Adjunct means supplementary
The Instability of labor in Higher Ed
by Jessica Pierotti
In addition to being an out-of-work service industry employee I am also now, as of this week, an out-of-work adjunct college professor. Many of you may be familiar with the hustle that is adjunct teaching, but when sharing my title with people outside my network they often say, "oh cool!", in a way that implies they think I have an impressive 'big girl' job. Tacking on the “adjunct” to college professor means nothing to most people, including my students. Perhaps they think it means I work part-time for now, or that I am just a newer professor - maybe I don’t have a permanent position, but I at least have job security and some benefits, right?
I have been teaching as an adjunct college professor in photography since 2015, my second year of grad school. At University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) they provide most MFA grad students a class during their second year so they can make a little cash and waive tuition. It’s not a bad deal. Over the past four years I have taught 5 courses at UIC, 6 courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), 2 courses at Loyola University Chicago (LUC), and 1 at the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC). My first two years out of grad school I was also working full-time as the Executive Director of a Chicago arts nonprofit, LATITUDE Chicago. As of January 2019, I moved to working full-time as an adjunct (and part-time in the service industry). My experiences have been strictly within art departments and limited to these institutions within Chicago, so while I am speaking generally about adjunct teaching in this essay, let it be known that this is the lens I am viewing through.
As an adjunct instructor every class is an individual contract. There are no commitments to, or from, institutions until adjuncts return their contract for that semester’s course. LUC and CCC have unions - LUC instructors are automatically enrolled, while CCC enrolls instructors after six semesters of employment. SAIC has a complicated four-tier adjunct ladder that can only begin after three years and a thorough departmental review and promotion process. The instructor remains an adjunct, but gains access to health benefits and incremental pay raises. Unfortunately, I have been told one can never leave the adjunct track to be hired as a full-time faculty member. I am still at the Instructor level, but currently have a 2-year contract with them that guarantees I will be offered at least 2 classes per academic year for the next two years. This, along with some other bells and whistles, mostly exist to keep part-time teachers comfortable enough to avoid an SAIC union forming. Learn more about their stance regarding unionization on their Union FAQ page.
Schools have steadily handed more and more of their course load over to adjuncts, or freelance instructors. A Washington Post piece from 2019 states: “Contingent faculty — a classification that includes part-time adjuncts, full-time instructors who aren’t on a tenure track and graduate-student workers — account for nearly 75% of instructional staff in higher education, according to the latest available federal data. Part-time teachers alone represent 40% of the academic workforce, compared with 24% in 1975.”
Like all shifts from full-time to part-time employment - including contract, freelancing, and gig-economy work - this benefits employers and hurts employees. Adjunct instructors do not receive PTO or medical/dental benefits, and pay rates are usually deemed as “non-negotiable.” There are no traditional raise structures based on time invested with the institution and/or performance reviews. In fact, most schools never bother to do performance reviews in or outside of the classroom, and rely wholly on student evaluations to gauge the quality of an instructor’s work. It is common for a semester contract to come through around a month before the first day of class. Even after signing this contract most institutions have an escape clause to cancel a course up to the last minute without pay - SAIC being the exception with a $500 cancellation payout.
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This is the break down of the most recent pre-tax rate I have received from the following institutions:
LUC - $6,513 per class
SAIC - $5,740 per class (Up from $5,125 in 2017)
UIC - $1,222 per month or Approx $5,200 per class (No change since 2016)
CCC - $4,700 per class
As a point of comparison the Chicago Public Schools starting salary as of 2019 is $58,000
To reach that salary an adjunct professor would have to teach 9 classes at LUC, 10 classes a year at SAIC, 11 at UIC, or 12 at CCC, distributed over two semesters.
There is usually a cap of 2 courses per semester for adjuncts at one institution. If one were to try to reach the starting CPS salary they would need to split their work between several institutions every semester, as most adjuncts do. The result is a significant increase in labor on the part of the adjunct juggling yet another email account, grading system, learning management system, and all the minor but time consuming bits and pieces of bureaucracy inherent in working anywhere. Additionally, teaching more than 4 courses per semester is basically impossible, though it has certainly been done.
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As contract workers, we are expected to revel in the fact that we are not committed to one job at one place - we can easily change careers, or states, or take a semester off. Unfortunately, flexibility really only benefits instructors that do not rely on teaching as their primary source of income - perhaps due to independent wealth or the income of a partner in another field. After the 2007 recession, many young people chose to return to school and up their degree level, which led to educational inflation in the job market. Jobs that once only required a Bachelor’s degree now required a Master’s, and Master’s climbed to a PhD. Moving forward there would be a larger and more competitive pool of candidates for around the same number of teaching positions. This only accelerated the move towards adjunct labor and poor labor practices, as there was always someone knocking at the door with a fresh degree willing to teach anything, anywhere, for any amount of money.
Most institutions have made an effort to diversify faculties over the past two decades, but with the shift towards adjunct labor coinciding with these initiatives, the upward mobility of burgeoning groups of underrepresented minorities has been shut down. An Atlantic piece citing statistics from a 2016 TIAA Institute study states, “From 1993 to 2013, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in non-tenure-track part-time faculty positions in higher education grew by 230 percent. By contrast, the percentage of underrepresented minorities in full-time tenure-track positions grew by just 30 percent.”
The system is perpetuated by the bootstrapping capitalist ideology that competition leads to ingenuity and invention - that if you only “work hard enough” you’ll be one of the elite winners in this absurd system. This competitive environment breeds a general wariness of your peers, and fear of collaboration or collective resource sharing. It is detrimental to departments, to students, and of course to the competitors themselves. Meanwhile many of the available full-time positions have been expanded and reconfigured to make them only slightly more appealing. Some institutions are folding staff positions into faculty positions, such as the maintenance of facilities and labs or student advising, and are given a heavier course load than their predecessors for lower pay.
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The analysis above is strictly pre-Corona. Moving forward in light of an active pandemic, what will happen to teachers? Our campuses were evacuated mid-semester and courses were thrown online overnight. Due to room and board refunds and other emergency costs, schools are already hurting financially. It looks like courses will most likely at least start online this fall, as another campus housing evacuation mid-semester - especially at schools with many international students - is too great of a financial risk to take. Conversations are already starting around raising classroom caps. For example, one of my schools is considering moving from 15 to 25 students in an Intro to Photography course, if it transitions fully online in the fall. Instructors will be expected to build comprehensive online courses from the ground up over the summer for online courses that have historically been paid less per credit hour than in-person instruction.
There is a potential here for institutions to exploit the situation, forcing adjunct faculty to accept working more courses, for less money, with more students per course. Non-tenured, full-time teachers are at least cushioned by a locked-in salary for now, but I expect no-one will be left untouched. In the midst of an economic depression, and without a vaccine - a rolling pandemic, there will inevitably be a drop in enrollment. There will be less work and more unemployed degree holders competing for it. Many institutions will be dramatically reshaped in the coming years as a result of the pandemic. During the upheaval there may be a chance to update, shift priorities and rebuild education and educational labor structures. Change must come from educators and administrators working collectively to overhaul an archaic, exploitative, and exclusive academic structure.
In the meantime, maybe I’ll go back to school.
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Additional Reading:
The Adjunct Revolt: How Poor Professors Are Fighting Back
Professors in the Gig Economy: Unionizing Adjunct Faculty in America (Book)