is usually more in terms of research than teaching). But there is almost nothing in the temp academic labor system to do the same for adjuncts. Whether or not an adjunct continues to have a job is primarily a matter of whether their services are needed, and not how well they do in providing those services. I mean, they need to do well enough not to generate undergraduate complaints that make it to the ears of the chair, but beyond that, it's not like they're eligible for merit raises or anything like that.

You want entrepeneurial? I give you entrepreneurial: Auction a limited number of As, Bs, and so on down the line. Takes care of the marking question. Time? I ain't got no fuckin' time, not for 4K/course. You want office hours, kid? You're buying the beer and paying consulting fees ($100/hr Cheap!). LIMITED TIME ONLY!!! Special bargain rate: $10 each for "yes" or "no." (All proceeds invested in short-selling Bechtel and Halliburton stock.)

People, people... It takes no genius to figure out that this is the party line at the Chronicle of Hierarchical Education. "Happy happy adjuncts do it for the love of teaching and -- busy little entrepeneurs that they are! -- they're parlaying their hard work into the hackademic sinecures of tomorrow! So shut up already!" You expect to read in the Wall Street Journal "Down with Capitalism, All Power to the Workers' Councils"? No? Well.. oh hell, you do the math.

I think the job of the lumpenintelligentsia should be to press an agenda that makes people forget about the CHE. When you get down to it, it's just an ideological Potemkin village. Worth a laff or two, but that's about it.

"I have sympathy for 'invisible adjuncts' like yourself, but haven't teachers in many historical eras (e.g. Plato vs the Sophists) had to compete for students, often rather directly? This may seem distasteful to those of us who have done our formal learning in the US's educational behemoth, but the world is changing"

Well, I might be willing to directly compete for students in an open market. But this would of course require the abolition of the decidedly non-market institution of tenure, and I doubt KB wants to go that route.

"I think the way to defeat Carroll's argument is to find what else it is that faculty bring to students beyond time, and whether or not that is better delivered by full-time, tenurable or tenured faculty than by adjuncts."

KB:

I think there are some further implications/points to develop out of Amanda's suggestion that the (meager) expectation of a bit of job security brings peace of mind, which in turn brings a more vibrant, engaged, and less harried attitude to the classroom. I can't speak for other adjuncts, but I know that in semesters when I have an especially heavy load I consciously alter my syllabuses. That is, I turn to less challenging, more straight-forward, and ultimately less time-consuming texts. To give an example, it's far easier to teach, say, a theory-lite essay by Joyce Carol Oates than it is for me to take a stab at Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense." Similarly, in heavy semesters I will stay far far away from writers whose work is especially demanding such as Woolf, Joyce, Beckett, or Coetzee.

Perhaps some (or many) will say this is a blatant example of professional iresponsibility on my part. On the other hand, it may simply be a sign that I've been around this block more than a few times and am aware of what can and cannot be done under the working conditions of adjuncthood. I stand in the middle and say I am saddened by the fact that the exigencies of adjunctification force me to stay clear of some texts I regard as essential.

Chris, my significant other always threatens that he will start teaching his comp classes as multiple choice if we don't either get class sizes lowered or get the course credit raised from 3 to 4. ;-)

I thought before Carroll was just misguided; now I think she's unethical.

Chris, isn't yours just another time argument? I manage faculty time through releases from classroom and service arrangements. Of course we shade courses towards easier activities when we're busier -- that only calls for a slight change in management.

IA, I think elimination of tenure is something still to be discussed. I've done some of it here, but that's far too brief a treatment.

JW, wouldn't you think with more money on the line ("quasi-rents", if you're an economist) that athletes face more stress? For the thousands of players in the minor leagues who are released without ever even making it to the top professional leagues, the alternative employment opportunities are probably as dire as yours, if not more so.

"the kind of security and stability that comes from knowing they'll be hired next semester"

Yes. And it's not simply a matter of time management or easier courses (by the way, kb, the kind of course load manipulations you describe are generally not available to part-timers -- we're hired for specific courses, and if we don't teach them we don't get paid). One reason I suspect my job searches have been going downhill since I graduated is that every year I need to prep new courses for new students at a new institution. It's a lot of work, at least if you want to do your topics and students justice, and severely cuts into one's ability to do research.

Yes, one can recycle a few things, like book notes and some lectures. But if you were hired to teach a lecture course on the American West in toto one year and a writing intensive seminar on the 20th century West the next, there's not a lot of overlap. Add in the difficulties of learning new systems of book ordering, having copies made, student-teacher culture, etc. and a LOT of time is wasted just getting started. Then, when you've finally figured it out and are able to start thinking of more interesting, complicated ways of approaching the subject (like coordinating with the local historical society) you have to leave. Tell me how this approach is an improvement on having professors grounded in the local community and knowing how the system works?

KB: The Minor Leagues? So you're suggesting that Univ. of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, Stanford, Bryn Mawr, and Columbia are the equivalent of, say, the Buffalo Bisons, the Trenton Sharks, or the Pawtucket Sox? Interesting. Wrong, but interesting. All of these "big league clubs" use, to use your phrasing, minor league adjuncts, and so there's good reason to ask if Harvard is the New York Yankees of academe, then what are the minor leaguers doing playing in key positions on the big club? Maybe you'll say 'but they're not playing key positions, they're doing spot duty, pinch hitting, or something along those lines. Not true, though, because as an adjunct, I "play" every-f'ing-day. Perhaps a better analogy would be to say that adjuncts are the bull pen of academe. But no, that doesn't work either, because relievers often come in to play when the game is very decidedly _on the line_: 2 on with 1 out in the bottom of the 7th, and Delgado coming to the plate is, in my humble baseball knowledge, "big time."

I think an altogether more apt Baseball analogy is to equate Harvard et. al. with the teams like Baltimore and Pittsburgh: they have an inflated payroll, several soon-to-be free-agents, they're 9 or 10 games back and going nowhere, so ... time to dump payroll and look to ... next year. And in the interim, let's have a look at some AAA prospects and call them up for September and see how they do.

Cindy: Not only have I thought the same thing, I'v actually done it in my comp. classes -- or at least, an approximation of it. Now here's the truly twisted part. I teach at two schools, one is really, really good, the other not-so-good. The first year comp. students at the really, really good school LOVE my test style approach, while the less-good ones hate it.

IA writes: "Right. Well, in that case, why have full-time teaching positions at all? Adjunctify the entire faculty (think of the savings!) . . ."

Isn't this the direction in which academia is already heading? And I'm not decided on whether that's a bad end. From a purely strategic perspective, if the hiearchical distinction between adjuncts and t-t's were eased, or eliminated entirely, many of the issues that presently make standing faculty unions and adjunct unions opposed entities would disappear. Among other things, adminsitrations would then lose one of their strongest, if not THE strongest ally.

But this is not Carroll's stance, nor seemingly her interest. Apart from her occasional flurries of indignation at being referred to as second-class, or second-best, or whatever, Carroll advocates borrowing a model of self-invention from the business/corporate sector in which individuals act as walking "skill sets" to be hired as free-agents to the best/highest bidder. Period. She seems to have little to say about the irony that in adjunct-academia the game between various employers for the highest rate is a zero-sum game. Indeed, as I have occasionally read her, she seems to avoid almost all of the wider political and ethical issues.

No wonder the Chronicle loves her so!

Chris, skip baseball -- your leaping abilities suggest the long jump in next year's Olympics. I'm not comparing schools but rather discussing a pyramid of grad students, professors on fixed terms full or part time, t-trackers, and tenured faculty. As pointed out on Crooked Timber a few days back, there are many good jobs out there. Do you know any career minor leaguers, or guys that just got a "cuppa joe" in the bigs once? Teaching at the schools you're describing is like playing for the Yankees or the Red Sox -- venerable franchises where even a few years on a fixed term would be the experience of a lifetime. Teaching where I do is like the teams you discuss: We get 4/4 teaching loads, paltry travel money and no summer research support. We carry our own bags (OK, time to stop beating that analogy.)

I'm the baseball equivalent of an "Class AAAA", on the fringe of a big-time career, never really catching on. There are thousands like me. And you know what? There are thousands more that don't make AAA, or even AA, or even high-A.

It's a tournament, friend, and not everybody wins, and the pressure to win is horribly intense.

To Rana: If you're a full-time fixed term, there's any number of things that could be done. Most people don't bother because with limited resources you tend to your t-trackers first. But I (as a dept. head) can adjust the number of students in your course, offer you a TA, or perhaps give you a higher number of students and count the course twice, effectively doubling your pay. I know, this doesn't usually happen at many schools, but there's no reason why it can't. I pretty much HAVE to do this, because it's hard to find qualified people in my field (economics) to teach on an adjunct basis, located as we are 70 miles from any doctoral program, and in a city of under 100k. So it's a supply-and-demand problem from where I sit -- it doesn't happen in the humanities because excess supply is so great, not because it can't be done.

So the question remains: Why is there such an excess supply? IA's posts on that topic are worth reading and I think closer to the source of the problem.

As a former adjunct in Economics, I can attest that kb is right - the salary and stability offered to adjuncts is largely a function of bargaining power. I made $4500 a course (which I understand to be three to four times more than an adjunct in the humanities would make), in an inexpensive rural town. The full-time equivilent of my position made about $35,000 a year and had quite stable employment.

Topic: I would suspect that the greatest impediment to high teaching quality at our universities is not adjuncts, but a tenure system that rewards excellence in research but only requires competence in teaching. I also doubt that the permanent job security that tenure provides offers little incentive to improve or adapt teaching styles.

KB -- it's nice to know that there's some flexibility in the system, at least for some folks. It's also useful to remind us part-timers that we shouldn't assume help isn't available if it's not offered on a silver platter.

Unfortunately, such flexibility wasn't available where I was -- I've been working a series of one-year visiting professor positions, where the courses were laid out ahead of time and TAs weren't available (small teaching institutions -- no one got them, even senior faculty) and the classes were fairly small to begin with. Perhaps I shouldn't gripe -- other people work more hours at worse jobs and my colleagues were nice and the courses interesting, and at the time I thought it was a pretty good deal.

Now, though, I'm wondering if I made a fatal error. I was assuming that this would translate into additional hire-me creds for t-t jobs, but if this year's search results (zilch) are any indication, I have been sadly mistaken. In retrospect I may have been better off teaching large lecture courses to uncaring undergrads and assigning only multiple-choice scantron exams while madly writing articles. Lovely thought, eh?

IA, thanks for such a nice place to have this conversation.

Rana, I can only relate what happens in my field so I don't know if this is the same for yours, but I have noticed that search committees on entry-level t-track jobs seem to pass over the applicants that have been out three years on temps. We've hired some of these, and we're stunned that people of such high quality are available. They are typically very good students who either got impatient with their dissertations and left to take a fixed term slot, then another, meanwhile doing little more than teach and write the diss, and then are slammed in the market, or, they are people who came out in bad years and had to scramble for a fixed-term or two. They have great letters, a dissertation that is going to get publications (in econ, we're more looking for refereed journals than books), and good teaching evaluations. They often take jobs at schools you haven't heard of (teaching in schools other than the US, Canada or Europe seems a major liability) and have moved once or twice already.

I end up concluding that this is a market imperfection. I'm glad it exists, because it allows us to get better faculty than I'd've thought we could ex ante. But I've struggled to explain why it happens. Those new PhDs that their grad schools have sheltered seem to have an advantage that really makes no sense to me.

For Matilde: Yes, the research emphasis is probably correct at your top-50 institutions. At my school, where perhaps 20% of the faculty are publishing regularly, the rules change to where teaching is valued more than research, but it's assessed poorly. And you're right that the incentives post-tenure go in the wrong direction.

Carroll's side business as a counselor is a laugh and a half. So she's found a way for an adjunct to take lemons (not. Prof. Lemon!) and make lemonade. She just counsels other miserable adjuncts and charges them money. Why don't all the other miserable adjuncts do that?

Half the people I have ever known who went through "therapy" ended up deciding they wanted to become therapists. Some transference there. It's a nice job if you can get it.

KB: Yes, the research emphasis is probably correct at your top-50 institutions. At my school, where perhaps 20% of the faculty are publishing regularly, the rules change to where teaching is valued more than research, but it's assessed poorly. And you're right that the incentives post-tenure go in the wrong direction.

A minor point, but I interviewed at many non-top-50 institutions and teaching colleges and not one of them ever suggested to me that teaching was more important to my tenure review then research. In fact, the opposite was often implied.

Rana: In retrospect I may have been better off teaching large lecture courses to uncaring undergrads and assigning only multiple-choice scantron exams while madly writing articles. Lovely thought, eh?

I burst out laughing, Rana, at this. It probably wasn't meant to be funny, but you just described exactly every adjuncting job I ever had.

It might reasure you to know that I had a really hard time selling that teaching experience to teaching colleges, who were concerned that I didn't have a lot of experience teaching classes smaller than 250 students. It didn't matter a whit that I had fantastic teaching evaluations and that I had won two university-wide teaching awards, all I was asked was "But will you be able to translate that experience to the small classroom?" Baffling. I have taught small classes. Teaching a small class well if fairly easy. Teaching a big class well is very hard, and lot less rewarding.

So if a teaching job is your goal, don't fill your vita with large classes!

I'm glad you found it funny. It was -- somewhat -- meant to be. :)

I do think that the sword cuts both ways on the teaching; places with large lecture courses predominating were also wary of my credentials -- albeit during an interview, so at least I got through the first cut.

Ironically, a teaching job hasn't been my goal; it's just ended up that way. On this count, at least, I will take full personal responsibility. :)