A L S O_ T O D A Y Comics Ruben Bolling: Everybody Wang Chung tonight T A B L E_ T A L K Has higher education become nothing more than a commodity? Discuss students as "customers" in the Education area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Vocational fiction 101 By Carol Lloyd The principles of creative writing can help make sense of the absurd autobiographical art of résumé creation (09/16/98) Penile Ponderings By Lori Gottlieb When a professor asks you to grope your friend's organs for extra credit, what's the right thing to do? (09/15/98) The $10,000 hoop By Zachary Karabell Why college doesn't matter (09/14/98) Why Ivory Tower? By Carol Llloyd Salon launches a new university section BROWSE THE IVORY TOWER ARCHIVE

GOING ADJUNCT | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - The life of an adjunct is dismal indeed, as anyone who's experienced it can tell you. The worst part, according to Columbia grad student Patrick Young, is the rude discovery that one is in a dead-end rather than an entry-level job. Over the past two years Young has held down jobs at five different institutions while working toward his Ph.D. in history. His toughest days have included shuttling between three different campuses spread over two of New York City's boroughs. Young says he's reached the point where he feels more like a menial laborer than someone following a linear professional path. "The whole idea that you'd be that transient is so antithetical to the idea of the engaged teacher," says Young. Between bad pay and lack of benefits and office space, Young is reminded on a daily basis of his status as second-class citizen. Some of the most destructive aspects of this existence are less easy to define. Confronted with the apathy of academic departments, he says, most adjuncts have little choice but to internalize their resentments endlessly. "The level of cynicism is harrowing," says Young. I ask what he means. He explains, "There's a constant temptation to avoid working hard because you're simply participating in your own exploitation." Hunter College adjunct lecturer Barbara Desmond has toiled for five years in Hunter's English department, where she describes working conditions so crowded that one colleague sometimes uses the bathroom to prepare for classes. Other disincentives include not being paid for preparation time or to hold office hours; with classes of up to 35 students, this can add up. Desmond discounts the possibility that being an adjunct has affected her performance; though conditions outside the classroom are bleak, she claims that, in the end, her cynicism has been short-circuited by her classroom experiences. Yet she tells me that in her spare time she's writing a script called "The Adjunct," a horror movie about an unstable part-timer who one day decides she's had enough and "goes adjunct." "Kathy Bates would be perfect for the part," says Desmond a bit wistfully. Tim Coogan is another denizen of this brave new world of academic nomadism. He works as an adjunct lecturer at three schools in the New York metropolitan area: Rutgers University, LaGuardia Community College and Cooper Union. Last year he taught a total of 18 classes, ranging from U.S. history and Western civilization to the history of technology and labor history. In the past he's also taught introduction to sociology, the history of minorities and the history of New York City. He's been doing this for 15 years and claims that he's taught at every school in the greater New York area, with the exception of Columbia and the New School. Hired as much for their willingness to work for low wages and no benefits as for their expertise in English composition or American history, adjunct teachers have become an integral part of the new market-driven university system. According to the National Adjunct Faculty Guild, there are currently 400,000 adjunct, part-time and full-time temporary college educators in the United States. Approximately 40 percent of the country's total academic work force, in other words, is treated as temporary labor -- roughly double the 1970 figure. The reasons for this expansion are complex -- according to a report recently released by the Modern Language Association, they have something to do with the end of the nation's Cold War-era educational funding system. It's no secret that schools balance their books with part-time teachers. Downsizing and flexibility have become the mantras of academic administrators. In the past, an implicit trade-off was assumed: In return for providing cheap labor, graduate students and recent Ph.D.s could get classroom experience that prepared them for life as members of the professoriate. With the current crisis of oversupply, however, more and more find themselves joining a new academic proletariat. For the current crop of Ph.D.s, the glad tidings of generational change have turned sour. The anticipated faculty turnover of the 1990s has failed to materialize. Tenured professors tenaciously defend their closed, guildlike world from the challenges of administrators and public officials. Academic superstars, who nowadays easily command six-figure salaries, often refuse to teach introductory level courses, which creates an increasing demand for part-timers. With declining budgets and escalating costs, overproduction of Ph.D.s and an embattled professoriate clinging to its privileges, no one is predicting changes any time soon. As NAFG executive director Patricia Lesko puts it, "What would prompt college administrations to change their basic employment practices?" The problems are too "structural," says part-time faculty advocate Karen Thompson. When she's not teaching English classes, Thompson works as president of Rutgers University's part-time chapter of the American Association of University Professors. She stresses that academic labor should be seen within the larger context of economic restructuring in which new forms of contingent work are becoming the norm. "Higher education is increasingly being transformed into a kind of vocational training system," she says. In the new information economy, educators will continue to play an important role, maintains Thompson, but an increasing number will do so as migrant workers. The ramifications are already being felt at every level of the higher education system: by an increasingly demoralized part-time work force; by full-timers, whose own bargaining position is undercut by the existence of this large reserve force; and by students, who are inevitably shortchanged by the system. I did manage to find a small glimmer of hope amid the ruinous statistics. Over the past five years, I learned, NAFG and other organizations like it have made "academic labor" one of the hottest topics on campus. Efforts at organizing have injected a new militancy into the hushed groves of academia. Though small, the tangible gains of these developments are not entirely negligible. Thompson cites the granting of recent concessions at CUNY, including better pay and pro-rated health benefits. But who can launch a movement, when you're teaching four, five, sometimes even more classes, often at more than one school, while trying to finish a dissertation? Organizing also assumes a degree of identification with one's status that many are not ready to make. "Having gone into adjunct teaching thinking it was a transitional phase," Desmond says, "I didn't want to accept this as what I'm doing with my life, and don't want to have to defend it." Each conversation was confirming my worst fears about my future. By the time I met Tim Coogan for coffee, I was thinking about a new career. He seemed to read my mind. "It's easy," he nodded, "to get frustrated by the sense that the profession has not made good on its promises. I know my Marxism and my labor history, and I know I'm being super-exploited." Yet Coogan himself does not fit easily into the adjunct-as-object-of-pathos mold. Wiry, bearded and bespectacled, he exudes fearlessness. His is a situation most would find singularly unappealing. Yet he's managed to carve out an enviable existence at the margins of academia. He ticks off some basic facts: at around $3,000 a class (for up to 18 classes a year) he makes as much as an associate professor. At Rutgers, where he's taught for more than 10 years, he has an office and is on the pension plan. He also gets medical benefits from LaGuardia. And he gets to live in New York City, a major plus. "In the hierarchy of adjunctification," Coogan says with a certain sang-froid, "I'm at the top." He publishes occasionally, thus escaping the condescension that many adjuncts say they feel from full-time professors. Doesn't he ever find his situation depressing? Coogan admits that his career trajectory has taken him down some strange byways. For instance, he's taught murderers and rapists at Riker's Island, where New York's Department of Corrections maintains an educational outreach program. But Coogan says that he ultimately found the experience tremendously rewarding. His inmate-students sent him a Christmas card at the end of the semester. Coogan seeks such challenges out. Not only do they pay well, but he's generally given carte blanche. He's the hired gun, the one who's brought in to take the job when no one else would dare. Indeed, Coogan finds hidden benefits to his situation. "In some ways," he points out, "I'm liberated from the tedium of academic life." He gets his pick of classes, and best of all, he never has to attend departmental meetings, the bane of every professor's existence. He's seen lots of his friends move on, and concedes that his life is not for the fainthearted. Yet he himself still has energy to spare, a fact he attributes to the pleasures of the classroom. Despite the obvious drawbacks, Coogan says, "I can live with being an adjunct." As he rushed off to catch the subway to yet another class, I had to admit that anything, even the subway, sounded better than a departmental meeting. I wasn't a violent person; I wouldn't harm a fly, much less a professor. Anyway, I mused, they already had plenty to worry about. I'd seen the future, and it wasn't pretty, but neither was it completely discouraging. One day, when tenure is finally demolished, academic cowboys like Coogan -- smart, resourceful and independent -- will be the ones who thrive. Only the truly brave will apply to graduate school in the first place, and they'll wear the badge of adjuncthood with pride. SALON | Sept. 17, 1998 Andreas Killen is a happily underemployed historian and new father living in New York. Any job offers should be forwarded to him care of Salon.