A few weeks later I had a visit from the liaison. She came to the horrible shared office I worked in, introduced herself and began to tell me about her own adjunct experiences. They were the same sad stories we all know. After she finished she began to talk about how she was interested in the future of adjuncting. She wanted to talk about my adjunct brothers and sisters in the future. She had big plans of organization and unionization. She wanted to experiment with longer contracts; she talked about offering benefits. And she wanted me to know that she was going to work for us from her perch in the full-time world.

After about thirty minutes of this she said to me: “So what is it that you want?”

And I thought about that question carefully. I’ve been teaching for 15 years, a little less than half of that in some kind of part-time or adjunct capacity. I’ve got the same bad experiences that many of you have: no office, no phone, driving countless miles, swapping around three briefcases. I once taught 28 composition students for 16 weeks for $600. So I know a little about wanting things.

This very eager and sincere liaison had asked me what I wanted and I knew of only one thing that would ease the torment of my adjunct existence

I wanted a file cabinet.

I was tired of storing my students’ essays in garbage bags. I didn’t have room to stack them on my shared desk; I didn’t have room in my briefcase to transport them home.  I didn’t want dental insurance. I didn’t want a vote. I just wanted a damn file cabinet.

The liaison looked surprised at first, and then a smile began to cover her face. She beamed at me. I felt warm. I felt like she had discovered a great answer.

“Don’t you see,” she said. “It’s much more important that a file cabinet be here for your brothers and sisters in the future.”

But of course she was wrong. I needed one right then. And no amount of patronizing and planning for the future on her part was going to help me do the job I was supposed to do right then.

That’s a few years ago now, but I’m still very much in touch with the world of adjuncting.

I’m the Writing Program Coordinator at Nova University in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. I care for and feed about twenty-five writing instructors every semester, about half of them part-timers. In fact, aside from my own teaching, hiring, evaluating, and aiding adjuncts takes up the majority of my time.

I do my best not to regale the part-timers with my own miserable stories; I know they’re all living their own. And while I have terrific respect for those of you who are working on this problem at the very highest levels, I find my needs much more mundane. I have a limited budget, and two tiny offices. I find myself down at our East Campus trying to trick Arlene out of yet another second rate desk. I find myself borrowing a pickup truck to bring a beat up file cabinet to campus.

Instead of working on solving the large-scale problems, I find myself working on the small things. And in doing so, I find myself working much more on the human level.

The liaison who dismissed my need for a file cabinet a few years ago certainly saw the big picture. But she didn’t see the small one. Obviously she meant well. Obviously large-scale remedies must be undertaken. But a few small repairs are needed right now, if only to remedy the dehumanizing way which adjuncts are treated in the current model.

All of the following things are things I’m doing now. Think of it as a work in progress. From my own experiences, and from the experiences of my current group of adjuncts, I’ve found that their concerns are simple.

They need space to do their teaching. The need an office and a desk and a file cabinet. A phone and a computer. These aren’t options or luxuries. Students need normal access to instructors, and instructors need a place to interact comfortably with their charges. Instructors without a space simply don’t feel that the institution values them. That is a degenerative condition that alienates everyone. 

Secondly I’m trying to provide my adjuncts with involvement. In some cases the only contact an adjunct has is for the signing of a contract and the turning in of grades. Sometimes this works out well, after all, the part-timer likely has duties elsewhere to take care of. Still, for those adjuncts who wish to be a part of things, it’s crucial we welcome their interest. In some of my better part-time positions I’ve been encouraged or “allowed” to attend committee meetings, head think-tank sessions, even advise students. It’s ridiculous not to take advantage of the experience and background of all of the institution’s instructors, not just those with tenure-track or full-time spots. In the simplest terms, adjuncts form an untapped source of help that any department could benefit from.

Thirdly, a few colleges are trying to offer their part-timers more security. Unless an institution is undergoing a vast change in their ratio of full-time to adjunct faculty, there is a rather steady need for part-time instruction. Usually, a slowly evolving pool of instructors gets used on a regular basis. The life of an adjunct is already unnecessarily harsh. In any institution that has a historically steady enrollment, creating some one or two year contracts for adjuncts would serve many purposes: 1) it would increase the adjunct’s loyalty to the institution; 2) it would help build continuity within a department (a common complaint among students, surprisingly); and 3) it would ease a department’s ongoing battle to maintain a steady stream of reliable and prepared adjuncts.

Finally, academic rights and academic freedom should be extended to part-timers as soon as reasonable. While I certainly review syllabi and textbook requests for my adjuncts, I do the same for our first year full-timers. Once any instructor has proven his/her worth through a year or so of instruction, he/she should be given the freedom to design and run courses that best suit the needs of those classes.

It all seems simple, but those of us with adjunct past, present and future, know that too often these easy fixes don’t exist.

The whole system can change. The abuse of adjuncts should not continue. But while people with larger brains and hearts than I put their energies toward the large-scale revision of the academic construct, I am going to do my part twelve adjuncts at a time, humanizing them in the eyes of the faculty and students at my institution.