by Elaina Loveland

Adjuncts are more catered to than ever. Adjunctopia.com helps part-time faculty find jobs. Academic publishers Allyn & Bacon/Longman and Houghton Mifflin host Web sites exclusively for adjuncts. A cover story about an adjunct English professor was published this past summer in Washington Post Magazine. People are beginning to recognize the role adjuncts play in the higher education community, and nearly everyone has some advice to give.

Jill Carroll, an adjunct in Texas, has this recommendation: adjuncts should think of themselves as entrepreneurs. The article, “Less Whining, More Teaching,” written by Scott Smallwood and published in the August 2001 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, urges adjuncts to approach teaching part-time as a business. In the piece we meet Jill Carroll, who earns approximately $54,000 per year teaching 12 courses at several different campuses. Since the article’s publication, Carroll has proven that she is certainly a businesswoman. Besides teaching, she now has self-published a manual called How to Survive as an Adjunct Lecturer: An Entrepreneurial Strategy Manual, maintains a Web site called AdjunctSolutions.com, offers e-mail consulting services to fellow adjuncts for $65 an hour and writes monthly for The Chronicle. I wondered, was Carroll on to something? Could adjuncts really approach teaching like a small business? As an adjunct at the community college level, I am grateful to have the opportunity to teach and gain experience so someday I might be able to make teaching my primary vocation. In the meantime, however, I work in publishing during the day and moonlight as an adjunct. I decided to put Carroll’s entrepreneurial theory to the test.

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