Eulogy of An Adjunct Career

by Adisa Lasesco

When I was a young, wild-eyed graduate student at a small Midwestern university, I was given the opportunity to substitute for a professor away at a conference. I stood before thirty young undergraduates I had never seen before and launched into a spontaneous tirade about feminism, homophobia, and conflict theory. Running frenetically around the room, gesticulating wildly, I proclaimed the evils of heterosexual privilege and called upon the theories Karl Marx. Incredibly, and much to my surprise, my lecture was very well received, and I left the room flushed with excitement and pride.

Thus began my teaching career. Upon graduating, I interviewed for a position at a huge community college, and was hired on the spot. Although initially bolstered by the Department Head’s praise for my enthusiasm, creativity, and teaching philosophy, my feelings of self-efficacy were flattened when I was handed my textbook, standardized exams, lectures, and classroom policies. I passed the next two years delivering prewritten lectures, administering tests – which I was not permitted to grade – and implementing classroom policies that I wouldn’t have created myself.

Over those two years, I also lost money in my chosen profession. I taught three classes each semester – four-credit classes – and was paid $2,200 per class. I commuted 75 miles each way, thrice weekly, in an old, gas-guzzler. I plunged $10,000 into debt.

Later I moved to another state, where I immediately found work at several different community colleges. I choose my textbooks, wrote my own lectures, and designed my own classes. The wages, though not great by any means, were better – $3,200 per three-credit class.

It was in the community colleges of my latest residence that I learned to both love and hate my job. With this new-found freedom, I designed interactive classes, lectured on institutional racism, AIDS, and female genital mutilation. I crafted a lecture touching on gun control, violence, and feminism entitled “Death by Dildo.” It had all of my students engaged, and later, talking in the halls. It was a unique time in my teaching career, one marked by my energetic pursuit of the most creative, interactive, social-justice based curriculum possible. It was also at this time that I began to feel the weight of the administration’s demands. With fierce competition between the many community colleges in the state, and dozens of other private and public universities, there was great pressure on faculty to retain students at any cost. The cost, of course, was my professional integrity.

When students missed exams and then took issue with my no-makeup policy, my Department Head gently pressed me to allow them to take makeup tests. When students plagiarized their papers, I was encouraged to turn a blind eye. I had one student show up in class precisely twice in the first two weeks of the semester. She completed no work, took no exams, and participated in no activities. When she called me three days before the final to arrange her passing grade, I flatly turned her down. The next day, there was a venomous letter maligning my professionalism on the Dean’s desk. My Department Head, upon reading this letter, reminded me that the college was building a multi-million dollar addition, and that there’s nothing wrong with being lenient with students.

That same day, I found a Faculty Appreciation card in my mailbox from the President of the college. It read:

Dear Faculty Member 82649530,

We want to thank and honor you for your time, commitment and dedication to the students of This College. We are committed to providing our students with the highest quality education marked by personal attention, cutting-edge technology and academic rigor. We thank you!

Reading this card, the irony of the situation was not lost on me. It dawned on me that it would be appropriate to replace the word student with the word customer, and since that day that’s precisely how I approached my work.

In his book, The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer postulates that higher education is increasingly becoming indistinguishable from other modes of consumption in society. Higher education is more and more a standardized, consumer-driven product than a education-based process. As students pass through the academic assembly line, the college and university maximize the efficiency of the product while minimizing quality:

I was the professor who taught three classes simultaneously from a television screen, using interactive camera technology that was vastly underdeveloped. However, the college offered two classes for the price of one, and that was the most important outcome.

I was regularly evaluated by a group of unqualified adolescents with no experience in college-level teaching, and hardly any as college-level students. These fill-in-the-bubble evaluations, which are terrible measures of teaching ability, in my opinion, are anonymous and a matter of public record. This is incomprehensible to me.

If you Google my real name, you will find me listed on RateMyProfessor.com, where I am usually described in one of three ways: hyper, fun, and easy. I was also gratified to learn that I have earned the dubious distinction of being a ‘hot’ professor. Marvelous.

And so a month ago, weary and disillusioned, I officially resigned from my position as an adjunct professor. More and more, I found myself going into the classroom asking myself, “What’s the point?” Under heavy pressure from the administrators, I have bent the rules to the point where they practically don’t exist anymore. I pass along students who are lazy, unmotivated, and have no business being in my classroom in the first place. I bow to the whims of the customer, granting any wish or desire, because everyone knows in business, the customer is always right.

While I know it was the right decision for me, I grieve the loss of my adjunct career. It was so much a part of my identity, and I had so many hopes pinned on the changes I would make in the world. I fiercely miss that wild-eyed graduate student full of optimism and hope. I hope that I will be followed by another, someone who will be persistent in their belief that they can make a difference, that to teach is honorable, and that to do so with integrity is non-negotiable. And perhaps they will continue, and perhaps they will change the system, and perhaps I will have missed it. And in the wake of that loss, I will remember all those light bulb moments I have been blessed to have witnessed, and that will have to be enough.