Adjuncting is Good
Adjuncting is a good thing, when employed ethically. Generally, adjuncting as a full-time gig isn't good, and adjuncting wasn't ever viewed that way. So, what are the good models for adjuncting?
1. Extended grad student experience/funding. Maybe, provided that it isn't an excuse to artificially attenuate traditional TA funding in programs.
2. Extended faculty adjuncts - using working professionals in limited capacities. One can certainly argue that using actual professional chemists to teach certain chemistry courses can be a good thing.
3. Freeing up core faculty for major courses and research - this is a mixed bag, but there is something to be said for this.
Adjuncting is Bad
1. The business model for adjuncting can dilute faculty strength - in the wrong hands, a department's core faculty can be eviscerated by expanding the funding of more and more adjuncts, while minimizing the expansion or maintenance of TT/FT budget slots. From the core faculty perspective, hiring adjuncts to handle the service course component can benefit the core faculty by using core faculty time more heavily in the major courses and in research. However, the same reasoning can be used externally in choking a department by liberally funding its service component and in neglecting the core faculty. This is a real risk if your department has a large service course load, or if your particular major area is not viewed as essential by your administration.
2. Adjuncting enables underemployment - in areas with a surplus of MA/MFA/PhD holders, adjuncting, along with post-docs and VAPs, allows graduate programs to crank out product without regard to actual demand. Research faculty can rack up their student counts, said students can then be routed into the aforementioned adjunct slots, post-docs and VAPs.
Finding an ethical balance is challenging.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you noted something that I've always appreciated about my adjuncts:
I love that a few of my professors come to class in the evening to teach us the skills that they've been using all day in the workforce. It's quite valuable. They're very in touch with the workforce that we'll be entering, and that kind of experience is something for which I am very thankful.
Without disagreeing with anything the original poster said, can we get a site-wide moratorium on posts that use "whence" in the title? Seriously, I think I may have to go kill a English grad student just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
ReplyDeleteAdjuncting was a good thing for me. I didn't get a TA during my master's degree because I got some kind of presidential scholarship instead that paid the same but didn't require me to do anything but take an insane number of courses. My doctoral assistantship was an RA for all but one year when the department needed a TA, so adjuncting was what gave me the experience I needed. I was lucky to be adjuncting at a college at which I had a full-time tenured mentor. He taught me a great deal about how to handle students and manage my classes while balancing my doctoral work.
ReplyDeleteBut I think the nature of adjuncting has changed over the years. When I was doing it, very few people were "career adjuncts." Most were either professionals doing it for fun or a little extra cash, proffie spouses who were home raising kids during the day but wanted to keep up their skills by teaching a night class, or a few newly minted MAs/doctoral students aspiring to tenure track who had a decent chance of moving up within 3-5 years.
Now it seems as if almost everyone is an aspiring TT candidate even as those positions become less available. We have a lot of infighting among our adjuncts about who "deserves" the next opening. Sorry folks, there won't be another one anytime soon with our hiring freeze and our new administrative mandate that at least half our sections must be taught by adjuncts.