Homeless Adjunct™ is the blog for ’Junct™ Rebellion, which will talk about the many issues related to what is happening to American universities today. We’ll talk about the faculty labor abuse, and the actions being attempted in order to end it. We’ll talk about the plight of the students. We’ll talk about the poverty of the college professors, and about the deprofessionalization of entire class of citizens in the United States.
If you would like to get in touch with The Homeless Adjunct, you can email Debra Leigh Scott at junctrebellion@gmail.com Her wish was to be nameless on the blog, not for reasons of anonymity, but to underscore the desire for The Homeless Adjunct to be understood as a kind of “every adjunct”. We who have been trapped in contingent faculty poverty often feel voiceless and powerless. There is a general fear of speaking up, since we don’t have any kind of job security. So The Homeless Adjunct will endeavor to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves, while encouraging more voices, more involvement. It’s only by coming together, raising awareness and a little hell, that we will reclaim high quality higher education in America.
Thank you! I was an adjunct for two years for NYU, and left with little but bile, outrage, and debt. Delighted to know about this site.
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Food for thought: an “adjunct” is something that is a part of but not essential to the whole. Perhaps our first act needs to be to reject the language of oppression by which others identitfy us. This goes as well for the term “part-time” faculty. I, for one, was never really “part-time”– I was either “no time” or “double time.” I either had to fight administration for unemployment (read: basic survival) when they (sometimes at the last minute) pulled my classes, or I taught up to six classes on two different campuses (with 3 hours of daily commute).
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Great Blog! However, I think your goals would be better served if you would place this explanation on the front page. Visitors need to read your mission in the first few seconds they view your blog. Best of luck to you! Here’s a quick suggestion:
“The Homeless Adjunct speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. She is an anonymous Blogger who wants to express the experience of “every adjunct.” We, who have been trapped in contingent faculty poverty, often feel voiceless and powerless. There is a general fear of speaking up since we don’t have any kind of job security. But on this blog we can post about the many issues related to what is happening to American universities today. We’ll talk about the faculty labor abuse, and the actions being attempted in order to end it. We’ll talk about the plight of the students. We’ll talk about the poverty of the college professors, and about the deprofessionalization of entire class of citizens in the United States.”
It is three weeks from the start of my fourth year of being an annually contracted full time adjunct. I could go on and on about the negatives of this experience. My reason for this post, though, is to ask if anyone knows if there are legal ramifications to breaking an adjunct contract? It is 3 1/2 weeks until school starts and I am interviewing for a dream job that will start very soon. Ethically, I know this seems bad. The guilt has already began. For my sanity, I need to get off of this non-beneficial hampster wheel of a job. Thank you for anyone who could help with this topic.
From everything I have read, the “contract” which has written within it the right of the university to cancel the class at any time for any reason (which is more or less the language universally used), pretty much exonerates the adjunct from any guilt should s/he receive a better — and what wouldn’t be better? — offer of employment. The whole system is built in such a way as to render us powerless and replaceable — so I would not worry, should you be offered another job, about giving notice and leaving. If you are still weeks away from school beginning, you might still have time to give notice before class starts. If not, trust me when I tell you that, as an adjunct for 15 years now, I’ve had administrators call me halfway into a semester with a panicked request for replacement faculty. It happens — less often than we SHOULD have it happen. These schools depend on the very guilt you are expressing, the sense of honor and obligation that we feel to ourselves, our profession and our students — but they have no such sense of honor or duty to us OR to the students. So — take those job interviews and do what you have to do to make a better life for yourself.
Let me second that, if it needs seconding. Lack of commitment to a contract should work both ways. “Sorry, but I have a good full-offer” sounds unimpeachable as an exit line, and might (if enough people had the chance to use it) even be therapeutic.
Holy crap! Come on, Jaymie if you were on fire, these bastards wouldn’t piss on you to put it out. You have been used, abused and generally screwed six ways to Sunday for three years, and you feel GUILTY?
Get PISSED, Jaymie. You should be angry, because it would be a righteous anger. Did you get the letter telling you what you’re teaching yet? When you do, I suggest you wipe your ass with it and send it back to them.
Unless much has changed in the last two years most contracts with temporary faculty are not really binding. I suspect you could talk to your program director and let them know what has happened to your job status. They can usually find a replacement with what they might deem an equally qualified person in a heart beat. Unfortunately there are many highly qualified persons available even on short notice. Good luck and do not feel guilty for trying to find a job with security. The current college teaching job situation is deplorable.
It is odd for someone working for the public good to use the archaic trade mark instead of a creative commons license, otherwise great stuff
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Very accurate analysis. The process, with a few minor name changes, was repeated here in Australia, starting with the ALP ( a sort of Democrats left wing) and continued by the Liberal party (a sort of Democrats right wing). Havel did warn us in 1978 in his essay, The The Power of the Powerless. that the process they were confronting, the apparat and ideology, in the old Soviet Empire was a global phenomenon, and that we in the West would have to confront in in time. It has conquered other centres of power here as well: both sides of politics, the union movement, most of the nongovernment sector, primary and secondary education systems. The ideology is managerialist domestically, and globalist internationally, but what it shares with Communism is the fundamental self-serving idea that there is a vanguard, a party, a management class, that makes its members the elect. Everyone else is there to be managed.
I do not share the writer’s optimism that this can be reversed. The system now in place will not surrender its power lightly, to any argument of reason, human dignity or benefit. It will most likely run its course, and, like the USSR and its satellites, collapse under the weight of its corruption and mismanagement. Communism Redux.
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Please include me