Key Takeaways
- With low pay and little access to employer-provided benefits, contingent faculty are struggling to get essential healthcare and cover the rising cost of food and rent.
- Non-tenure-track faculty who belong to unions fare better than those who don't. But even with a union, life as an adjunct can be grim.
- The higher education system has become increasingly dependent on temporary labor: nearly 70% of U.S. faculty members held a contingent position in fall 2021, up from 47% in 1987.
It’s been nearly a decade since Margaret Mary Vojtko’s death became a rallying cry for exploited faculty. Vojtko, a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University, died on a street corner after suffering a cardiac arrest. Two weeks later, her lawyer published an opinion piece in the local paper, faulting the university for failing to help Vojtko in her later years, when she was struggling to afford her cancer treatment.
Part-time faculty across the country were enraged—and the discussion around Vojtko’s death brought new attention to the working conditions of adjunct academics. Yet little has changed since her passing.
The horror stories of non-tenure-track faculty still abound in academia. And, as the higher education system becomes increasingly dependent on temporary labor (nearly 70% of U.S. faculty members held a contingent position in fall 2021, up from 47% in 1987, according to a report by AAUP), the problem is only becoming more urgent.
With low pay and little access to employer-provided benefits, contingent faculty struggle to get essential health care and cover the rising cost of food and rent. They are expected to teach with little institutional support, no job security, and limited access to basic resources, like laptops and office space.
Faculty who belong to unions fare better than those who don’t: in their last contract, City University of New York adjuncts won a 71% increase in minimum pay. And the last Coalition of Academic Workforce survey found that unionized adjuncts are paid about 25 percent more than non-union adjuncts. But even with a union, life as an adjunct can be grim.
Despite the challenges they face, many instructors in contingent positions are exceptional educators: they have advanced degrees, care deeply about their students, and make enormous sacrifices to carve out time to meet with students face-to-face. Still, the higher education system treats them as disposable.
Here are some of their stories.
“I realized I’d been sold a bill of goods. I’m never going to get hired." - John Martin
Nearly 30 years ago, John Martin first began teaching as an adjunct faculty member, “hoping it would lead to a full-time job,” he recalls. It never has—and, by now, he realizes it never will. Sometime in the last century, “I realized I’d been sold a bill of goods. I’m never going to get hired,” he says.
But he still loves teaching history to college students and so, he has persisted as an adjunct at two California community colleges. One semester a few years ago, Martin taught nine classes: “It was the most money I ever made in my life.” The next semester? He taught two.
Job security is a huge issue for contingent faculty members. Martin says he never knows how many classes he’ll get assigned from semester to semester, or whether they might get canceled or reassigned to a full-time faculty member days before the semester begins.
The other challenge, of course, is pay. Teach two classes a semester at some California community colleges and get paid $5,000. That’s $15,000 a year with summer classes—and summer classes rarely go to adjuncts.
Today, Martin, who is chair of the California Part-time Faculty Association—an independent grassroots organization—is a plaintiff in a suit filed against the state by adjuncts across California, demanding compensation for the many hours they spend preparing for classes and grading student work.
"We're all there teaching the same students. And we all want them to succeed." - Deborah Rogers-Jaye
Deborah Rogers-Jaye considers herself lucky. She’s been teaching childhood development courses as an adjunct faculty member for over 20 years—but that hasn’t been her only gig.
Early in her career when she was supporting three kids, she worked full-time as a director at the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago, and then as a consultant for Chicago Public Schools—all while teaching classes in the evenings and on Saturdays.
Most of her colleagues would prefer to focus all of their energy on teaching, but working multiple jobs is the only way you can survive as an adjunct, she says. “You can’t make ends meet teaching one or two courses.”
She’s grateful that her jobs have been related to her career. She knows a lot of adjuncts who’ve had had to pick up extra work as baristas or servers. Others try to pick up courses at several different colleges. But bouncing from campus to campus makes it difficult to form relationships within any one department, she says, making it even harder to land a full-time job—or feel like you’re a respected part of the team.
She also considers herself lucky to work in a department that gives her a seat at the table. As a union rep, she knows this isn’t most adjuncts’ experience. There’s no magic wand to fix the myriad of challenges adjuncts face, she acknowledges, but she says changing the culture within departments so adjuncts are valued and understood is an important place to start. “We’re all there teaching the same students,” she says. “And we all want them to succeed.”
“If I had to have an extended stay in a hospital, I could be wiped out financially." - Walter Harper
For Walter Harper, life as an adjunct professor is a balancing act. Gasoline is expensive and money is tight, so he only uses his car to get to and from campus. To get everywhere else, he takes the bus or walks. The commute from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, to Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts, where he teaches courses in anthropology, is about 40 miles.
Providence isn’t cheap, but it’s more affordable than Boston, so the commute is worth it—that is, if he can stack his classes in the morning and get out before rush hour, when traffic turns the usual 45-minute drive into a three-hour ordeal.
When it comes to health insurance, Medicare is keeping him afloat for now, but it doesn’t cover everything. “If I had to have an extended stay in a hospital, I could be wiped out financially,” he says. If he had better pay, more job security, and health insurance, he wouldn’t have to live his life “semester to semester.”
If we want to make quality public institutions available to young people, he says, “every faculty member who works there should have an adequate wage. They should have health insurance and more resources so they can be the wonderful professor that every student deserves.”
