Adjunct to Tenure-Track: Ex-Part-timers Tell How They Leaped the Crevasse

by Christopher Cumo

Forget the Yellow Brick Road. You don’t want to go to Oz. You just want a tenure-track job but the road is under deconstruction, and the jobs in cul-de-sacs in bleak neighborhoods. If you want a tenure-track job, you have to teach part-time until menopause and publish enough abstruse stuff to fill a library shelf. Finally, after years and even decades of privation and rejection letters that pile up like corpses in your psyche, comes the assistant professorship: four courses per term of freshman composition at $31,000 a year, what a used-car salesman makes in six months. Welcome to the rest of your life.

So runs the canonical story, the one that circulates through the corridors of every Modern Language Association conference and on all the listservs. Trouble is the story, like Goedel’s Theorem, is difficult to prove.

Leslie Sutter, Wendy Russell and Brady Carey landed on the tenure-track without breaking a sweat. Sutter, who taught part-time at International College in Naples, Florida, applied for four jobs, interviewed at International College and is now professor of liberal arts and interdisciplinary studies there. Wendy Russell taught part-time during graduate school, spent a year as a replacement for someone on sabbatical and got the first tenure-track job for which she applied at the Centre for International Studies at Huron University in London, Ontario. While teaching part-time at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois, Brady Carey applied for eight jobs, got six interviews and netted a tenure-track job at Mesa State College in Grand Junction, Colorado as Director of Forensics and lecturer of speech communications.

Maybe the road to the tenure-track is short, straight and fast after all, or maybe Leslie Sutter, Wendy Russell and Brady Carey know something the rest of us don’t and should.
Carey credits “the package,” what one might call a portfolio and what others, he says, have called “amazing.” Carey gives pride of place to his Curriculum Vita, which on page one lists his two teaching awards. More than anything else in his portfolio, Carey credits his awards with getting him the job at Mesa State. To amplify the effect of these awards, he includes in his portfolio copies of the award letters. To these he adds a cover letter with a statement of his teaching philosophy, letters of recommendation, “tons,” he says, of student evaluations, a list of references and a list of accomplishments that showcase his teaching talents outside academe.

Like Carey, International College liberal-arts professor Leslie Sutter believes good teaching trumps everything else. In addition to his Ed.D., Sutter holds a Master’s degree in humanities and has done additional coursework in history and philosophy. All of this gives him a breadth of experience that he believes impressed search committees.
Wendy Russell, too, cites teaching as the crucial skill, but she adds that luck helps. Her sabbatical-leave position came with the title of assistant professor rather than visiting professor, instructor or another designation that would have stigmatized her as a term appointee.

Russell was also fortunate enough to land at a university that wanted her specialty, what she calls the study of “indigenous peoples and development in global perspective.”
Marvin Katilius, professor of English at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois, agrees: “It was probably sheer luck and perseverance more than professional skills and personal attributes that finally landed me a permanent job.”

Katilius taught part-time for 14 years at four universities before snagging a two-year appointment at the University of St. Francis. He earned strong student evaluations and made friends with faculty both in and out of the English department. He volunteered to teach a new introductory course for freshmen, and kept abreast of the latest pedagogical research, using what he learned in the classroom and in conducting workshops on the teaching of writing. He also attended daily Mass in the university’s chapel and prayed. God must have heard him. A core of faculty persuaded the Dean to make Katilius’s position permanent at the end of his second year.

“To make a long story short, I had two years to make a good impression and I made one,” says Katilius. “I had very good student evaluations and I made friends among the faculty.”

International College liberal-arts professor Leslie Sutter likewise stresses connections.

“You need someone to pull for you inside the organization,” he says. “When I was an adjunct my department chair really took a liking to me and made it happen.”

The personal approach also worked for Ibis Rodriguez-Carro, a Spanish instructor at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Rodriguez-Carro explains: “I think that the key to success in moving from an adjunct position to a full-time one is to be involved with the college community in general by participating in different activities or projects. Let other people around the college or university know that you exist and want to be part of that community.”

But even without connections W. T. Pfefferle made the tenure-track. While a term appointee at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, he got an interview at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The search committee needed a director of its writing program who could also teach freshman composition. His textbook, Writing that Matters: A Rhetoric for the New Classroom (Prentice Hall, 1999) gave Pfefferle an edge, and he closed the deal at Nova by telling the search committee that he had taught composition courses more than 100 times.

Even with two books, journal articles and poetry to his credit Pfefferle rates publications less important than his commitment to teaching and his willingness to learn as much as he could about a position before the interview. When a job similar to the one he held opened at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland Pfefferle didn’t assume his experience at Nova would make him a front runner. He called faculty and writing coordinators at Cornell, Duke and other universities to learn as much as he could about what they did and how he could craft himself as the person with the right skills, rather than as just some guy from a party town in Florida.

“I was told by the guy who hired me [at Johns Hopkins University] that I was the only candidate to put in the leg work,” says Pfefferle. “A job isn’t some award that is bestowed; it can be an award you can win if you do the legwork, [and] if you show them you are willing and able.”

Pfefferle advises part-time faculty to tailor their cover letters to the individual positions for which they apply. Find out which courses you would likely teach, and refer to them by title and course number in your letter. This information is available on college and university Web pages, but few candidates, Pfefferle believes, make the effort to dredge up the details. Sell yourself in your cover letter by recounting what you did to make a course successful.

“Personal letters that really discuss the candidate and the candidate’s desire to come to Whatever University are so rare,” says Pfefferle. “When they show up on my desk I already like that candidate better.”

Anna Sher, a biologist who held a series of postdocs and temporary appointments between 1998 and 2003, devised a slightly different and more scientific strategy. For years she fretted over every detail in her cover letter. Seeing that the effort was getting her nowhere, Sher changed course and created three generic letters: one for research universities, a second for small colleges and a third for government jobs. In the same way she standardized her statements of teaching philosophy, she wrote one letter for universities with a graduate program in biology, and a second for colleges without one.

Tenacity and smarts elevated Sher to the tenure-track. She held temporary positions in Kenya and Israel, giving her CV international allure. Sher used these years to broaden her research by publishing articles on conservation biology and ecology, thereby widening the range of biology courses she could teach.

Sher estimates she applied for some 50 positions between 1998 and 2003.

“Early in the process I learned not to internalize rejection,” she says. “I just moved on with my life.”

This attitude was not easy to maintain, she admits. The nadir came in 2001 when the U.S. Department of Agriculture offered her a position at GS (General Schedule) 13 which she lost when a bureaucrat belatedly downgraded her to GS 12, disqualifying her for the job. Others might have been crestfallen, but Sher had the resilience to keep applying for jobs, landing an interview in 2003 with the University of Denver in Colorado. This opportunity was all she needed. Rather than send documents by mail, she converted them to PDF files and e-mailed them, a skill she had learned in Kenya, where international postage to the U.S. was costly. Sher also sent her PDF files along with a video of her seminar (a formal presentation of one’s research) on CD. When she learned the department chair had not planned to attend her seminar, Sher gave him a CD, telling him he could watch her seminar at his leisure. The department chair had intended to hire someone else, but Sher’s tact and technical savvy swayed him. She is now not only an assistant professor of biology at the University of Denver, but also Director of Research at Denver Botanic Gardens.

Sher also touts the importance of her letters of recommendation, which stress her teaching skills and thereby made her a good fit at the University of Denver, where good teaching is expected.

University of St. Francis English professor Marvin Katilius also stresses the importance of gathering strong letters of recommendation. A bad letter sabotaged his wife’s academic job search. As a result, he counsels faculty to screen letters of recommendation before they go on to a search committee.

There are no guarantees, of course. Johns Hopkins’s W. T. Pfefferle knows talented people who have worked hard, but escaped the adjunct trap only by leaving the academy. University of St. Francis English professor Marvin Katilius was able to persevere through 14 years of part-time employment in academe only because his wife made enough money to pay the bills. Katilius shows us that the route from adjunct to tenure-track has the mythic quality of an odyssey. For University of Denver biologist Anna Sher the road passed through Kenya, and Israel.

W.T. Pfefferle still hasn’t reached his final destination. He is taking a year off to travel across the country to interview poets and musicians. Unlike Odysseus, not everyone can return home to Ithaca. What becomes clear during the course of listening to the stories of these part-time faculty who jumped from temporary to tenure-track is this: Part-time faculty who want full-time teaching jobs must work to build their own roads paved, perhaps, with teaching awards, publications, as well as evidence of excellence in the classroom. They must find within themselves the stamina to reach the Promised Land after sometimes years of aimless wandering in the desert that is contingent employment.

Those faculty must also contend with this sobering fact: many contingent faculty, like Moses, will lead exemplary professional lives and still never reach the tenure-track Promised Land—through no fault of their own.