Adjuncting Until the End of Time
There is no indication that adjuncts are less capable than their tenured peers, only that they haven’t won the lottery of professorship. Despite their compromised positions, adjuncts still win teaching awards, publish books, and contribute widely to scholarship, literature, and the arts. And they do this even though their academic research and writing—meant to be supported by a tenured position—has been relegated to unpaid labor.
Adjuncting is also a bad deal for students, who seem largely unaware of the problem. (I recently heard about a student who was shocked to discover, upon dropping food off at a local pantry, that their instructor was the one picking it up.)
As the cost of tuition rapidly increases, and as the proliferation of AI compromises the college experience, students should know that universities are ensuring that their instructors don’t have the time to dedicate to creating new classes or modules or to fully contend with how AI is changing the classroom. Adjuncts also don’t have a chance to be a part of any one university community, which would allow them to become mentors to students as well as to connect with and learn from peer scholars, then bring that knowledge back into the classroom.
I used to think of academia as a modern patronage system that shaped our thought and culture in important ways. Through tenure, thinkers, writers, and artists were offered financial stability, and with it the time and freedom to research and create outside of the market. In exchange, they passed their knowledge on to students.
But academia no longer fulfills this promise. In the 10 years since my partner’s surgery, he has worked at eight institutions in three different countries, in a series of precarious academic positions—and all this while applying for the next round of jobs, writing articles for leading journals, and publishing a book with a major university press. There’s a strange, depressing dissonance to leveling up in a career—achieving, essentially, all the milestones of tenure—yet never having the opportunity to advance, never mind having the dignity of stability.
