This College Professor Has a Master's...And Is Living in Poverty

[Igel]

74. This is true and not quite right at the same time.

I've been an adjunct, but the courses I've taught weren't essential in any way.

They satisfied a temporary, short term demand and to hire a permanent person for that would be crazy, or they were filling in for somebody who was on sabbatical (or whose tenure-line was waiting to be filled). This adds variety and breadth or scope to a dept. It provides flexibility and as such is good for the students, too. My formal semantics teacher was one of those--he used his experience as adjunct to get hired in a tenure-track position in the Netherlands (sadly, killed in a car crash a few years later). Another adjunct was finalizing his dissertation, and it provided income and experience after his winter diss defense but before he filed and graduated in late spring. (He's tenured at MIT now.)

Or the adjuncts' courses weren't relevant to the university's mission as the university defined them. My dept. always had adjuncts. The adjuncts taught introductory language course electives, one or two per year, year after year, but "introductory language teaching" at a Tier 1 research university is a service course at best. Moreover, we're talking Romanian, Hungarian, or other languages that ended after two years of instruction. No 3rd year Hungarian, only perhaps a Hungarian or Romanian survey literature class every 4 years. One year nobody signed up for Romanian. Bye-bye adjunct. (If the teacher had been tenured, what then?)

You don't want that kind of teacher to be tenured if you have to worry about finances. They typically have small teacher:student ratios, a good thing. But they tie up resources so you have large core classes that can't be funded. Complaining about how universities get their money is no help: The universities get their money and then decide on adjuncts or no. My dept. not only had adjuncts for Romanian and Hungarian, but tenured faculty for 3 lesser-taught languages. These tenured faculty had to teach 3 courses a semester, two of which were 1st and 2nd year language classes. 1st year would have perhaps 10-20 students, 2nd year would have 3-8. Their non-language courses might have 10 students, so fewer than 40 students per semester. Meanwhile in psych or English they'd "core" courses with more than 40 students each taught by adjuncts because the regents only had assigned so many tenure lines, and 3 of them were taken.

As those underutilized tenure-lines were vacated by RIFs and retirements they went to psych and English and those other language courses were staffed by adjuncts. My dept. went from lots of tenured faculty to some tenured faculty in a sea of language adjuncts.

The one exception I saw to this mission/non-mission division was a language instructor with a master degree who made a name for herself as a kind of theoretician. She didn't just teach some undergrads how to order a meal in a restaurant or reserve a train ticket in a foreign language. She taught 4 years of the language, but that wasn't enough. She trained grad students to be excellent teachers, observing them, assigning readings, going over lesson plans. It still wasn't enough. She co-authored a 1st year textbook, then a second-year textbook, then a pedagogy manual. She started writing papers and presenting at conferences on pedagogical techniques, using data from courses she supervised to show not how to teach a language better but how to train language teachers to be better teachers.

After fighting for several years, and an offer of a pay increase + tenure from another Tier 1 school, she was converted to tenured faculty. Thing is, she wasn't primarily a language instructor at that point, but supervised TAs and onoly taught pedagogy classes and upper division language classes.

Teaching freshmen or even advanced composition ... Not research. Not academic. It's secondary or even tertiary to the primary mission of the dept. and in the context of a tier 2 university it's still just a service course. It's like algebra and pre-cal. It's the kind of thing universities should contract out to local community colleges for, and community colleges should offer at high schools for dual credit.