Letters to the Editor
Adjuncts as Entrepreneurs
Recently, you published an article about adjuncts as entepreneurs. In it, you portrayed this approach to the profession as not profitable. My wife and I are adjuncts, and we earned over $70,000 last year. Neither of us has a doctorate. I earned about $45,000 and she earned about $25,000 ( because she was just starting out). We do not live in a major metropolitan area. This year our objective is to earn a combined income of $80,000. Lawyers and accountants take this kind of approach to their careers. Why not adjuncts? I can’t believe you would discourage adjuncts for the purpose of promoting some union-type agenda. This is the reason I am not renewing my subscription. I was looking for support for my approach.
Dewey DeFalco,
Jacksonville, FL
Editor: The piece to which Mr. DeFalco refers was a first person essay written by Elaina Loveland and published in the November/December 2002 issue: “The Problem With Adjuncts as Entrepreneurs.” Evidently, he missed Chris Cumo’s piece in the March/April 2003 issue titled “The Intellectual Entrepreneur,” in which Chris suggests adjuncts position themselves as intellectual entrepreneurs in order to increase their incomes. Issues of the Adjunct Advocate routinely contain opinion pieces which represent conflicting points of view.
An Accompanying Object
K. Mazzoli wrote in the “Letters” section of the March/April 2004 issue that Elayne Clift “An Accompanying Object” (January/February 2004) should just “shut up, quit whining and do her job.” Suppose I were a student in Mazzoli’s class and for every assignment I culled existing literature for information relating to the assigned topic. What if I wrote up my assignments, neglecting to cite any of the sources I’d used, refusing to give attribution where credit was due? Would I not be guilty of plagiarizing?
As adjuncts we develop our ideas, notes and programs to the benefit of the college or university where we teach. Why then, should we eschew protesting when a department head or program director dismisses our work-or us-while keeping our ideas, notes or programs for the college? Isn’t usurping an adjunct’s work without giving proper credit (or continued employment) another form of plagiarizing?
Unfairness is unfairness, and should never be quietly accepted. Attitudes like K. Mazzoli’s are the reason why adjuncts learn not to be innovative or give more. They know their innovations may be taken over by program directors or department heads who feel threatened by adjuncts who are not content to be mediocre instructors–the kind who just shut up, never complain and do their “jobs.”
Barb Hahn,
Cornville, AZ
Adjunct Award Winners
I just finished reading the March/April 2004 issue. “Adjunct Award Winners” is a winner! Where else am I going to read about part-time faculty who have won Guggenheims and Fulbrights? How else is anyone going to know that part-time faculty win Mellon Fellowships and (gasp!) MacArthur Fellowships? Without the Adjunct Advocate, and the time you take to research the facts and show the academic community that adjunct are not the second-class slackers we’re assumed to be by virtue of our employment status. It would be convenient if all adjuncts were Neanderthals fit only to teach introductory courses (perhaps) and just maybe the ocassional upper-level course (as an extraordinary measure).
We are not! We are reseachers and scholars of national repute and high caliber. We are writers and artists, scientists and historians. We are adjuncts by choice, and adjuncts by circumstance. Neither should ever be interpreted by anyone to mean that we are any less talented than the people down the hall on the tenure-track.
If there is one issue of your magazine that every adjunct should “accidentally” drop on the table in the Full-Time Faculty Lounge in their department it is the March/April 2004 issue.
Thanks for making my day, week and year. I’ll be applying for several fellowships and grants during 2004. I hope every adjunct who reads that feature does the same.
Benjamin S. Kirkpatrick
Boston, MA
An adjunct MacArthur Fellow? Good Lord, what is the world coming to? Next thing you know, we’ll have adjuncts winning everything! I enjoyed the “Adjunct Award Winners” story by Chris Cumo. Very inspirational.
Fiona Abernathy,
Phoenix, AZ
If I learned one thing from the March/April 2004 “Adjunct Award Winners” issue it is that I have to apply to win. I really had no idea the wide variety of grants and fellowships available to adjunct faculty. It’s a shame that we part-timers don’t get more support from the institutions we teach at to apply for grants and fellowships. I suppose the notion is that we’re not interested in research, but rather want to focus primarily on teaching. For some, this is true, but most of the adjuncts in my department conduct research and stay current in their fields through conference attendance and subscriptions to journals. I, for one, will be applying for at least 2-3 grants/fellowships this year. You can’t win unless you apply.
Jack M. Applebaum,
San Diego, CA
