The Intellectual Entrepreneur
by Chris Cumo
Tim Coogan has taught part-time 15 years for community col-
leges in New York and New Jersey. He has been on every cam-
pus in New York City except Columbia University and the New
School. At Rutgers University, where he has taught more than
a decade, Coogan has an office and contributes to a pension.
He has medical coverage from LaGuardia Community College in New York City and teaches as many as 18 courses a year. At $3,000 a course on average he earns some $54,000 a year.
But what about the rest of us who have neither the option nor perhaps the stamina to teach 18 courses a year and who wouldn’t get $3,000 a course even if we did? The conventional wisdom is that adjuncts whose incomes hover around the poverty line should find work in business, government or anyplace else that will hire them. When part-time teaching didn’t land University of California, Berkeley English Ph.D. Annalee Newitz on the tenure-track she left academe to become features editor at The San Francisco Bay Guardian. The lesson seems to be that the rest of us should follow Newitz into the world of post-academic capitalism.
Yet it does not require a Berkeley Ph.D. to figure out that adjuncts have other options. You as an adjunct can continue to teach part-time even though you don’t make $54,000 a year or occupy some corporate cubicle. The solution may be to reconfigure yourself as an intellectual entrepreneur, and to be an entrepreneur means to generate multiple streams of income. You are not just an adjunct who teaches Existentialism or medical ethics; you have skills that can put money in your pocket faster than you can say Ulysses Grant or any of the other dead men who grace our green.
Think for a moment about how graduate school programmed you to churn out limpid prose, and lots of it, on demand. The rationale was that you would need this skill to publish monographs that sell 400 copies and articles for journals that specialize in medieval Sardinia, and the like. This makes sense if you’re up for tenure, but not if you’re an adjunct. Instead, sell your writing skills to the local newspaper, which may not want to hire a reporter but will take on a correspondent to write news and features. Everyone should know about the excellent reference book Writer’s Market, and it may lead to a few assignments especially if you already have some published clips. You might do just as well, perhaps better, with the growing number of on-line sources that list freelance jobs. Start with Graduate school also gave you an umbilical attachment to your computer. You probably already know HTML. If not, borrow HTML 4 for Dummies from the library and teach yourself. Approach local businesses with an offer to design or expand a Web site for them. You should find takers, Jennifer Hodgdon knows from experience. A Cornell University graduate with a Pd.D. in physics, she began the trek toward an academic job with a postdoc at Bell Labs. When research lost its luster, she left Bell to become a Web developer for a Wall Street firm. She now has enough clients to work free-lance. You can do the same, and generate yet another source of income.
Opportunities exist for those who want to stay close to their disciplines. The key is to understand that your field, no matter how esoteric other may view it, qualifies you to do more than teach. Beth Wee teaches part-time in Tulane University’s departments of ecology and evolutionary biology and cell and molecular biology. She also puts her training as a biologist to use as Tu-lane’s Biology Lab manager. Biological anthropologist Linda Spurlock is an adjunct at Kent State University who uses her knowledge of anatomy to free-lance for coroner and police departments in Ohio by transforming skeletal remains into sketches of how people looked when alive.
Take your cue from Wee and Spurlock. If your field is English moonlight at a college writing lab. If you are a historian, design exhibits for a local museum, serve as a tour guide or gather and organize archival materials. The point isn’t what you do, but that you translate what you know into income.
Teaching is only part of what
you do. Take on multi-ple identities, and your talents will lead you to an eclectic
mix of jobs. Your identity as entrepreneur will liberate you to craft multiple sources of income that just may enrich
your savings account, as well as your intellect.
