Some time ago I picked up a used copy of The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success, and was sorely disappointed. Obviously, no book can sell you the secret of success in your field, but I had still hoped that it might be an enjoyable read; a book written by adjunct college instructors, for adjunct college instructors. Even if, in the end, the message boiled down to “Work hard, and be lucky” as the only true secret of success for an adjunct instructor, I had still looked forward to hearing life lessons and strange stories from my colleagues. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success was written by, Richard E. Lyons, Marcella L Kysilka, and George E. Pawlas. According to the book, Lyons is a doctoral-holding dean, while Kysilka and Pawlas are both tenured. These are hardly part-time employees. Rather, the authors of The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success were in fact the bosses of said adjuncts. This wasn’t a book so much about living the difficult life of a part-time college instructor. It was a book written by your tenured bosses telling you how they’d prefer you did your job.
It’s very difficult being an adjunct. You have the same qualifications as a full-timer, and you do the exact same job as a full-timer, but for significantly less money. You receive no benefits such as healthcare, no time off, and often not even any sick days. In order to pay the rent and keep the electricity turned on you have to work at 3-4 districts, because each will only let you teach a few classes a year. To top it all off you have to reapply for your job every three months or so, and there’s always an overwhelming chance that you’ll end up without a class to teach.
To me, a bunch of tenured deans spelling out success for adjunct instructors is reminiscent of when President Reagan sat down with a group of unemployed Michigan auto workers, and tried to offer them some advice about how to find work in a struggling economy.
So I decided to write my own thoughts about being an adjunct instructor. I don’t have the qualifications of Lyons, Kysilka, and Pawlas, and that’s exactly what makes me qualified to talk about life as a part-timer.
Please come visit me from time to time at www.theadjunct.net. I don't know if people will find my posts on life as an adjunct professor interesting, but if you want to take a peak and leave a comment then that would be great. Please remember this is my first attempt at a website, and it is still just a few day old baby, so please excuse the dust and be kind. : )
An excerpt:
I was very upset after reading Stanley Fish's recent blog entitled, The Last Professor. In it, Fish reviews (coincidently, of course) the most recent publication of one of his former students, Frank Donoghue, as a starting off point for a baseless rant about how adjunct instructors at America's colleges are causing the downward spiral of our higher education system.
Fish states that, "Universities ... do not hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” After paying momentary lip service to the reality that no one specifically is to blame for the rise of adjunct instructors, Fish then spends the rest of the article blaming adjunct instructors, even going so far as to say that we adjuncts represent a lack of values for "higher learning."
Yes, we are the cheapest teachers, in that we get paid dramatically less than our tenured colleagues. But I resent greatly that Fish compares adjuncts everywhere to shameful schools like the University of Phoenix, simply because he sees most colleges and universities are now basically "for profit" organizations. Invoking the University of Phoenix to win an argument about academia is as much a fallacy as invoking Nazis to win...well, just about any other argument.
...read the rest at www.theadjunct.net...
The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success was written by, Richard E. Lyons, Marcella L Kysilka, and George E. Pawlas. According to the book, Lyons is a doctoral-holding dean, while Kysilka and Pawlas are both tenured. These are hardly part-time employees. Rather, the authors of The Adjunct Professor’s Guide To Success were in fact the bosses of said adjuncts. This wasn’t a book so much about living the difficult life of a part-time college instructor. It was a book written by your tenured bosses telling you how they’d prefer you did your job.
It’s very difficult being an adjunct. You have the same qualifications as a full-timer, and you do the exact same job as a full-timer, but for significantly less money. You receive no benefits such as healthcare, no time off, and often not even any sick days. In order to pay the rent and keep the electricity turned on you have to work at 3-4 districts, because each will only let you teach a few classes a year. To top it all off you have to reapply for your job every three months or so, and there’s always an overwhelming chance that you’ll end up without a class to teach.
To me, a bunch of tenured deans spelling out success for adjunct instructors is reminiscent of when President Reagan sat down with a group of unemployed Michigan auto workers, and tried to offer them some advice about how to find work in a struggling economy.
So I decided to write my own thoughts about being an adjunct instructor. I don’t have the qualifications of Lyons, Kysilka, and Pawlas, and that’s exactly what makes me qualified to talk about life as a part-timer.
Please come visit me from time to time at www.theadjunct.net. I don't know if people will find my posts on life as an adjunct professor interesting, but if you want to take a peak and leave a comment then that would be great. Please remember this is my first attempt at a website, and it is still just a few day old baby, so please excuse the dust and be kind. : )
An excerpt:
I was very upset after reading Stanley Fish's recent blog entitled, The Last Professor. In it, Fish reviews (coincidently, of course) the most recent publication of one of his former students, Frank Donoghue, as a starting off point for a baseless rant about how adjunct instructors at America's colleges are causing the downward spiral of our higher education system.
Fish states that, "Universities ... do not hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers.” After paying momentary lip service to the reality that no one specifically is to blame for the rise of adjunct instructors, Fish then spends the rest of the article blaming adjunct instructors, even going so far as to say that we adjuncts represent a lack of values for "higher learning."
Yes, we are the cheapest teachers, in that we get paid dramatically less than our tenured colleagues. But I resent greatly that Fish compares adjuncts everywhere to shameful schools like the University of Phoenix, simply because he sees most colleges and universities are now basically "for profit" organizations. Invoking the University of Phoenix to win an argument about academia is as much a fallacy as invoking Nazis to win...well, just about any other argument.
...read the rest at www.theadjunct.net...
