Gypsy Scholars and Liberated Lecturers
The trials and benefits of part-time teaching.
By Bill Kirtz
They can't get on. They fell off. They jumped.
They were pushed. They would prefer not to. Whatever the reason, they're
off the tenure track.
They're the many. The part-timers.
In these budget-trimming times, the math is compelling.
Tenure is a $2 million bet on an academic specialist that he or she will
continue to be both productive and needed for thirty or so more years of
changing enrollment and educational patterns.
The attractive alternative? Part-time faculty,
who for as little as $2,200 a course at N.U.-about one-quarter of the per-class
salary of tenurites teaching comparable courses-can be added or jettisoned
at will. The university gains the flexibility to meet last-minute needs.
Part-timers-a category that includes lecturers,
adjunct faculty, and graduate assistants-teach nearly forty percent of
N.U.'s undergraduate classes. This fall quarter, they're handling 12 of
21 courses in accounting, 12 of 24 in psychology, and all but 14 of 91
in English (including freshman and remedial sections). This reflects a
national pattern. An estimated forty-seven percent of the country's higher
education teaching positions are part-time, with their numbers nearly doubling
since 1970. Ads in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education list 37 tenure-track
positions and 55 temporary appointments.
Malcolm Hill, the associate dean of N.U.'s College
of Arts and Sciences, who fields departments' pleas for more teachers,
notes the obvious. "Financial interests favor fewer tenured faculty.
They cut in on things you'd like to do with the money."
Finding qualified profs is certainly easy these
days, with platoons of hopeful scholars to choose from. The toughest competition
for academic jobs comes in the liberal arts, where humanities PhDs flood
the market. The Modern Language Association (MLA) reports that only thirty
percent of newly hatched doctors in linguistics and classics, a third in
English, and forty percent in foreign languages and literature find tenure-track
jobs within a year of graduating.
And Boston is a magnet city. Tenured profs from
the hinterlands have jumped at the chance to become junior faculty on Huntington
Avenue. So pity the doctorate without teaching portfolio. An MLA forum
last year noted the jobs some of them have been forced into: greeting card
writer, astrologist, midwife. Not to mention that perennial standby, waitron.
As Hill puts it, "There's a bazillion people kicking around"
for adjunct work.
One of those bazillion is Murray Forman. The popular
and well-respected Department of Communication Studies part-timer dreams
of treading the N.U. tenure trail, but meanwhile pieces together "a
very basic living salary between here and other institutions."
A specialist in critical cultural studies and
race and diversity issues, Forman is a typical gypsy scholar. He started
at Northeastern in 1994 with one course, dividing his time between Boston
University and UMassBoston as well. Last winter, he taught three courses
here. Last spring, it was two at N.U. and two at Emerson College. From
time to time, Tufts gives him a ring.
Although some part-timers complain that tenure-trackers
give them no respect, Forman appreciates his N.U. communication colleagues
"letting me hone my skills. I have a lot of room. They give me collegial
space."
Forman would love a tenure-track position here,
but he knows N.U. and other components of what he calls the education "industry"
shy away from creating them. He believes this hurts institutions and students.
Part-timers can't help their departments with such crucial matters as curriculum
development and university governance. Rushing between gigs, they can't
spend as much time as they'd like counseling students. When they hear of
a good student job, which university should they tell?
Forman tries to be part of the N.U. community
but says he's "often forced to split alliances, with no strong commitment
to any one place." Still, he's hanging on. He's searched nationally
for tenure-track jobs, but "here I'm established, and I have to weigh
geographic and institutional connections. I feel a kinship to N.U. and
hope something will open up."
With departmental support and deans' acquiescence,
scholars like Forman can move up the food chain. The first and most common
rung on the part-time ladder is day labor-no benefits, with pay ranging
from $2,240 per undergraduate course in Arts and Sciences up to $7,500
for some Law School classes. More seasoned adjuncts can get a benefits
package and a guaranteed number of courses a year, usually nine. And "academic
specialists" get yearly contracts, with the assumption that these
will be renewed for five years. For these rarefied assignments, part-timers
can negotiate higher salaries, often because they do administrative work
as well.
Some part-timers, like University College's Diane
Harper, see another advantage in "academic specialist" work:
freedom from the infighting that can transform a department from the Brady
Bunch to Bosnia at the drop of a chairperson.
Harper loves her specialist berth because "there's
no BS. I can engage whenever I want to, or walk away." Stuck in one
of the mind-numbing meetings that tenure-trackers must endure, Harper can
say, "This is boring. I'm out of here."
Harper, holder of a master's degree from Boston
College, has been at Northeastern for a decade, teaching writing courses
in the College of Engineering and the English department. She faults tenure-track
people for the attitude that a route like hers means "you're a failed
PhD." Her response to that sort of sheepskin snobbery: "My job
model threatens tenured people a lot. Lots of people do other things on
purpose. My job lets me teach on my own terms."
For thirty-four years, Joseph De Roche has taught
here on his own terms, without a doctorate but with a unique situation
in the English department, a year-to-year but permanent instructorship.
In essence, he's swapped academic status for writing time. He's a pro as
well as a professor. "I chose to go on the creative track, concentrating
on contemporary poetry," he says. "I fell into my slot. I'm 'permanent
part-time.' I don't know how permanent 'permanent' is. I don't know if
that has legal status."
The N.U. graduate (LA'61) returned to Huntington
Avenue with plenty of professional status: a master's from the University
of Iowa's famed writing workshop. De Roche teaches two-thirds time, two
courses a quarter, with no committee duties. He feels fortunate. "I'm
an anomaly. There are fewer and fewer places open like this. This allows
me to write poetry at my own pace. It's allowed me to be a hyphenated person,
a teacher-poet or vice versa. Teaching is draining if you're doing it well-a
creative drain-but if I've lost a few poems, it's a trade-off I've chosen
to make."
Of course, the PhD route is also a trade-off.
De Roche says, "I always warn students that if you're going to the
academy, you'll write to their direction. That's not a complaint, but academic
writing tends to sound the same." Nevertheless, he believes "the
tenure track could make a person blossom."
Blossom-or wither. Bradley Smith fears the latter
enough to seek a high school berth. The fifteen-year English department
lecturer has taught eleven different courses here. Exceptional student
evaluations from business administration and engineering majors attest
to his ability to get them excited about books. "I love literature
and like teaching composition," he says. "My kids like me and
I like them."
But he recently dropped out of Northeastern's
PhD program after five years, fearing the "publish or perish"
gauntlet his colleagues have had to run. He points out that a high school
job would be more secure and better paid than his present nine-course load,
adding that it would also give him the "sense of community and camaraderie
I'm not getting here."
In N.U.'s English department, from which he graduated
with highest honors in 1980, Smith has found "an us-and-them attitude
between the tenured and the nontenured. There are factions within the tenure-track
people, and between teaching assistants and their mentors. When you specialize
and specialize to the exclusion of everything else, you need a niche to
get tenure and you don't want anyone else in the niche."
Teaching assistants' and adjuncts' lots may not
always be happy ones, but they're unlikely to change for the better. They
may be hanging on by a thread, but at least they're still in academia.
So when you're about to stiff that surly serveperson,
the one whose dissertation on Daniel Webster's rhetoric has earned him
only the right to mutter the dessert menu, stop and think. Tonight's waiter
may be tomorrow's adjunct. At least he hopes so.
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the
School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the
Gown."
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