Author Michael Dubson met with a small audience last night at Food For Thought to discuss his book, Ghosts in the Classroom. The book is a collection of essays about the current trend of the use of adjunct faculty at colleges and universities.
For Dubson and the book’s contributors, the trend is also a problem. Adjunct faculty are those hired by a college or university to teach classes on a part-time basis. They are not granted the perks and privileges afforded full time or tenured faculty members. According to Dubson, the trend emerged decades ago when experts in certain fields, such as business management, would offer their expertise to students by teaching a course at a local college in addition to their careers. But, Dubson said, adjunct positions have come to constitute a career for those looking to start in the field of higher education.
Dubson said he has taught in the adjunct track at a number of Massachusetts community colleges, and that the book began with his personal experience in the field. He said he thought of the book’s title when a fellow adjunct faculty member commented, “I feel like a ghost at this school.”
Dubson linked the trend to greater shifts in ideas about the purpose of higher education.
“It’s become more goal-oriented,” Dubson said, adding that students and administrators have come to look at higher education as preparation for work. “There’s this idea that going to school is a dreary thing, and that people who are smart are geeks or nerds or teacher’s pets. [Because of this] adjunct faculty and students have to grit their teeth and get through [school].
But schools offer a service. It isn’t offering a product. Running schools for profit corrupts education. We’re turning workplaces into factories.”
Only four people were in attendance, and the talk became a discussion forum rather than the lectures usually offered by the Food For Thought reading series.
Leslie Chalmers, who called herself “an unemployed adjunct,” has worked as an adjunct faculty member at a number of community colleges in Massachusetts, and said she recently turned down an offer of employment from Holyoke Community College because the pay was too small. “I felt literally sick when they told me what my pay would be,” she said. “I feel like [the adjunct system] is a lot of wasted human potential.”
Chalmers, like Dubson, linked these problems to societal attitudes toward education. “In this country we’re not interested in long-term human investment,” she said. “We’re interested in the short-term bottom dollar.”
Anesa Miller, a contributor to Dubson’s book, was also in attendance at the discussion. “When you start into it, it’s so exciting,” she said of being an adjunct faculty member. “But it really goes flat after a while.”
Adam Zerda, a doctoral candidate in Polymer Science and Engineering at UMass, said that he felt that adjunct positions were necessary. “Not every teacher can be tenured,” he said.
Once the realities of adjunct faculty employment were discussed, the question of how to reform the current system of higher education was explored by the group.
Dubson said that employees of colleges and universities had to mobilize and organize. He cited a 1998 campaign by faculty at UMass-Boston, which resulted in better pay and the granting of benefits to adjunct and part-time faculty members there. Dubson said that at UMass-Boston, students also aided in the effort, which included marches, demonstrations and petitions. Since then, he said, the state legislature and teaching organizations have been doing more to resolve the problem of adjunct faculty. “I think that state schools will be the leaders in cleaning up the problem,” he said. “They have more unions and more students.”
Chalmers said she disagreed. “Reform has to come from the consumer – the students and the parents of the traditional-aged students that are paying a lot of money for tuition.”
Zerda said he felt that change had to come from the employees that Dubson and Chalmers described as “used and exploited” by administrators. “There is a tendency to treat adjunct faculty as less than regular faculty,” he said. “But what do you want? Is it equal pay for equal work? Adjunct faculty aren’t doing equal work. I’ve never really seen being adjunct as a career. In my opinion you shouldn’t expect to be full time.
“Adjunct faculty is a problem, but on the other side of the coin – you’re not working full time, and you’re not supposed to,” he went on. “You’re thinking it’s a career and it’s not supposed to be a career.”
Dubson said that he partially agreed with Zerda, but that the problem is that adjunct positions have become the only option for those seeking a career as educators.
“You are right to some extent on this-it was never supposed to be a career,” Dubson replied. “But when you train for this career and when you get out of college, what else are you supposed to do?”
Zerda said he still felt that administrators should not carry all of the blame for that system. “It’s not purely an administrative problem,” Zerda said. “Things should be done in such a way that they don’t hire adjunct faculty to do this job.”
“Bingo,” Chalmers responded.
