by Michelle Martin
In Spring 2013, after 8 years of grad school, getting married and having twin daughters in the process, I finally finished my doctorate in English. Along the way I taught freshman composition numerous times, business writing, intro to the short story, intro to fiction, Contemporary American Fiction, even History of the English Language, for which I wasn’t well-qualified but I gamely took on anyway because – as you might have guessed – I needed the money. The latter class I taught in Fall 2013, the semester after I finished grad school when I began my adjunct career. Prior to this, I had taught in the capacity of graduate teaching assistant. While that situation possesses its own set of exploitative complexities, since it is technically not contingent labor, I’ll begin my account with the Fall ’13 semester. In that semester, as well as the History of the English Language Class, I taught four composition classes, for a total of 5 classes. This was at two separate universities. Teaching five classes while my husband was teaching 3 and trying to finish his own dissertation meant that, financially, we were doing okay. Just okay. With 2 children, urban rent, and my student loans coming due, even that amount of remuneration was not quite enough, though, especially as we knew we *should* be putting money aside in case we faced reduced teaching loads in the spring semester. My husband and I had no health insurance; for the girls, we acquired CHIP – another hit to the wallet because state programs like that are calculated on how much you earn per month (which looked sufficient) rather than how much you earn per year (much less once you take into account the typically reduced spring teaching load and the dicey summer situation). So we paid $500/month for their health insurance. What ended up happening is that, despite working what I calculated to be roughly 65 hours/week (at what amounted to a wage of $9/hour), we were unable to save any money. In November, we received the bad news we had been worried about: between the two of us, our teaching loads would be reduced from 8 classes to 3, a completely untenable financial situation. Before I discuss what steps we decided to take (or where fate led us) let me spend a moment describing that fall semester.
At 65 hours/week, the quality of one’s teaching decreases. Even spending as much time as I did on grading and lesson planning, my lessons were not as thorough as they had been in the years where I was working on my dissertation and only teaching two classes. There is simply not enough time to prepare a thorough lesson with the historical breadth and critical depth characteristic of an excellent class. My responses to individual homework and writing assignments were necessarily curtailed. Rather than the full analysis which normally comprised my responses, I developed parsimonious rules of grading – 1-2 comments per page, a 5 sentence global comment at the end. I felt guilty, but it was the only way to ensure that the 90 papers I received every 2-3 weeks were returned to them before the next round was handed in. I tried to counteract it by expounding on my paper comments in meetings with the students who cared about their grades. Cultivating writing skills requires an attention to the details of student writing that I simply could not accomplish as well as I might if I had been teaching fewer classes. I did not have an office, which made conferencing with students, a requirement at both universities, incredibly difficult. But the lack of an office is a minor complaint, one that joins others such as difficulties in getting copies made, lack of communication with other faculty and program directors, little in the way of educational support in general. Because I was traveling to two different campuses, my travel time each week was roughly 13-14 hours. I spent most of my waking hours, including on weekends, working. I was exhausted – and felt increasingly distant from my family.
But it was necessary. The pay at one of the universities I taught at was slightly above average for the area; the pay at the other was rock bottom for the area. Neither had adjunct unions. They didn’t offer benefits, nor did they promise any job security. It is purely an exchange-based process, a stripped-down transaction of the adjunct’s time and knowledge for just enough begrudgingly-given pay to survive on – and often not even that. Frequently in the spring classes get reduced. Summer is unpredictable, and the summer classes are often given to favorites again and again (without a union, there are no rules to counteract such favoritism). There is no stability, and unless one is independently wealthy or has a spouse in another, more stable profession, inevitably one’s finances, credit, and housing situation suffer.
To return to where I left off at the end of Fall ’13, with the devastating news that our income would be so reduced as to force us to move out of our house (breaking a lease in the process) and into a relative’s house, we began to look for other options. A friend was leaving her job in administration (at my graduate alma mater) and suggested I apply for it. I was hired. As a mid-level administrative assistant, I make twice what my husband and I would have made teaching together. Our entire family has health insurance. We don’t have to worry about the possibility of eviction or scarce food any more. Life is immeasurably better. Except this job in administration doesn’t fit in with what I had envisioned for myself. How important are those ideals? I spend a lot of time debating that, as well as calculating how much you could raise adjunct pay out of the waste I see on this side of university life and fantasizing about quitting my job. I am still applying for tenure-track jobs, but a return to adjuncting would be foolhardy and financially disastrous, so for now here I stay. I’m trying to consider myself lucky.
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