Last summer, Rachel Riederer interviewed me for “The Teaching Class,” an essay she published in...

Last summer, Rachel Riederer interviewed me for “The Teaching Class,” an essay she published in Guernica , about adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty. She could only use so much of what I said, of course, but now that her piece has been referenced in this New Yorker article, too—with my story anonymously summarized there—I felt I should include her original questions and my full answers on this blog for anyone who might be interested.

In terms of  background, I’d like to know when you started teaching, what subject, what university?  And then how long had you been teaching when you had the dust-up?

I started teaching as a graduate assistant at New Mexico State University in 1999. English departments call graduate students who teach “graduate assistants” or “teaching assistants,” but in truth, they’re not assistants at all. They’re almost always solely responsible for choosing class materials, planning lectures and in-class lessons, grading, and so on, and that was my experience, too. I received four days of training before I was turned loose in the classroom for the first time. On the fifth day, the department chair said, “Any questions?”


I was 22 years old. Some of my students in that first semester were older than me. And once I got over the shock that someone was dumb enough to let a 22-year-old teach a college class, I realized I was quite adept at it. You have to know the subject. You have to know how to relate to other people who may not care about the subject. And you need common sense. If you have those three, you can begin to learn how to teach, but after a certain point, it never gets easier. You’re never on cruise control.

After I finished my M.F.A. at NMSU in 2002, I was hired by Ball State University in my home state of Indiana—a full-time, salaried contract position with benefits that I have to this day. Between 2002 and now, I’ve also taught at a few universities as an adjunct. Most notably for your purposes, I taught three classes per semester at Marian University in Indianapolis (2008-2011).

When the situation I originally told you about occurred in February of 2011, I was finishing my third year as an adjunct at Marian, but it was my twelfth year as a writing instructor at the college level. At Marian, I taught the required first-year writing courses, one of which was also a literature class. At Ball State and other universities, I’ve taught fiction writing, screenwriting, and other creative writing courses, too, though first-year composition is the reason I have had these jobs.

What were your working conditions at the time?  (How many courses; amount you were paid, if you feel comfortable saying; what kinds of administrative support / office space / etc, did you have access to, or not have access to?)

I taught three courses per semester as an adjunct at Marian. Had I been assigned more classes per semester, I would have been considered a full-time employee and given an actual salary. Instead, I was paid $700/credit hour, or $2,100 per three-credit course. By contrast, my full-time course load at Ball State meant four classes per semester, and even my starting salary in 2002 meant that I was paid more than $3,500 per course. Now, after twelve years, I make a bit more than $5,000 per course, though my base salary after more than a decade of meritorious service is only finally equal to what many of Ball State’s named peer institutions pay as a starting salary for someone in my position.

There were a handful of us adjuncts who taught English or communication classes at Marian. We were housed in one office with dilapidated, leftover office furniture acquired when other faculty or professionals on campus no longer had use for them. There was one computer for us to share, a hand-me-down that barely held together. One secretary managed everything for the entire department, and the mailroom for the entire university was housed in another building. We were responsible for making our own photocopies, but were given access to a room full of photocopiers. Faculty aren’t allowed to make their own copies in my department at Ball State.

I vaguely knew that the adjunct situation in America was horrible, but only when I began to teach as an adjunct did I begin to fully understand what a horrible racket it is.

I decided that, in addition to my full-time job, I needed to pick up some extra classes somewhere to stay ahead of the economic downturn. And it’s true that, from 2008-2011, while many Americans were losing their jobs or being forced to take furloughs or lose pay in other ways, my annual income continued to increase. But I was teaching seven or eight classes each semester, plus working with online students at Ball State to bring in extra income, too. I had the equivalent of two full-time jobs, in other words, though my overall income was not twice my full-time job’s base salary. My wife and I also needed money to renovate our kitchen; once the kitchen was finished, we could refinance the mortgage we’d agreed to at the height of the housing bubble.

How did you decide that talking about your position as an adjunct was important for your students to know about?

I only talk about the working conditions of contingent faculty when it’s appropriate, such as when a student argues that faculty salaries should be reduced in order to lower tuition costs, or when a student says “I pay your salary,” which is thankfully not something I hear much anymore. Most Americans think university faculty are raking in six-figure salaries for teaching a couple of classes each semester. I find it necessary to fight against those assumptions, which are not representative of the humanities, and certainly not English departments.

How did you tell them?  Would love you to walk me through this conversation — how did you phrase things, how did they respond?  

In between two of my classes—it’s important to emphasize that this exchange did not happen during scheduled class time—six or seven of my students who had arrived early were hanging out in the classroom. One of them began talking about a history instructor across the hall. The student said the class was easy, that students didn’t have to do much work, and that the teacher seemed interested in getting them to like her. I knew the instructor was an adjunct, and that she taught at several places to cobble together a living. I told the students as much, and that the class was easy because she was afraid of losing her job.

On your students’ understanding of what you were telling them — did they know the term “adjunct” before this conversation?  Did they know whether their other teachers were also adjuncts?

A few of them were familiar with the term, but I defined it for them all. I said that an adjunct’s course evaluations could play a huge role in whether he or she was re-hired, and student learning did not seem to matter as much. One of the students asked if I was an adjunct. I told her I was, but only at Marian—in this Age of Google, it was no secret that I also taught at Ball State. One of them jokingly asked why I didn’t go easier on them, too. We laughed, but I told them that because this was my second job, and one I didn’t intend to keep forever, I could afford to have academic standards. “You may not like me, you may not like this class, but if you do the work I assign and make a sincere effort, you will learn something of value,” I said.

Because I considered this interaction a “teachable moment,” I made a comparison that is 100% true, though it still got me in trouble. I said that the university pays the janitor who scrapes the gum off their desks more per year than me and most of the people who teach their first-year classes. My private university students couldn’t believe that, but it was true. Even a low estimate shows how that’s true. Ten bucks per hour for forty hours a week equals an annual salary of $20,800.

One year at Marian, I taught seven courses (including a summer section), but made only $14,700 before taxes. It was three-fourths of the work of my full-time job at Ball State. I would have made nearly double that amount for teaching seven classes at Ball State, based on my then-current salary. And Marian isn’t the worst of the bunch—a few schools in the area still pay adjuncts less than that per credit hour. It’s shameful.

What happened next?  Would love to hear more about the student who brought this to the administration.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time—in no way did I think I’d done something wrong by speaking the truth. But 10 days later, my boss wanted to meet with me about a “classroom incident” that had been reported by another faculty member. This other faculty member reported that a student had come to him for help because I had “ranted” about the low pay and working conditions of adjuncts to my students.

I’m not an idiot, but I didn’t immediately recognize that one of my older students shared a last name with a Marian professor who worked in another department, and she was one of the students who participated in this discussion before class. I only knew his name because he sent dozens of emails each semester to the faculty list. The student who supposedly came to him for help was his wife—she told him what I said and it upset him so much that he felt he needed to report me. Again, I didn’t take up class time. This discussion happened before class. And all I did was tell the truth. The kicker? This guy who tried to get me in trouble probably still has an appallingly low salary, too, even for a tenured theater professor. 

Teaching in the humanities is like being in The Hunger Games. The odds are never in your favor, and your best bet is to run like hell in the other direction. But if you do get caught up in the fight, you’ll be fighting for scraps. There are no winners.

My boss was especially worked up about the janitor comparison. She wanted to know how I could possibly make that claim.

A day or two before my boss called me into her office, my wife had worked up some budget numbers for the next year. She told me I didn’t need to keep working at Marian—we’d already renovated the kitchen and refinanced, and most of my income from the third year in this position was in the bank. So while I calmly explained to my boss the realities of adjuncts at Marian and across the country, and then argued that she should work harder to improve the working conditions of the instructors under her direction, I already knew how the meeting would end.

I told her that would be my last semester at Marian. She immediately switched to a pleading, softer tone, begging me to stay. I’ll never understand that. She had hit me up for all kinds of free consultations about curricular design—the Writing Program at Ball State had won a big award for our curricular overhaul, and I had played a part in making that happen. The program at Marian was very much out of date, by 20 years or more. Maybe that had something to do with her pleading. Or maybe the only thing worse than a troublemaking adjunct is having to go through the process of hiring his replacement.

Do you think the rise of contingent labor affects student outcomes?

Maybe. I think it’s an easy assumption to make. “Contingent labor” is a broad term. Salaried, full-time employees with benefits—especially those whose one-year contracts have been renewed multiple times—probably feel like they can do more to challenge students and keep high standards. Adjuncts living from class to class might not always feel like they can do that. But are tenure-track faculty better teachers? No. Absolutely not. Obviously, there are good, bad, and mediocre teachers in every department, whether they’re adjuncts, contract faculty, or tenure-track faculty. But some of the best teachers I’ve known have been salaried, full-time instructors off the tenure track.

Now, because of my administrative position, I have a (reduced) teaching load of three courses per semester, the same as most tenure-track faculty in my department. I still write and publish. I still write letters of recommendation for students and colleagues, serve on committees, and everything else. But my base salary twelve years after I started my full-time job is two-thirds of the starting salary my department just offered a tenure-track hire who has almost no relevant teaching experience and no book publications. Departments and universities are afraid to promote contract faculty because they think it will open the door for them to pay everyone a decent salary, adjuncts included. But the research shows that tenure-track salaries are tied to contingent salaries in interesting ways. A rising tide lifts all boats, but too many tenure-track faculty think it’s an us vs. them situation. Universities are being gutted from the inside out by state legislators and those who think “running it like a business” is the best strategy. A recent article in the Indianapolis Business Journal praised my university for its low faculty pay, and didn’t say much about how our recently departed president was paid nearly a million dollars last year. Her base salary was lower than that, of course, but after bonuses and the rest, it totaled close to a million dollars. And this is at a public university in Indiana, one without a medical school or law school.

In my experience, adjuncts are really reluctant to talk with students about their work/contract circumstances.  Why do you think this is?  Did you feel this way in the past and change your mind, or…?

Adjuncts are afraid to speak up for fear of losing their jobs, and universities play on that fear. Tenure-track faculty have their own fears, of course, and in general, I think faculty across the humanities are afraid to demand better pay and working conditions. I have never been afraid to speak up, but look what happened when I did—I was reprimanded for telling the truth, and not even in an especially inflammatory manner. I had the luxury of leaving that position, so it didn’t matter. But what if I’d needed every last one of those 700 dollars per credit hour? What if, as one of my colleagues there did, I had to teach at five different universities all over the state just to get by? I imagine I’d have to act like that colleague, who was defeated and quiet, and who most closely resembled a ghost floating in and out of campus.

I spent last year researching faculty pay for a proposal that asks the university to increase the salaries of contract faculty in my department. I knew the starting salary for my position hadn’t been raised since I started, and that cost-of-living raises during the last 5-10 years had been few and far between, even for faculty who were deemed “meritorious,” as I was. I errantly thought that was just the situation at all universities. But it’s not, I discovered. My university has a list of 21 peer institutions, and 14 of those institutions responded to my inquiries about starting salaries, titles, and course loads for non-tenure-track faculty who teach writing courses. I was ashamed, and then angered, to learn that the median starting salary at these institutions was exactly equal to my current salary. Because I’d been deemed meritorious for more than 10 consecutive years, I should have received the highest annual raise of any contract faculty member in my department during each of those years. Indeed, the only contract faculty who make more than me now are those who’ve taught in the department for 20 years or more. That’s the only way to get a higher salary: grind it out for two or three decades.

Meanwhile, the contingent labor force is becoming more qualified than ever. In some departments, the contingent faculty may be as qualified—or more qualified—than those on the tenure track. As this continues, departments will have to find more equitable ways of compensating their employees. The old way of thinking about contingent labor is that they’re temporary teachers who, if they’re any good, will move on in a year or two to a better position. But that hasn’t been the case for the entirety of my professional career. There just aren’t enough tenure-track positions. Creative writers, in particular, are not going to stop writing poems, essays, short stories, novels, and screenplays just because they have a teaching job off the tenure track, even one with a heavy teaching load, and when those creative works are published, some of them to wide acclaim, the balance of respect and recognition may begin to shift within English departments.

Another factor is location. I’m qualified for many tenure-track positions in creative writing, but my wife and I bought and renovated an old house in Indianapolis that we love. We want to stay here. We are deepening our roots in our home state by choice, not because we don’t have better options. Some people say, well, why don’t you leave academia? Believe me, I think about it every year. I love teaching, but it’s hard to respect yourself when the institution you work for so clearly doesn’t respect you. Because so many Americans assume college professors have the easy life, it can also be difficult for professors to transition to positions outside academia, but it’s not impossible. Your CV might be fat-packed with accomplishments, but if you’re in a non-tenure-track position, there’s a low ceiling and few opportunities for advancement. Try to shuffle sideways into another career and you might find that those interviewing you don’t understand why you’d ever want to leave your “cushy” academic gig. The choice to attend graduate school, especially if your intention is to one day teach college courses, has never been riskier, especially if you take out student loans to do so.