STATE IS MISTREATING ADJUNCT INSTRUCTORS
Most people might imagine that the holiday/winter break at colleges and universities is a time of rest and relaxation for faculty, but for adjunct/contingent or so-called “part-time” faculty, it is often a time of stress and trepidation.
Speaking from my personal experience as a 20-year adjunct/ contingent instructor, many adjunct/contingent faculty juggle holidays with grading deadlines, and do it while unemployed. This is certainly the case with my colleague Yolanda Yslas-Thompson, a math adjunct at Miramar and Southwestern colleges, who was grading student math videos on Christmas Eve.
“It’s extra work for me, but I find it helps the students to better understand the concepts,” she told me in an interview.
Most academic institutions hire adjunct/contingent faculty on a term-by-term basis, such that adjunct/contingent faculty are effectively hired and fired twice a year, unless getting a rare summer or intersession class.
As a 20-year adjunct, I have been fired and rehired over 30 times.
That said, there is no guarantee of being rehired, even with stellar evaluations — all hiring is contingent on enrollment, either in one’s own class, or in the class of a fulltime faculty member, who may bump an adjunct-contingent faculty member if their enrollment is low. Now is a time when we look at the enrollment numbers and wonder if work awaits us at the end of an unpaid “break.”
The use of adjunct/contingent faculty is not a limited practice, but in fact the rule. According to the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, approximately 70 percent of faculty were “temporary” or adjunct/contingent in fall 2019, not far from the national figure of 73 percent, as reported by the American Association of University Professors in 2018.
This “flexibility” in hiring allows public institutions, or the state, which funds them, to avoid providing benefits. Additionally, with regard to California Community Colleges, the state only allows an adjunct/contingent faculty member to teach a full-time equivalent load of 67 percent or less, also largely for the purposes of reducing benefit obligations, and the adjunct is usually only paid for their classroom hours, not for prep and grading, meaning they are paid one hour for what might amount to five hours of work.
Further, these faculty are paid at a prorated fractional hourly wage, which generally runs between 60 percent to 80 percent of a base full-time salary. Since our teaching load is capped at 67 percent of a full-time faculty member, that means that at best, an adjunct/contingent faculty member will make just under 54 percent of a full-time salary for effectively doing the same work as full-time colleagues.
Consequently, most adjunct/ contingent faculty have to cobble together a living doing a variety of jobs, usually at other colleges, provided they can match up schedules. Often, such “part-time” faculty work teaching loads in excess of full-time faculty, still making less and with no benefits. I have regularly taught 17 units a semester when the full-time load is 15. The teaching of multiple classes at multiple sites, and at inequitable wages is what makes Yslas-Thompson refer to herself and other adjuncts as “the new professional migrant workers.” Yslas-Thompson is herself the daughter of Mexican migrant farmworkers.
Even this is often not enough. The American Federation of
Teachers’ 2020 report “An Army of Temps” found that 25 percent of such faculty live on some form of public assistance, 40 percent struggle with household expenses, and over a third made less than $25,000 a year, putting them below the federal poverty rate for a family of four, based on a nationwide survey of over 3,000 adjunct/contingent faculty. When her husband was laid off in 2016, Yslas-Thompson had to enroll her family in Medi-Cal. I myself raised a son on WIC milk and cheese.
Given these conditions, some may ask why these faculty members don’t all simply quit. The reality is that the average adjunct/ contingent faculty member is over the age of 50, already financially challenged, and not readily in a position to retool. Further, many adjunct/contingent faculty are less driven to teach by financial gain than by a desire to help students reach their goals. Yslas-Thompson, a former high school AVID teacher who sees herself as a “lifelong educator,” is driven by a desire to encourage “first-generation college students to transfer and complete their degree because it helps their family and community.”
But a willingness to teach despite lower wages should not be taken as a vow of poverty.
With a projected budget surplus of $31 billion, California could afford to pay adjunct/contingent faculty equitable wages and provide greater access to health benefits or simply affordable health care. Students in the classroom see adjunct/contingent and fulltime faculty as the same. Why can’t the state of California?
Johnson