Up or OUT
by David Murray
Most of us agree that life as a full-time adjunct is no kind of career. The pay is low, benefits are nonexistent, we have no formal job security, and our years of dedicated teaching will not count for anything except more of the same. Every year we do it, the odds of getting the tenure-track position that some of us secretly hope for decrease. (Cary Nelson, current President of the American Association of University Professors, estimates that fewer than ten percent of his fellow doctoral students at the University of Illinois in the early 70s made it to tenure—and that was then.)
Some of us have spouses or partners who provide a main income, and some have day jobs and teach purely for fulfillment or to contribute to a discipline. But most of us, studies show, rely on adjuncting for a full-time income. And we can easily fall into the habit of treating it as if it were a real career even though it’s not.
One reason for this may be that no one is pushing us out the door. Adjunct teaching lacks the “up-or-out” incentives that many competitive institutions have. Career stepping stones in the corporate world often sink beneath the waves if you stay on them for too long—especially with today’s changes in technology and labor markets. Military careers last only twenty years—except for top generals, who can stay longer. Even the Union Pacific railroad has a defined advancement ladder that everyone must climb, from lineman to conductor to engineer. Miss one rung, and you’re out of the Union Pacific altogether.
But too many people have an interest in our cheap labor, and too many of us willingly enter the system year after year. Maybe we have developed comfortable relationships with those who hire adjuncts, so that we may feel we have a de facto job security, even though it’s not official. But whatever our rationalizations, we should not allow ourselves to live in this career twilight world for more than three or four years. That means we have to create our own “up-or-out” mechanism—and stick to it. And since there’s no longer any real “up” (i.e., a tenure-track position) for most of us, “up” may mean “out.”
You need to start by convincing yourself that you’re really serious. So here are some reasons to wean yourself away from relying on adjuncting as a main income stream—and maybe even to practice what Jack Kerouac called the Buddhism of quitting, and stop teach altogether.
1) You will stop enabling an educational system that is broken in many ways. By spending our working lives in unacceptable conditions, adjuncts enable both our secondary and higher educational systems to avoid facing their problems. What would colleges and universities do if they didn’t have adjuncts willing to teach what incoming freshmen should have learned in high school? For that matter, what would high schools do if colleges stopped accepting sub-par students with the proviso that they can always get help at the campus writing or math labs—often staffed by adjuncts? I don’t know, and I don’t think we’re going to find out anytime soon. But I do know that adjuncts help maintain the dysfunctional status quo.
2) If you stay, you might find it difficult to maintain the quality of teaching your students deserve. Don’t misunderstand me. I know many supremely dedicated adjuncts, some of whom are more than qualified to be on the tenure track at top universities. You may be justifiably proud of the dedication you put into your teaching—even if your pay and advancement prospects are no better than those of your less-motivated colleagues. But be honest with yourself: how long will you be able to maintain your motivation after five, ten, or fifteen years? At a recent adjunct conference, one participant admitted after some hesitation that he made a decent living by teaching as many as seven courses a semester at different institutions. While I’d like to think all of his students were well-served, I admit I had my doubts. And not all of us are equally dedicated.
3) Paradoxically, by leaving you will be helping those career adjuncts who remain. If college administrations have a smaller reserve army of adjuncts, they will have fewer alternatives to treating them fairly, paying them better, and providing benefits. We may benefit our profession more by leaving it than we ever could by staying.
4) When you leave a higher-degree track to pursue non-academic work, you’ll be starting at the bottom, like everyone else (unless you have other experience earned before or during your long stretch in graduate school). The earlier you leave, the easier it will be to accept your new apprenticeship—and the more years you will have to build contacts and relationships in your new field.
5) If you haven’t yet earned your Ph.D., you will save yourself not only time and money, but opportunity costs as well. Don’t let yourself be fooled into thinking that you “have to finish”. In the non-academic world, no one will care whether you finished or not, and finishing it will not help you get a non-academic job. In fact, it may well hurt you. Which of the following do you think sounds better to a hiring manager or potential boss? “Half-way through graduate school, I realized that my sales job at Lufkin Furniture was engaging me more than my studies, so I changed directions.” Or this: “After I got the Ph.D. and looked unsuccessfully for a tenure-track position for three years, I decided to give your industry a try.” Which employee would you be more likely to hire?
6) As with any break-up, it’s always better to be the one doing the breaking up. Even in today’s job market, you have a good chance of bettering your adjunct’s pay and prospects in almost any job. And you are more likely to feel that you are controlling your own destiny, instead of being a victim of outside forces.
Some of us will require a clean break, while others might be able to stay “just friends” with our old ex-non-career. It’s up to you to decide whether your new path will require that you leave teaching altogether—or at least set that as a goal—or if you can find a career that allows you to teach a course or two, if that’s what you want and your schedule allows.
Adjunct teaching may even work well with certain full-time occupations. After years of looking, a friend of mine began a new full-time position as web editor for a medical website. Her new boss actually urged her to keep on teaching at the weekend college where she’d been adjuncting—so she could maintain her contacts at her old institution to recruit interns and lab assistants for his labs.
If you reach that happy state where you are able to keep teaching, but your teaching has become uncoupled from perennial income anxieties and status insecurities, you may find that it’s reinvigorated. You will no longer be a career adjunct. But you may be a better teacher because of it.
