An Interview With Eileen Schell

by Gloria McMillan

TAA) Would you like to supply a bit of biographical detail for this interview? Anything that you think we should know about you?

I grew up in Eastern Washington state on a small farm near a small town. I attended public schools and public higher education. I waited tables while I put myself through college. I have taught reading and writing in higher education since 1987, and my career spans five institutions, including a community college, state universities, and a private university. I also teach off-campus here in Syracuse at a local retirement center (my oldest student is currently 90 years young). My most challenging teaching was as an adjunct at North Seattle Community College in the late eighties. My students were from all over the world and their writing abilities and English speaking abilities varied dramatically.

[Editor’s note: Today Dr. Schell is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and the Director of Graduate Studies in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric at Syracuse University in New York.]

TAA) What is relevant in your background to the subject of working conditions for adjuncts or for academics in general?
I have always been interested in labor issues and working conditions, especially since many academics seem so uninterested or willing to ignore how working conditions impact students’ learning conditions. Perhaps my interest in labor was sparked since I grew up on a small farm where one’s thinking is always about labor, about the land, about the weather, about material necessity. When I attended college, I never “shook off” that way of thinking, that concern for things “material.”

That interest in “labor” was a continuing theme for me in my formal academic studies. At the time, I had not heard of working class studies, but I did find my way to feminist literary theory and to feminist theory and also to Marxist theory.

TAA) What drew you to studying the conditions of adjunct writing faculty, Eileen?

I started my “career” as an adjunct at a community college at the ripe old age of 24 (I also held two other jobs, waitress and tutor), and while I was happy to have a job and a start as a writing teacher, I realized early on (I was hired a week after classes started) that adjunct teaching was a racket. I also noticed early on how many women were part-time faculty in the system and how talented and diverse their work experiences are and were.

At the time, I was studying feminist theory and it was clear that there was a gendered discourse surrounding the work of part-time teaching, especially part-time English instruction. It seemed to me, at the time (and this was the late eighties/early nineties) that few people in the fields of English studies and Rhetoric and Composition were talking about (or caring about or addressing) the situation of part-time faculty, especially the situation of part-time women writing faculty. Meanwhile, there was a growing body of scholarship about liberatory writing pedagogies and about the radical potential of the writing classroom. It seemed to me that the issue of labor was simply being ignored or glossed over in much of the mainstream scholarship on writing pedagogy. It also was clear to me that the job market in English studies and across academia was shrinking while the use of adjunct faculty was growing despite all kinds of claims (the Bowen study, for instance) that there were going to be full-time faculty retirements and that there would be a huge need for full-time faculty.

TAA) How difficult was it to get these adjuncts to open up and tell you about their working conditions?

When I wrote Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction, I had little trouble getting the interviewees to talk to me. They seemed mostly eager and willing to speak about their working conditions. I’m sure that being connected to my interview subjects helped spur their willingness to speak with me. I worked with the women I interviewed; I was a graduate teaching assistant and a writing program administrator at the time, and I spoke freely with them about my experiences as an adjunct. We shared common concerns and a common interest in adjunct issues. Also, around the time, I began the interview research, the teaching assistants at the institutions where I conducted the interviews voted to form a collective bargaining unit, and labor consciousness was high. I also guaranteed the interviewees anonymity; I did not use their first names.

TAA) What surprised you in doing case studies of adjunct faculty?

What surprised me was the willingness of the adjunct faculty to value teaching and to persist in it despite institutional devaluation (low wages, minimal or inadequate office space, unprofessional treatment). I thought that the adjunct faculty I interviewed might be more cynical about teaching and about working with students, but they were more cynical about the structural situation, not the pedagogical situation. I found that surprising to some degree, and not surprising in other ways. There is a lot of rhetoric in higher education about the value of teaching, but there are the accompanying low wages, unstable contracts, little or no office space. In spite of this, many remarkable teachers persist for years without the institutional rewards that should accompany such teaching. I heard a lot from the interviewees about the “psychic” rewards they got from teaching, yet, at the same time, the psychic “costs” that were exacted from them since they worked hard and received low pay. It was this both/and that interested me.

TAA) What was the most difficult part of doing such research?

The difficult thing continues to be how to address this labor situation: how to organize, how to mobilize to gain better working conditions and to raise public awareness about this issue. The labor situation has improved in some senses and worsened in others. There are growing numbers of contingent faculty, but there is also a growing series of movements to call attention to these issues.

TAA) What do you feel the best about?
I feel the best about the fact I continue to hear from adjunct colleagues that the books I wrote and co-edited were useful in some way. I feel the best about being invited to do workshops and hold dialogues with adjunct faculty and tenure-track colleagues who want to do something about improving working conditions for contingent faculty.

TAA) How do you see your work as aiding in gaining better conditions for adjuncts?

I think of my work as offering a partial clearinghouse of resources for part-time and non-tenure-track faculty and tenure-track faculty who want to address working conditions. I have the time and the resources to assemble and do that work because scholarship is a significant portion of my job. I also think of my work as posing “labor” as a central question for academia and for English studies/writing instruction. I also see myself as someone who can speak out from the vantage point of the tenure-track professoriate. Carolynn Heilbrun argued that we tenured and tenure-track faculty should be using tenure as an opportunity to speak out, to act on social justice issues. I agree wholeheartedly.

TAA) What should adjuncts be doing?

Many adjunct faculty right now are leading a national and international movement for promoting improved working conditions: organizing unions, professional associations, sharing resources. I think of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor as a potential model for what more of us might do. I think all of us need to be building coalitions across lines of rank and position and organizing to improve working conditions. We have some severe obstacles in front of us right now, including state budgets and the undercutting of public higher education. In addition to labor questions, the question of access to public education is key. What kind of public education system will we have ten years from now? How can we as educators address the severe cuts that are in front of us now. I’d like to see us form more alliances with our students. They are certainly going to be impacted as we are by the cuts to public education.

TAA) Any tips on where they should turn for help?

AdjunctNation.com, of course! I also recommend the Coalition on Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) website as a resource. I recommend organizing Campus Equity Week activities to call attention to adjunct faculty issues. Campus Equity Week will be a national and international week of action meant to call attention to the growing use of part-time/adjunct faculty. The American Association of University Professors has made contingent faculty issues an increasing priority, and they have some useful organizing resources and papers/reports that can be accessed at their websites. I also think the web-based journal Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor is a remarkable resource for those seeking information about organizing efforts, essays and scholarly materials on academic labor issues. Marc Bosquet and the new editors of that journal have done a remarkable job with this publication.

TAA) I would like to thank you for your time in answering these questions and also for your years of service and research to benefit the adjunct writing instructor community.

Thank you! I’d like to thank my first-year writing teacher Connie Hale, who was an adjunct for years at the University of Washington and at University of Puget Sound. She recently left academia after many years of adjunct teaching, and she was and is a remarkable teacher. Her teaching changed my life and continues to shape my work on a daily basis. Adjunct faculty have a remarkable impact on their students, so thank you.