By Jon Marcus (excerpted from Times Higher Education, March 5, 2009).
Overworked, underpaid and insecure: adjunct and part-time US faculty are fighting to convince their institutions – and tenured colleagues – that they deserve better. Jon Marcus reports
As an adjunct instructor in English at a small higher education institution in the American North West, Jessica Bryan lived with the usual indignities of being a part-time faculty member.
Unlike her senior tenured counterparts at North Idaho College, she had no job security, no benefits and none of the safeguards of academic due process. And even while teaching three classes a semester and two summer courses, and supplementing that income as a tutor in the institution’s writing centre, she earned, at best, $15,000 (£10,600) a year.
Yet Bryan continued working as an adjunct, part of the swelling ranks of contingent faculty appointed for one term at a time without the typical faculty privileges, and often resented by their full-time, tenured and tenure-track colleagues, who were watching their own proportion of the professoriate decline.
Even as a part-time instructor, Bryan prided herself on knowing all her students’ names by the end of the first week of class. She returned assignments promptly with feedback and made herself available for extra office hours.
“Like many adjuncts across the US, I did at least the same amount of work as senior tenured faculty members. I believe, because of my commitment to and love for the classroom, I did more. I entered the classroom with enthusiasm and dedication, and all my professional evaluations attest to that. My belief was that my commitment to the students, coupled with my hard work and personal concern to see my students succeed, would be rewarded, although perhaps not financially,” Bryan says.
But in the autumn of 2007, on the last day of term, the college sent Bryan an email telling her that she would not be reappointed for the following semester. It gave no reason for the move, and shortly thereafter hired another adjunct to replace her. In a written statement, the institution says that Bryan’s contract was to teach a specific course for a specific semester, and that it could not make binding commitments to part-time instructors because of the need to maintain flexibility.
Now the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which routinely investigates complaints about workplace mistreatment of senior faculty, has forcefully intervened in Bryan’s case.
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