On Academic Precarity of the Faculty Adjunct by Ali Colleen Neff

“…Academic precarity is the year-to-year or class-to-class, contingent, underpaid and labor-intensive employment status most Ph.D.s now have to navigate while seeking a protected tenure-track position.

“After, say, eight years of graduate school, this tacks on another two to four to ten years at a $20-$40,000/year salary. [College adjuncts] have crossed over into [their] thirties and forties in sustained poverty, now separated from [their] graduate communities and parceled into departments and towns in which [they] have no belonging or protection. 

“All the while, [they] must stay on the academic job market, an extremely demanding labor that costs up to 800 unpaid hours a year and expensive attendance at conferences and interviews. These jobs are unprotected, shorter-term, and often require moving to far-flung college towns from year to year. 

“The precariat is charged with developing entire new courses on short notice…, teaching large classes of students whom they'll never see again, and biting their nails in hopes this will be the year they are going to get chosen. 

“They are more than thirsty: they have been drawn into the academic shell game long enough and far enough to have, semester by semester, staked their financial, physical, familial and mental health on it.

“Yet with every passing day, they see that the career they had invested immense loans and a decade of work to build is hostile, empty, and dangerous to the most vulnerable in the Wild West of rapid defunding and administrative power grabs. 

“This is not because they are suckers; this is because higher education is in undeniable crisis. It is imploding, suddenly, leaving then scrambling to understand the circumstances in which [college adjuncts'] lives [are] unfolding…

“Precarity is the phenomenon of being on the edge: one lost contract, one departmental bully, one nasty student evaluation and there is no job… Can [they] switch careers on such short notice, in a different town, with no savings? Jump on a contract--any contract, anywhere, for any pay–until [they] can sort it out on nights and weekends. Do [they] retrain to do HR or Admin or tax preparation and forfeit the research [they] have done, or do [they] follow the conventional wisdom that if [they] are tough enough to hang in there, and brilliant enough to shine through, [they'll] be the one who gets the job and gets to be the professor?

“Precarity is a holding zone that entails more overwork, more debt, and the expiration of passionate graduate research for the day-to-day tasks [college adjuncts] take on in order to show [their] department that [they] are worthy of a good recommendation, even as they treat [them] as day laborers. 

“Precarity is hope that sustains the past promise of hope and into the immediacy of survival. Precarity is humiliating. Precarity quickly becomes a stigma when [college adjuncts] are not-good-enough for too many semesters in a row…”

For the complete article, On Academic Precarity by Ali Colleen Neff, click here. 

For 58 articles on the plight of adjunct faculty, click here.