Inside the Current Issue

Reports from the Front: The Adjuncting Experience

In this special section... The Tensions of Teaching Marriah Star Critical Adjuncting Kimora Reflections of an Adjunct Teacher Daphna El-Roy On Love, Hate and Adjuncting Dan Skinner Graduate Students: Sign your Union Cards! Andrea Morrell Against Tuition Remission, Against PSC Adjunct Unionization Spencer Sunshine The Value of Student Evaluations Jonathan R. Wynn Experts Ask: Do We Need Adjunct Pedagogy? Mark Wilson The New Proletarian Academy James Hoff Teaching Shakespeare with an Eastern European Accent Szidonia Haragos

On Love, Hate and Adjuncting

Dan Skinner

To make one's way through graduate school as an adjunct is to precariously straddle a complex of paradoxes, all of which make the experience of teaching both hopelessly liminal and simultaneously rewarding. In the disjointed and obscenely defunded CUNY system, this is particularly true.

Obviously, there are good reasons to adjunct. The rationalization that has kept me coming back for more for almost four years now is that, conditions aside, adjuncting is closer to doing what I care about than every other job I've had. My utter inability and unwillingness to function in the average corporate office environment, after all, was one of the reasons why I went back to school. I've enjoyed adjuncting, not necessarily out of a pure love of my specific discipline, political theory, but out of a newfound care for pedagogy, a word rarely heard in the halls of 365 Fifth Avenue. The pay is atrocious, of course, but, on the whole I've learned more from my undergrad students than I have from many of my graduate school professors. And I've learned how to teach. It's far better than walking dogs, as a recent article in The Advocate suggested I should do. I may be biased, though: I hate goddamn dogs.

Brackets: It occurs to me that what I wrote just then is not quite true. While there are some wonderfully hardworking and creative students in the CUNY system, basic skills are - on the whole - so deficit that I think that if I were teaching something I felt had no extra-academic value - as I believe thinking about politics does - I wouldn't care nearly half as much as I do. If I studied Biology, for example, I'd have to teach elementary-, junior- or high school, where the formative damage of public education in New York City is really inflicted.

Nonetheless, adjuncts should be aware of their liminal status. I worry about my fellow "unnecessaries" who allow their students to call them "professor." There is something dangerous about "playing professor" - the least of which is the psychological damage that will be done when the structure of the system reveals itself at the end of our studies and we enter "the market." Not only are the chances of most CUNY adjuncts getting "good" jobs low, but even CUNY itself has a dispreference for its own; there is an unmistakable spectre haunting CUNY that makes it clear that CUNY adjuncts themselves are, in the long run, not even good enough for CUNY - the final nail in the CUNY coffin. (At a "professional development" seminar a few years ago, this was made explicit - "we teach you, but the reality is that you're probably not going to be able to get a job here.")

The system is seriously flawed, and I'm well aware of the structural problems that agreeing to teach condones and supports. The forces keeping CUNY from imploding altogether are the good faith efforts of underpaid and slightly masochistic adjuncts who teach for reasons that linger outside of the simple logics of political economy. CUNY is lucky - very lucky - and CUNY students are lucky that it is (or, looking to the future, that it has been so far). This is another reason why I worry about students calling their adjunct lecturers "professor": students (and their parents) should be aware of how the system that they are depending upon works. It needs to be exposed rather than glossed over with an illusory veneer. CUNY gets away with far too much, and we adjuncts let them do it.

There are the usual arguments, all no doubt true (see, e.g. Spencer's article in this issue): in accepting sub-subsistence jobs, adjuncts are hurting their long-term prospects as academics and teachers. We're propping up a system that, ironically, once we finish our degrees, will be so packed with cheap labor that there won't be any jobs for us. We should stop it now. We should turn this labor power into change. If we all just refused to work, the system would crumble, hence forcing a real reconfiguration and reinvestment by the politicians who claim to care so deeply about education. Doing so would force the universities to hire more PhDs, who could then give students the quality education they deserve, and us, eventually, jobs.

There are problems with this, however. Many - if not most - students in the CUNY system seem to prefer adjuncts to their full-time, tenured professors (many, incidentally, don't know the difference...a different but related problem). Many students say that they learn best from adjuncts who, admittedly, may not have the depth of knowledge of their fulltime colleagues, but enjoy asking difficult questions and struggling through them - a process that is exciting for students, most of whom have never been asked to work through a critical puzzle in their lives. Teaching, after all, is about learning how to think, and that's what graduate students are learning how to do every day.

This is not, of course, to disparage full-time faculty. There are some brilliant and passionate professors at CUNY (most of whom, by the way, are themselves underpaid and given scant professional resources). But new teachers have to work hard to give coherent and exciting lectures, and students appreciate the enthusiasm and investment that this uphill climb engenders. There are bigger problems with CUNY than adjuncting and, I have to admit, I enjoy the simple possibility that my efforts, however misguided they may be in the long run, have actually made a difference in even a few students' lives. Happily, this egotistical sentiment happens to jibe with my core progressive values.

Slouching back toward the downside, a few final thoughts. The average adjunct teaches two or three classes, prepares for and attends her or his own classes, and takes on additional part-time jobs to pay the bills (which, at CUNY, usually and shamefully includes tuition). Adjuncts are often confronted with the choice of preparing lectures, grading their students' papers, or preparing for their own classes or exams. Unwilling to let down their students, many adjuncts choose the sacrificial route and allow their own education to take a backseat, pushing serious intellectual work past the midnight hour or dispensing with it all together.

A point which, writing this at 2 a.m., reminds me: adjuncting is isolating. Without reliable office space or resources, and excluded from faculty meetings, adjuncts lead a mostly fractured and acommunal existence. Relationships with fellow adjuncts are frantic and hard to maintain. This, again, is particularly true at CUNY since the system is a fractured collection of colleges. Graduate students teaching at CUNY move from one isolated space to another, with nowhere to settle down and feel part of an institution (ahem, I mean "ivory tower"). This, in fact, is a mirror reflection of the experience GC students have with their professors: community is nearly impossible at CUNY, and in graduate school, community is supposed to be everything.

Finally, a rarely acknowledged - if obvious - "fact": the average high school teacher has had extensive formal training before being thrown into the classroom. CUNY students would probably be shocked to learn that there is no pedagogical training or experience required when adjuncts are first put in their classrooms. This is equally unfair to students and teachers. If CUNY is going to maintain its current reliance on adjuncts, then, it could at least provide some form of paid training to indicate that it values the integrity of its classroom. And it would give adjuncts a little confidence that the system cares whether they are successful in the classroom or not. At the very least, CUNY could garner a reputation for producing PhDs who are among the best teachers in the country.

Of course, the fact is that the state government and the CUNY Board of Trustees don't really care about the quality of education at CUNY. In this respect I have said nothing surprising here. I continue to teach because I love it. And, love, as we all know, is intimately bound with hate.