The Adjunct Advocate: 10 Years of Adjunct Advocacy

by P.D. Lesko

In September of 1992, the Adjunct Advocate debuted. The magazine, a slim 20 pages, had no display advertising and led off with a cover story titled “Health, Wealthy & Wise”: Finding Affordable Health Care.” The issue also featured the very first “Reportcard.” The feature, as we explained it to readers back then, “focuses on individual schools, and their treatment of the adjunct faculty. The Adjunct Advocate is a tough grader, but then again some colleges and universities aren’t treating their adjuncts fairly.” We sent a copy of each Reportcard directly to the President of the featured school and never once, in the three years that the feature ran, did we receive a letter of reply, explanation or correction of information. “Reportcard” was our effort to be provocative, and to be very public in our criticisms of how individual colleges treated their adjunct faculty.

The initial print run was 150, and the printer charged us just over $1.00 per issue. A one-year subscription cost $18.00, and that first year of publication included eight issues of the magazine, quite a bargain. Beginning in September of 1993, we decided to drop the number of issues down to five per year, and make them bimonthly. The majority of adjuncts, after all, did not teach in the summer, we reasoned, and so a summer issue would not be necessary. It wasn’t until years later that we would realize that frequency has a direct connection to reader loyalty–you want readers to remember to miss you.

In 1999, the magazine underwent a total graphic redesign. It is, for the most part, the look of the magazine you see today. We began printing the magazine’s covers on thicker, glossy cover stock. Color debuted for the very first time on both the front cover and inside pages of the magazine in the November/December 1999 issue.

In 2000, we decided to add a July/August issue of the magazine. Six issues per year would give our advertisers the year- round access to adjunct faculty they were asking for. In addition, the amount of editorial content had risen dramatically since that first 20-page issue. The magazine was up to 52 pages, and circulation had grown dramatically, as well.

By 2000, we were lucky enough to have over 20 free-lancers writing for the publication on a regular basis, as well as a group of contributing editors, who handled several of the regular columns, such as “shoptalk.” That same year, Laurie Henry came aboard as the magazine’s Associate Editor, and Chris Cumo became the magazine’s staff writer.

In our eighth year of publication, our new printer helped us add 4-color pages to the 2-color pages we were already including. Readers responded to these changes enthusiastically. During 2001, our readership jumped by over 30 percent.

In September of the next year, the magazine debuted as a 4-color publication throughout. We also decided in September of 2001 that the Adjunct Advocate should join the vanguard of DTP (direct computer- to-plate) publishing. This offered us the opportunity to produce the publication and have it printed more quickly and more cost-effectively. And that brings us to this, the 10th anniversary issue of the Adjunct Advocate magazine.

Take a look back over 10 years of the Adjunct Advocate. In many cases, our writers scooped the other higher education publications by years. For instance, in 1993, we published a piece titled “Grade Inflation: GPAs Soar While SATs Plummet.” In 2001, the higher education and mainstream media picked up on the subject of grade inflation (and the role adjunct faculty play in the inflation of grades). In 1996, we published “The Virtual Campus: Guess Who’s Teaching There?” It would be over two years before The Chronicle of Higher Education and LinguaFranca would examine the extensive use of adjunct faculty in distance education programs.

We look forward to a second decade of leading the way in news coverage of the Adjunct Faculty Nation.