November 17: Miners, The Bowels of the Earth, Good Reads, New Cartoon

"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.

"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth," returned the Spirit.  "But they know me.  See!"

I have used this passage from A Christmas Carol before.  The Ghost of Christmas Present has brought Scrooge to a mining village.  The Spirit's goal is to show Scrooge that even people who live in the most desperate of circumstances celebrate Christmas.  Yes, the Ghost is saying to Scrooge, even these poor schlubs enjoy this holy time.

For my Good Read today I have chosen a book near and dear to my own circumstances.  The book is titled In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, and it is written by a person who simply identifies himself as Professor X.  Professor X is an adjunct English instructor, and he performs the same job I perform at my university.  In his Introduction, he describes his duties:

We may look mild-mannered, we adjunct instructors, in our eyeglasses and our corduroy jackets, our bald heads and trimmed beards, our peasant skirts and Birkenstocks, but we are nothing less than academic hit men.  We are paid by the college to perform the dirty work that no one else wants to do, the wrenching, draining, sorrowful business of teaching and failing the unprepared.  We are not characters out of great academic novels such as Pain or Lord Jim.  We have more in common with Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.

Adjuncts are the miners of higher education, working in the bowels of universities and colleges.  Professor X doesn't use his real name, doesn't name the academic institutions at which he teaches.  He says he maintains his anonymity to protect his school.  That may be true.  However, being a 17-year veteran of the adjunct wars, I also know that Professor X is protecting himself.  As "contract" teachers, adjuncts are hired semester-by-semester, depending upon enrollment.  We are hit men.  The analogy in the passage above is fairly accurate.  We teach classes that the full-time professors cannot or do not want to teach.  We adjuncts are always one disagreement with a department head away from unemployment.

Professor X captures the plight of this underclass of higher education fairly well.  Most adjuncts begin teaching as a way to supplement their incomes.  A bad mortgage or high credit card debt or sudden job loss forces a person with an advanced degree to join the ranks of these teachers at the bottom of the educational mineshaft.  If I remember correctly, Professor X's situation involves the purchase of an expensive new home.

Don't get me wrong.  Professor X also writes about the rewards of the adjunct business, which are abundant.  There's always the hope of improving students' lives.  That's one of the reason why I have been an adjunct for close to 20 years.  I believe I can make a difference in the world, every year, every semester, every class, every student.  That is the ultimate goal of my teaching career.  Professor X captures this hope pretty well in his final paragraph, where he describes meeting with his students in the basement of the ivory tower:

We are, all of us there gathered, trembling with fright, short of breath, sick at heart, but perhaps hopeful.  That our senses are so alive is thrilling.  The whiteboard markers give off a vaguely medicinal smell.  The edges of posters from semesters past curl away from the wall.  Motes of dust bob in the light from the overhead projector.  The old heating unit comes on with a shudder.  There seems a meaning in all this mundanity that lies just beyond our grasp.  Every new assignment, at least, starts us all thinking.

 Saint Marty is ever hopeful, ever thinking.

Confessions of Saint Marty





May 9: Being an Adjunct, Saint Pachomius, Instructor Bridesmaid

I'm currently reading a really interesting book about teaching as an adjunct professor in higher education.  In the Basement of the Ivory Tower was written by Professor X.  The man doesn't want to identify himself.  He fears embarrassing his students and the institutions at which he teaches.  But Professor X is exposing the underbelly of colleges and universities.  Discussing full-time, tenure-track professors, he writes, "[a]ccording to a report by the American Federation of Teachers, only 27.9 percent of faculty fit this description in 2007, a decline from 33.1 percent in 1997.  In community colleges, only 17.5 percent are full-time tenured or on the tenure track."  That means that I'm a member of the majority teacher class (72.1 percent) in institutions of higher learning.  That doesn't give adjuncts any more respect, however.  In fact, the Modern Language Association judges the quality of a school by this gauge:  "the fewer the adjuncts on the job, the better."

Buy this book!  Hug your adjunct!

I really shouldn't read this book.  I find it both enlightening and depressing at the same time.  I've known for some time that I'm basically on the lowest rung of the academic ladder.  For the last few years, the adjuncts at my institution have been trying to unionize.  The full-time professors have voted to accept us into their union by a very slim margin.  However, the e-mail debate preceding the vote was heated, nasty, and incredibly self-centered.  I understand where the full-timers are coming from.  They're an endangered species, and they're trying to protect their turf.  I would probably be doing the same thing, if I were in their privileged position.  I am not, however.

One of the things I have learned from Professor X's book is that I probably don't stand a chance of ever being hired full-time by my university.  Because I am basically gum on the soles of professorial shoes, scraping that gum off and giving it a full-time job with benefits, private office, and retirement is not very likely.  I have known this fact for a while in the back of my mind.  I mean, as the old saying goes, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free (or next-to-nothing)?  The only chance I probably have of ever being hired by my department is if I win the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, or the Nobel Prize.  Therefore, I will always be Instructor Bridesmaid, never Professor Bride.

I am not bitter about this fact.  Much.  I think I realized the truth of my situation a long time ago.  I just prefer to live in a state of intellectual denial.

In a lot of ways, my professional situation is a lot like the situation of Pachomius, today's feast saint.  Pachomius was born at the end of the third century in Egypt.  What he did that nobody had done before is "organize hermits into groups and write down a Rule for them."  Pachomius was the founder of Christian monasticism, although the credit is usually given to Saint Anthony (I don't know why).  Even Basil and Benedict, the most famous Christian monastics, based their rules on Pachomius' Rule.  But Pachomius is not a household name.  When you go to kindergartens, there aren't a lot of little Pachomiuses running around.  Basically, Pachomius is an adjunct saint, acknowledged only grudgingly by the full-time, big-name saints.

Professor X is still teaching.  Like most contingent faculty (that's the more politically correct term for adjunct), he needs the money and, also, believes what he does in the classroom actually makes a difference.  Which is also something that sets adjuncts apart from many full-timers.

Professor X, Pachomius, and Saint Marty--adjuncts for life and beyond.