College Temps Carry the Load in Florida

by Tina Trent

As the legislative session begins, so begins two annual, highly publicized tantrums: Tenured faculty at Florida research universities, who earn an average of $98,907 a year, threaten to depart for other states because they feel inadequately appreciated and reimbursed (the dreaded brain drain).

Meanwhile, state legislators hysterically oppose any effort to raise Florida’s tuition rate–the lowest in the nation–declaring even the tiniest hike an inconceivable cruelty they will oppose to the death.

Rarely does either side mention the subject of classroom teaching. And why should they? Neither elite professors nor elected officials spend very much time in the classroom.

The majority of people who actually teach in our universities and colleges are not tenure-track, or even full-time professors, but grossly underpaid temp workers. In the universities, many of these temp workers are graduate students. However, in the community colleges, which now enroll three-quarters of all Florida college students, approximately three-quarters of the teachers are mere temps, also called adjuncts, who labor with no health insurance, no job security from semester to semester and a pittance for wages.

There was a time when these adjunct positions were themselves temporary: stepping stones to full-time employment, the occasional course picked up by a retiree or specialized teaching in technological fields. But with the vast majority of teachers at many state colleges now relegated to permanent adjunct status, nobody is fooling him- or herself that we will return to those days.

The community college adjuncts I’ve met harbor few realistic hopes that they will ever be promoted into full-time positions no matter how many years they have been teaching. Many have worked as temps for more than a decade and have given up applying for the dwindling number of full-time positions. “They want younger people,” they tell me, or, “I’ve just given up. It’s too painful to keep trying.”

These people, who rank among the most experienced and committed teachers I’ve ever met, scramble each semester to (hopefully) secure positions at one or, at best, two campuses, to reduce the amount of gasoline they must buy from their ridiculously small paychecks, not to mention the unpaid time they spend commuting between campuses. Adjuncts who work in the community colleges work with a student body that is unusually challenging because it is very diverse in age, ability and familiarity with English, and, in some cases, in matters of basic literacy and reading comprehension.

Without these temporary and underpaid instructors, the higher education system in Florida would simply collapse. The existence of this massive (and growing) temporary work force is a primary reason tuition rates remain artificially low for students at all schools.

Yet adjuncts are entirely ignored in the debates about higher education that rage at the Capitol and on the editorial pages
of newspapers.

Why?

I believe we are ignored because the truly grim facts of adjunct employment, and the degree to which everyone in the current system — from legislators to administrators to full-time faculty to taxpayers — benefits from exploiting us, is simply too embarrassing to acknowledge.

After all, say you’re a full-time faculty member at a public research university earning $100,000 a year, with generous health and retirement benefits, a mere two classes a semester to teach, summers off and teaching assistants to carry even that reduced load. If still feel entitled to demand that the taxpayers support the research you want to do for your second or fifth academic publication on some obscure topic, the last thing you want to acknowledge is that there are thousands of equally experienced instructors earning less than $7,000 a semester to teach twice as many classes as you do, while receiving none of the perks of your job. No help in the classroom, no benefits, no retirement, no summer paycheck, no “time off” for research and not even job security from semester to semester.

Likewise, if you’re a legislator trying to claim that you’re creating viable jobs in the state, while simultaneously trying to whip up a tempest in a teapot over tuition increases by pointing out the excesses of the tenured elite, the last thing you want to acknowledge is that the typical Florida college instructor is a permanent temp worker with no benefits and no job security who earns barely more than minimum wage, even if she has been teaching for 30 years.

Exactly how bad is the pay for Florida adjuncts? At Hillsborough Community College, where I temporarily teach, the pay is $1,650 for teaching a three-credit course that begins in January and ends in May. If you hang in for eight semesters of temping, you receive an additional $60 per course.

So if you teach four classes in the fall and four in the spring (the maximum adjuncts are “allowed” to teach, lest we qualify as full-timers), and if you are lucky enough to grab two classes over the shortened summer term, a teaching load that is, believe me, more than full-time work, you earn, before taxes and with no benefits, $16,500 a year.

That is $16,500 a year for full-time work as a college professor. No distinctions are made for possessing a master’s degree or a Ph.D. No distinctions are made if you have been teaching high school students for 20 years and are providing your specialized skills to the large percentage of students at Florida’s community colleges who need special skills training in literacy and writing.

The classroom is supposed to be the heart of higher education, but it is actually the afterthought, the one place where expertise doesn’t matter, experience doesn’t matter, commitment doesn’t matter and none of these things get rewarded.
According to its Web site, Hillsborough Community College has 272 full-time professors and 1,490 adjuncts. The adjuncts, the Web site states, “help ensure a broad academic program. They know how to make class work (sic) interesting because teaching takes priority over research.”

“Teaching over research?” Spare me. I have at least 124 students enrolled in my classes. I have no campus phone number, and the adjunct office, which I share with an indeterminate number of other adjuncts, contains four desks and one computer, so between classes, I work in my car. My students use my home phone to contact me, and I have no place on campus to meet privately with them.

Students lose out when we starve education this way; turning the majority of instructors into temporary laborers disrupts campuses. Community colleges tout the personalized instruction students receive in smaller classes. Many of my students certainly need extra help, and all of them need and deserve career counseling and letters of recommendation and other things that are supposed to be provided by their professors.

But I wasn’t on campus last semester; I won’t be there next semester, and in the meantime, I’m not really there: I’m in the parking lot grading papers in my car.

Floridians need to decide if this is what they want from higher education.

Last year, the community college system absorbed 54,000 more students with no increase in funding. Legislators need to bravely stop whining about miniscule tuition increases and start explaining to their constituents (and admitting to themselves) that the vast majority of college professors aren’t latte-sipping post-structuralists jetting off to posh conferences on the public dime.

And those professors at public universities who are sipping lattes and jetting off to posh conferences while complaining that their peers in South Carolina earn 5 percent more than they do need to take a hard look at their own culpability in creating an unstable temp workforce out of their own peers.

If you are one of the many professors who philosophically opposes the “Wal-Martification” of the American workforce, chew on this: Wal-Mart actually offers more job stability, more access to health insurance and comparable or better wages than your own profession offers to most of its members.

Meanwhile, I’m not allowed to join the chapter of the United Faculty of Florida union at my school because I am a temp. Both the administration and staff at Hillsborough Community College have been personally gracious and kind, but it is frankly difficult to walk into a workplace knowing that you are working hard for pennies compared to the dollars earned by people around you.

It’s also difficult to express how demoralizing it is to be asked to lecture expertly on the entire expanse of Western civilization while being paid like someone who just got picked up off the streets to work an overflow shift for Manpower.
This semester, I am teaching, among other subjects, Homer, Socrates, Sophocles, the Justinian Code, the Old and New Testaments, St. Augustine, the Koran, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Martin Luther, Machiavelli, Blackstone’s Commentaries, Hobbes, Locke, Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Engels, Dickens, Nietzsche, Freud, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Hurston, Hemingway, Joyce, Sartre, DeBeauvoir, Tillich, Weisel, John Hersey and (Thomas) Wolfe.

Every week, usually on about Sunday night, I try to convince myself again that it is worth going through with this seemingly insane exercise in fiscal self-denial (St. Augustine helps with this). After meeting with students, grading papers, preparing readings, designing lectures and classroom activities and actually teaching them, I earn approximately $8 an hour.
It has been recommended to me that I could earn more by the hour (though still nothing that resembles a living wage) if I didn’t even lecture, but instead simply read ahead a few chapters in the (expensive and inane and historically inaccurate) anthology and talked with the students about what they had read. But that’s not teaching.

No wonder it’s so easy for the politicians and tenure-track faculty to forget that teachers like me exist: I forget I exist. In a banal metaphor for my current status, the magnetic nameplate keeps slipping off the mailbox I’ve been assigned temporarily.
Despite all of this, teaching at a community college is more exciting, interesting and challenging than university teaching; it’s too bad the pay scale reflects the opposite. I have students who ought to be on scholarship at four-year institutions. I have students who struggle with the English language, yet have still managed to get through “Oedipus Rex” with the rest of us.
I have military veterans who were separated from their families for long periods, and some who saw combat, which makes teaching classical stories of war like the “Iliad” more challenging and more relevant and more heartbreaking than I ever imagined it could be.

I have students my own age, or older, who, after working for decades for the same company, or in the same industry, suddenly found themselves laid off as their job went overseas, or were simply replaced with cheaper, younger employees who have even fewer expectations about being rewarded for things like being skilled, doing a good job, and showing corporate loyalty.

In other words, my students and I are in the same boat. We all show up at that campus for the same, modest reason: We want a job that won’t go away, with some healthcare benefits, a little hope for advancement, and a wage we can live on.
But the prospect for all of this just seems to be slipping away.

First published in the The Tampa Tribune on March 23, 2008.