Learning About the Adjunct Crisis

To be perfectly honest, I had not been aware of all the disappointments that come with being an adjunct professor at higher educational institutions today. Since a young age, I’ve been taught about the value of education, of how far it can take you and how it alone can change the course of your entire life. Those choosing to take the scholarly path of teaching or professorship have long been seen in my eyes as honorable individuals. They foster growth and knowledge into all sectors of society and seem, at least from the exterior, to maintain what constitutes as a ‘good’ stable career. Hence, Catie’s presentation on the current ‘adjunct crisis’ thoroughly surprised me-- the idea of a faculty member of any university “sleeping in a car, showering at college athletic centers and applying to food stamps” hit me with the reality of an incredibly problematic situation.

The choice of any doctoral student to continue to contribute to the educational field should be highly regarded and respected—albeit if they are on a ‘tenure track’ or not. It’s unnerving to learn that corporate universities are willing to monetize on labor in order to sustain funding for a growing list of amenities that, as The Atlantic article puts it, focuses “on enhancing the student experience outside—rather than inside—the classroom.” Looking more and more like a business in which students are the customer, universities now ‘market’ themselves to attract potential future alumni. This was especially apparent at my alma mater, Loyola Marymount University, where its reputation as one of the “most beautiful college campuses” situated near sun, sand and surf was often used as a tool to campaign for more incoming applications.

Furthermore, during my four years at LMU, there had always been a lot of hush hush talk amongst various faculty members regarding tenure, university politics, pressures to “publish publish publish” and as one individual so simply put it, “hierarchal injustices.” Often times, when various professors disagreed upon a specific course of action the University was implementing (such as changing the entire undergraduate core curriculum during my senior year), it would be my tenured professors who’d step out to challenge the status quo. There was this inside joke of how they didn’t have to ‘worry’ because, well, “I’m already tenured!”

I never fully grasped the concept of all of this until learning more about it from this course—and the articles Catie shared with us succinctly outline the harm that all of this can continue to have on society. “College is no longer creating a critically-thinking citizenry who can participate actively in a democracy,” Maria Maisto says in The Atlantic piece. Furthermore, it is, as Joe Moran puts it, “erecting barriers between teachers and students” (p. 76). As we saw even in the brief in-class Job Worksheet exercise, the goal of actually ‘teaching and working with students’ was not a top priority for any professor—associate or otherwise. In this day and age, adoption of the promotional mode has, unfortunately, “become indispensable to academic survival” (p. 74).

Stuart Hall had once stressed for academics to concentrate first and foremost on the students. With this ongoing ‘crisis,’ the system has obviously lost sight of education’s main mission, of what academia should really be about. That, in itself, is the most terrifying thing of all.