Editor,
Your story on award-winning adjunct instructor Ann Skinner-Jones (June 6-13) makes clear her excellent qualifications and enthusiasm for teaching.
It also highlights the unfairness of adjunct status for many of those who hold it. The increasing use of adjunct instructors in universities across the nation exploits the academic labor force and undermines the professional status of higher-education faculty.
As your article points out, full-time adjunct faculty teach more courses than regular faculty, receive much less pay and have little in the way of job security or benefits. Yet their credentials are often equivalent to those of tenure-track faculty, and their work in the classroom can be outstanding.
Why should these dedicated professionals be treated as a species of academic migrant worker?
Obviously, the answer has to do with economies of scale and the corporatization of the university. Administrators are under considerable pressure to offer more courses and degrees than ever at less and less cost. An attractive solution is to create a permanent, undercompensated, second-class workforce.
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I do not refer to adjunct instructors as they were defined in the past. Your article rightly notes that “historically, adjunct instructors were working professionals (from professions outside academe) who periodically taught specialty courses part time.” Many of today’s adjunct faculty still fit this description, but we now have a growing class of instructors who are fully qualified academics dependent primarily upon teaching for their livelihoods but unable to find tenure-track employment.
People in this group become adjunct faculty not because they want to, but because they have to. They teach basic courses rather than specialty courses.
Although adjunct faculty often handle such teaching well, their heavy course loads and temporary status often prevent them from fulfilling the research and service functions of tenure-stream faculty. In most instances, adjuncts have neither the time nor the sense of institutional commitment to serve on the committees and perform the departmental administrative duties that are essential to the daily operation of any major university. Those functions fall to a dwindling and increasingly hard-pressed number of tenure-stream faculty. Research and service to the university community suffer as a result.
On the one hand, then, I’m glad that Ann Skinner-Jones has received recognition for her teaching. On the other hand, I’m inclined to think that the Adjunct Teacher of the Year Award was created for more reasons than one.
In addition to acknowledging merit, it’s a cost-free way of appearing to reward an exploited workforce, and it helps to sanction the continuing existence of such a workforce within the institution.
-Professor Hugh Witemeyer
English Department
President of the UNM chapter of the American Association of University Professors
