Adjunct As Object: A Look At A Dozen Dissertations
Perhaps familiarity does breed contempt. Nearly half of post-secondary faculty work as adjuncts, yet Ph.D. students pay them scant attention when choosing dissertation topics. During the past three years, 11 out of 120,000 dissertations examined adjunct faculty use. Ten of the eleven were written by scholars in the discipline of education, and a Ph.D. candidate in economics wrote the eleventh. Ph.D. candidates in the rest of academe are curiously uncurious about adjunct faculty.
Even the dissertations that acknowledge adjunct faculty do so only in a parochial sense, focusing on part-timers in one state or one community-college system, for instance. Only one dissertation among those examined by this writer included research about part-time faculty from two states; for the most part, the dissertations presented research about adjunct faculty in the Midwest and south. The coasts, with their prestigious universities and tens of thousands of adjuncts, might have been fertile ground for research, but only in Virginia, Florida and California did Ph.D. candidates do any spadework.
As a result, the picture of adjuncts that emerges from these dissertations is fragmentary, like a strand of DNA with only a few nucleotide bases in place.
Cindy Zoghi joined the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August 2000 as a research economist in the Division of Pro-ductivity Research, where she splits time between her own research and compiling statistics for the labor composite index. The index measures how much the education and experience of workers contribute to gains in productivity.
“I highly recommend a career outside academe to other Ph.D.s, especially those who are self motivated and who seek greater autonomy over the pace and timing of their research,” she said. “Many government jobs recognize that the way to recruit top Ph.D. students is by allocating a large share of time to independent research, often larger than what they could manage in academe.”
One of the nucleotides is the language of oppression—the parlance of several of the dissertations and an idiom the academy already speaks too fluently. For instance, Phyllis Berning reinforces the stereotype of “adjunct as victim” in “A Study of Intellectual Capital: Adjunct Faculty in Minnesota Colleges.” The adjuncts in her dissertation resent full-time faculty, whose lifestyles they protect by teaching the least desirable classes at the worst times. Full-time faculty repay this scorn with interest, dismissing adjuncts as mere moonlighters.
Administrators find themselves in the middle, need ing to staff courses but unable to spend enough money to hire faculty full-time. They settle for adjuncts, pleasing no one. Berning, a retired administrator, calls for the traditional suite of reforms: more money, benefits, offices, phones and “support services” for adjunct faculty.
Elizabeth Morrison looks at part-time faculty through the same lens of exploitation in “Integration of Adjunct Faculty into the Culture of a Metropolitan Community College: An Analysis.” Adjuncts at Valencia Community College in Florida teach more than 60 percent of remedial and introductory math classes, the courses no one else wants. Like Berning, Morrison finds the traditional foci of dissatisfaction: low pay, no benefits, no office, no voice mail, and no Internet access. Curiously, she finds that men are more satisfied than women as adjuncts, a tantalizing observation she doesn’t explore.
More than anything else, adjuncts at Valencia Community College want to know how to translate their part-time stints into full-time positions, leading Morrison to recommend that “adjunct faculty should be given fair consideration for tenure-track positions when they become available.” She is on safe ground here, and perhaps that’s the point of a dissertation: to say what academics want to hear.
Deborah Naquin writes of a different impoverishment in “Educational Technology Integration.” She examines the digital divide between full- and part-time faculty in Virginia. Her research concludes that aside from e-mail, adjuncts use little technology on campus. They are less likely than full-time faculty to have Web pages, to use computers in the classroom, and to attend technology workshops. Naquin’s solution is to dismantle the committee structure, which reinforces the idea of university as caste system. Instead, she advocates the university as hierarchy-free zone, which she dubs “learning communities.” In her communities, all faculty will share information, thus bridging the digital divide.
In “Training and Development Needs of Adjunct Instructors in the Wisconsin Technical College System,” Allyn French accepts the definition of adjunct as cipher, but only in part. She found plenty of embittered part-time faculty, but she didn’t find some of the traditional markers of exploitation. Only 17 percent of adjuncts she surveyed fit the gypsy-scholar stereotype, teaching at more than one college. She didn’t find Ph.D.s languishing in part-time work: only two percent of her adjunct population had Ph.Ds. Nor did she find the majority
of adjuncts desperate for full-time work. More than 70 percent worked full-time at another job and taught one class for enjoyment or to supplement their income.
Allyn French has been admissions Director at Lakeland College, Vice President for Enrollment Management and Program Outreach and Director of Career Directed Programs for Adult Learners at Silver Lake College, and is now Dean of Business and Technology at Lakeshore Technical College, in Wisconsin. She has hired and trained adjuncts and is herself one, teaching management and education. Her research combines adult learning theory and adjunct training.
“I am very passionate about the needs of adjunct instructors,” she said. “I have worked with many dedicated and talented adjuncts that have chosen to work odd hours with little pay and no benefits because they love teaching and the way education can visibly change individual lives.”
Even more upbeat is Cynthia Johnson’s “A Comparison of the Teaching Styles of Full-Time and Part-Time Community College Faculty.” She finds that student evaluations rate adjuncts higher than full-time faculty in seven Florida community colleges. Yet students preferred what Johnson calls a “teacher-centered style.” By this she seems to mean the traditional fare of lectures and exams—a style students associated more with full-time than part-time faculty.
Given this preference, students should have preferred the teaching of full-time faculty. Because they didn’t, factors other than teaching must influence evaluations, she concludes, implying that evaluations are less a critique of content delivery than a measure of how much students like an instructor.
The most intriguing dissertation of the bunch was “Labor Markets in Higher Education” by Cindy Zoghi. She challenges the prevailing belief that universities hire adjuncts to cut costs. She found that wage increases for tenured faculty didn’t lead administrators at the University of Texas and UCLA to use more part-time faculty. Rather administrators hired adjuncts to staff courses with high enrollments.
According to Zoghi’s research, the use of adjuncts isn’t influenced by financial motives, but rather to meet enrollment fluctuations. Moreover, departments at the University of Texas and UCLA that emphasize faculty research used 12 percent fewer adjuncts than departments that emphasize instruction. The move toward adjuncts, in other words, is not uniform throughout academe, and is not always driven by the desire to cut payroll costs. To be sure, these dissertations tell us much we already know. They amplify the litany of complaints: low pay, frustration and alienation. On other subjects, the dissertations are curiously mute. We learn little about adjuncts who thrive, who win teaching awards, who publish books and articles. We learn little about those who teach part-time by choice. This is unfortunate, as the adjunct experience is often positive, as well as professionally rich and varying. One hopes that future dissertation writers will recognize this and move from the well- trodden path to the road less traveled.
