Letters to the Editor

Living the Good Life While Teaching On-Line

How can anyone say that he has a modest income while earning $100,000 ? This article (“Living the Good Life While Teaching On-Line,” January/February 2003) made me laugh, and then want to cry.

My wife and I are struggling to raise a child on a combined income of $30,000 Canadian, because even part-time sessional appointments are few and far between due to intense competition. After abandoning notions of a tenured career in history years ago, I still held on to the belief that there would be a full-time sessional position somewhere, but this has not been the case, and the Adjunct Advocate’s anecdotal stories from time to time have proven it also to be true elsewhere.

It is exciting to think that after years of hard labor to earn a Ph.D. one is now marketable world-wide, but I have found from experience that few U.S. colleges even bother to respond to my CVs. Thus, it seems from this perspective that international job searches are a fantasy, and waste of time, unless one has direct connections with the institution in question, or has an impressive research and publication paper trail, in which case there are plenty of openings.

What is completely lacking in the job market today is a middle range of full-time jobs for people with Ph.D.s who prefer to teach rather than publish. Either you are a starving part-timer with no future or job security, and the hassle of constantly having to scramble for piece work here and there, or you are a privileged full-timer with all the perks and benefits that academia can offer.

D. Gossen, Canada

Thanks

I just wanted to thank you for a very polished and much needed publication. My dissertation is focused on the needs and roles of adjunct faculty in higher education, and your magazine provides a great deal of insight into the lives and issues surrounding these professionals….Thank you again for your fine efforts, and best wishes.

William H. Kazarian, English Faculty, Hawai’i Facific University, Hawai’i

Faculty Senates

I think Chris Cumo has hit upon the solution to the “adjunct problem,” as it were (“Faculty Senates: The Last Bastion of Patrician Privilege,” July/August 2003). If adjunct faculty could gain voting control of faculty senates, then the first item on the agenda would most certainly be (as it is for tenure-line and tenured faculty) employment conditions for part-time and temporary faculty.

Adjuncts could vote to redistribute the wealth–perhaps voting to freeze the salaries of full-time faculty for a few years while the salaries of part-timers rose to pro-rata rates. The possibilities are endless, and wonderful to contemplate.

Thanks to Chris Cumo for his insight and the delicious glimpse into the chamber of power on campus. It is clear why full-timers want to bar adjunct faculty from serving and voting, and clear why part-timers need to push for proportional representation on faculty senates all over the country. Forget forming a faculty union, give me a seat at the real game and let’s see what happens.

Anthony La Ferla, Queensborough Community College, New York

So Long. Farewell. Sayonara.

Can Anthony Akers please bottle and sell his courage? I would be first in line to buy a gallon (“So Long. Farewell. Sayonara. Good-bye” July/August 2003). I have been teaching part-time for the past six years, and have come up against many of the same walls as Akers. I went to conferences, always paying my own way. I had business cards printed up to use at those conferences (even though the department where I teach has them printed up for the full-time faculty free of charge). I publish in my field and have applied for funding to conduct research. No one in my department would give a whit if I landed a book contract, or published a piece in a peer-reviewed disciplinary journal.

So why, I ask myself day after day, do I stay? I have, after several years, come to the conclusion that I am a coward. I don’t have the courage to chuck it all and find another job. At this point, I just don’t have the self-confidence left. I have allowed myself to be beaten back from the table for so long I don’t even remember what the view from the good seats looks like.

I want to wish Anthony Akers the best. Maybe some day I’ll have the same get up and go to leave teaching and all of this behind. I know I wouldn’t miss it, and I know I would be much happier, and probably better compensated. It’s not that I lack the will to live, just the will to live well.

Name Withheld/p>