I am humbled, and if you were in the hallway outside my dim office, you would see me bowing gratefully in your direction. It was not necessary to be so kind, and isn't that always the loveliest of kindnesses?
I teach at a place where a young man and a young woman perform an office-share across from me. I know them both. They are the most splendid of folks, yet they are also among our college's growing ranks of adjuncts. This is not their fault. They have excellent credentials and backgrounds. The young woman, I am told, has published a fine book with a university press about Joseph Heller. I would like to find it, and I will endeavour to that end later today on my Half.com or likewise.
But the story I would like to tell today concerns the young man. Let us call him Schimmel. Schimmel is a funny thing. He is always pleasant, joking, and he makes me laugh once a day at least. (This is, of course, when I should be dour and working, as is the mandate from the college.) I get the opportunity, because of the proximity of our offices, to see him interact with students. He does wonderfully. He is respectful of their ideas, but also firm when discussing advantages to other paths that they might take in future assignments. They may arrive sullen, but they almost always leave happy and refreshed. It is my opinion that this is a mark of a fine instructor.
Schimmel has been here for about 3 years, and he works like a dog for this college doing his piece-meal teaching. (I am also aware that he is an actor, and often performs with troupes in and out of the college community.)
But Schimmel is all right. This is really the message. A hard working sort, a friendly pal, and - from my own albeit limited view of his work - a credit to the college.
And to my point. He stopped in as he was leaving class today to tell me the most extraordinary and horrid tale. This morning he was on his way to work and encountered an automobile accident that took place some miles from the college. As the route is heavily traveled at that time of day, he was forced to wait in his place until the mess was cleared. When he arrived on campus, at his office door, it was 9:08 am (an hour when I, Yaro, am usually in my class, skewering the ideas for the day). As he keyed his way in, our lovely office assistant (Anna, but no more about her for now) came down the hallway to talk to him. This, to the best of my recollection, is the exchange Schimmel reported to me:
--
Anna: "Mr. Schimmel, I'm sorry, but I have to put a note in your employment and duty folder that you were not in at your office hours today, as per the information sheet which we ask all of our instructors to provide in the semester's early days."
Schimmel: "Pardon? Oh dear. I don't quite understand. I have only now just arrived after spending time in a rather long queue of automobiles out on Spring Hill Avenue. I was detained by that, but as you can see, am here only a few minutes past my normal window of time."
Anna: "Indeed, Mr. Schimmel, and it pains me to mention it at all, except for the fact that our Dean has contacted me and the other workers in the office, telling us to 'spot check' office hours for all of our part-time instructors. It has been passed down to me from Rebecca, the Dean's assistant, that should two of these events take place within a semester, that the expected result shall be the deduction of a single hour's wages, something, that in my own hasty calculation, amounts to something between $67 and $74.
Schimmel: "This is all blackness. I am without words, so I will simply thank you for the information and aim to arrive by 9 am on future mornings, regardless of traffic and - for I can see this coming as well - weather conditions."
--
This, I am told, was the extent of the conversation with Anna. Schimmel, however, not without skills and boldness, began to call around some of the other adjunct instructors in our building, and by the time I arrived for my own office hours at 10, a confabulation of them had gathered in Schimmel's office and in the hallway spilling both north and south.
It was not until later, in fact, just a while ago, that Schimmel made his visit to me to tell me of what had happened.
I, Yaro, was outraged by this. That the college is - pardon me - trying to "dick" around a fine young instructor over his inability to pierce the space-time-contiuum and meet a - let's be honest - arbitrary start of the day, leaves me nonplussed.
I offered Schimmel my own dismayed condolences, and then asked him if he would like me to get involved, because, as I told him, I was rather keen just then on making a visit to the Dean's office anyway. (For, if the Dean's assistant Rebecca really had returned from her recent maternity leave, I would like to give her my congratulations and huzzahs, as she was once a fine and particularly adept student of mine.)
Schimmel thanked me, but asked that I give him a day or two to do some more investigating. He did not want anyone taking up a charge of his until he was satisfied that this some $70 penalty was real, and not just some poorly designed warning that a drone in the Dean's employ might have dreamt up to scare the part-time workers.
I admit I was embarrassed at all of it. This is my college, after all, a place that, while it has its disappointments, has been my home for some time.
Schimmel left me there to go on to the next part of his day, and I was left to ponder the story and the events that I have just now told you.
I remember a line from a film I saw that seemed to sum up my feelings. I cannot recall the exact wording, as the idiom was not one I was familiar with. But it was along the lines of this: The monkeys have been put in a supervisory capacity over the zoo.
Indeed. It has taken the wind from my sails, and I shall report - if you wish - on any developments.
My friends,
Yaro
Bullshit all around, of course, but you seem to be glossing over the most outrageous aspect of the story: in what fucking universe, and by what possible fucking calculation does an adjunct make $70 an hour?
ReplyDeleteOf course this offers one possible answer to the eternal question of how administrators can live with themselves while treating adjuncts as they do. Maybe they aren't, as I've always assumed, morally bankrupt pieces of rat shit. Maybe they are so fucking stupid (and/or innumerate) that they actually believe they are paying adjuncts $70 an hour.
I mean, holy long-division Batman! What dark and smelly orifice did they pull that number out of?
Just a guess from my own experience as an administrator. We used to compute adjunct pay as it related to leave time and personal time this way.
ReplyDeleteAdjunct pay for a single class = $3000. 2 1/2 hours in class each week, plus an extra half hour for office hours. 16 weeks?
3000 / 16 / 3 = $62.50.
Like I said, just a guess.
Wait, wait, wait. You guys are debating the money problem when we really have to ask this principal question: Do Anna and Schimmel REALLY talk exactly like Yaro? This is delicious!
ReplyDeleteI suspect that everyone within 20 feet of Yaro talks exactly like Yaro. Even here, at the bottom of the comment list, I feel an inexplicable urge to do likewise. Let us call it the Yaro Field.
ReplyDeletePeople can rage against the dean, but how about that Anna? If someone tells you to be an asshole, the general rule is to avoid being an asshole as much as possible. If the dean says to check the office hours of the adjuncts, you don't rush up there at nine sharp. And you definitely don't report that an adjunct is missing by 9:08. There's a nice little Nazi working in Yaro's office, "just following orders".
ReplyDeleteCrush her, Yaro. Crush her.
This is outrageous, of course, but common in my experience. As for the computation of the actual hourly "rate," I can't tell you for sure. But last year when I took leave time beyond what I was allowed, the colleg deducted $59 and some change for an office hour I had to cancel and $118 for a week of class I couldn't fill with a sub.
ReplyDeleteI think an insistence that the T-T faculty (actually in fact) abide by the same rule would be hiiiii-larious. Can you imagine the hue and cry if some officious minion was double-checking to make sure Senior Prof Dr Dr Silverback was indeed in his office at 4:02 PM and not just then packing his golf clubs into the trunk of his Prius?
ReplyDeleteNice how the hourly computation doesn't take into account that one might have to actually, y'know, PREPARE for class or, perchance, GRADE anything. Shoot, if they're paying adjuncts for 3 hours a week, that's what adjuncts should give 'em.
ReplyDeleteThis year, I'm tallying my own "time card" to see how many hours I really do put in during a semester. I may find that, really, I'm paid about $1.47/hr as a part-timer, but I'm hoping to at least make what the kid next door pulls in from mowing lawns.
Wouldn't it be lovely if Yaro was down the hallway?
ReplyDeleteI did the math when I was an adjunct, and when I counted in prep time plus grading plus student e-mails plus class time plus an office hour (who does a half hour?!), it was $2/hr. That was 10 years ago, and the pay was $1500. So at today's $3K it would be $4/hr. Which is well below minimum wage.
ReplyDeleteJe love him, Yaro, too.
I worked for a short while at a pathetic university, and one day, I called in sick. I could not have dragged my flu-ridden carcass in if I had wanted to. They took approx $210 off my next pathetic pay check...estimating that I, like Yaro's fine colleagues, earned $70/contact hour. So believe me, I took that back. I cancelled office hours without telling anyone and I showed two films. I then told the students that I had my pay docked and that they should go to the registrar's office and ask for their money back for that one day because that's the kind of indignant shit disturber I am.
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine the hue and cry if some officious minion was double-checking to make sure Senior Prof Dr Dr Silverback was indeed in his office at 4:02 PM
ReplyDeleteDuring a particularly bitter strike by graduate assistants at a well-known private university many faculty moved their classes to off-campus locations as a gesture of solidarity. The deans then sent a squadron of Annas around to the classrooms to see which classes were not being held at their appointed place. I don't think anything substantive ever came of it in the end, but they did actually check on the Herr Doktor Professors and send them nasty emails.
In the end I don't klnow if any protest will be effective, but it needs to be made. This is appalling. Oh, and make sure Anna's life is miserable, too.
ReplyDeleteThink about it, though. These policies are saying what many adacemics have realized: that we are wage labor, not management. Attending committees and doing that sort of work, research, grading, and countless other "unbillable" hours have been passed off as "management" issues. And we, the professoriate, dislike thinking of ourselves as workers.
Well, if we are going to be "knowledge producers," then I say unionize, and start demanding both a living wage and overtime. If ALL classes had to be taught by full time people, I bet that Senir Prof. Dr. SIlverback would not like his paycheck but that Schimmel and his office mate would have jobs.
I think the PickyHistorian hits the nail on the head. Schimmel's problem is that he's a professional and he's being treated as if he were an hourly employee, just a cog.
ReplyDeleteWhat would be sweet is if Schimmel sent the Dean a bill for the hours he spends at home prepping the class, grading exams, etc. Pay to the order of Schimmel.
Then he could take Yaro out for a falafel.
Yaro, perhaps, should you get involved, you might mention to the Dean the following senario, which you will of course instruct all your adjuncts to follow:
ReplyDeleteAn adjunct one minute late who is docked an hours pay will spend the remaining 59 minutes sleeping/relaxing/having coffee/taking a walk/taking on the phone/using the time to his or her personal benefit. So the result of his policy is that rather than the adjunct depriving the students of 1 minute of office hour time, the DEAN is depriving them of 59! Should the dean expect the adjunct to work the 59 minutes sans pay, then perhaps the state Department of Labor might be interested in this violation as might the Federal goverment RE finacial aid eligibility for the uni.
Then I might tell the dean that this encourages the adjuncts to set large blocks of office hours (3-4 hours one day a week) as opposed to sporatically throughout the week so as to maximize availibility to most students. Say that you, were you an adjunct, would set your office hours to 5AM-7AM Saturday and Sunday morning (they way you aren't forcing students to work on the Sababth) when there will be no spot checks nor students committed enough to attend. So now the dean's policy is depriving almost every student of all adjunct office hours.
Of course, you will tell the dean that you will instruct your department's adjuncts to do exactly what is written above and you will find like minded colleagues in other departments to do the same. So should the dean choose to continue his policy (and not refund Schimmel's pay) then you will work diligently to ensure students have difficulty accessing office hours and when they complain you will point your finger squarely at the dean.
Go, Picky! I'm pretty disgusted with the "Senate Faculty" model of non-self-governance, and would take a union any day. Even, perhaps, over the tenure system.
ReplyDeleteYou fail to take into account the professors who mark students absent for being late. You guys seem to think this is totally fair (and to an extent, I agree). Why is this any different?
ReplyDeleteOh God. Not another student bitching about how bad she's got it.
ReplyDeleteLaura, your argument holds no water simply because most professors who "mark off" a late person as absent are not depriving the student of a living wage.
You pay the university, the university pays the instructor, the instructor uses that money to pay rent et al.
You having your final grade marked down from a 77 to a 76 because of one absence is not the same as someone being docked a whole hour for being delayed 8 minutes by unavoidable traffic. False analogy.
If they want to dock 8 minutes, so be it...then every instructor should do as suggested above: Bill for overtime and expect to get it. That will also mean no meetings for students outside of office hours, no e-mail responses outside of office hours, no extra help when you ask for it, etc. That's why professors are NOT hourly workers; it works out well for the schools in the vast majority of cases.
Your life as a student is so painful, but most readers of this blog live in reality.
Follow-up question: Would Schimmel have been docked if he had been in the restroom?
Yaro, it's time for you and other tenured faculty to circle the wagons and take someone in administration down a few pegs.
Laura, MPF makes some good points about it being a false analogy. But I'd like to let you know that some profs do distinguish between tardiness and absence.
ReplyDeleteWhen I didn't, I had students who showed up 20 minutes late (to a 50-minute class) every day and claimed to have never had an absence--though they missed 40% of the class!
So here's my system, and it works well: If a student walks in more than 5 minutes late, I glance at my watch and record the number of minutes that student is late. Instead of writing a check mark (for "present") or an "A" (for "absent"), I write an "L" with a superscript numeral, and that numeral is the number of minutes late.
At the end of the semester, I add up all of the minutes of lateness. Every 50 minutes of total lateness = 1 absence. I warn everyone about this in the syllabus, and I've never had a student object to this system.
Of course, this system only worked because I had 15 students in a seminar-style class. A larger class would find this system unwieldy.
My point: I've always agreed with you that tardiness should not be recorded the same as an absence. But MPF is right--adjunct profs are paid a certain amount of money for an uncertain amount of time. Unlike your class, there is no easy equation between minutes late and points (or money) deducted.
This is incredible. Your adjuncts need a union, Yaro. Anna needs to be fired posthaste. She is a nice little Nazi, as someone else pointed out. Your Dean also needs to be fired. So does your administration. This is obscene. I truly hope your adjunct gets a job elsewhere, immediately, and sends a letter to every scumbag in administration telling them why they lost him.
ReplyDeleteAs a follow-up on Ruby, I usually gave students "free absences" of up to the equivalent of 1-2 weeks of class (varied by school). And I never graded exclusively on attendance. And an 8-minute tardy was often typical where I taught. Hell, it used to take me the 10-minute in-between class time PLUS 2-5 minutes of class time just to get the effing classroom computer system working. More than 15 minutes late = absent (without a damn good reason). Heck, for a typical 50-minute class that's missing 30%! Instructors cannot be expected to take attendance more than once a class period. Now, if we had time-cards for students to be able to enter the classroom...
ReplyDeleteI don't take attendance.I do warn them that showing up tends to be correlated with doing well. But frankly, they're adults (or should be); they're paying for the class, and if they don't show up it's their lookout.
ReplyDeleteI passed an attendance sheet around at the beginning of class, and if someone wasn't on it, I marked them absent. Then I recorded their absences on ANGEL so that they could see them. I told them that class participation was 10% of the grade but I never actually added up the absences for each student. I found that students tended to get the grades they deserved.
ReplyDeleteI love reading what you write, Yaro. You are unique and talented. I look forward to future posts.
ReplyDelete"Anna" sounds like she must be my department head's sister, and the Dean is their brother. In our department, but in no other at Large Metropolitan Multi-Campus Two-Year College, we must end our office hours no less than 15 minutes before the start of our next class, and can start them no sooner than 15 minutes after a class ends.
ReplyDeleteOne of my colleagues is consulting a labor lawyer. The policy itself is not the real issue; the inconsistent application of it is.
Who is Yaro's favorite author? Edward Gibbon? I have to be careful whenever reading large doses of Gibbon, because I start talking that way, too.
ReplyDelete(Sad situation in this post: this little toad Anna is something else.)
I am smitten with Stella and Yaro--academic super-heroes!
ReplyDeleteCount me in as another reader always happy to see a post from Yaro.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether the adjuncts could cook up some sort of limited work-to-rule to call attention to the administration's questionable bookkeeping practices. Perhaps answer emails only during office hours (and only when a student hasn't shown up to make use of said office hours), and put a vacation message explaining why (that they're only contacting students during the "contact hours" for which they are paid) on the account? A week or two of such replies from a substantial proportion of the adjuncts might yield some interesting results (and shouldn't inconvenience responsible students -- the ones who actually read assignments and come to class and ask questions there -- too much).
Of course that doesn't get at the very real issue of pay for preparation and grading. I'm not at all in favor of docking adjuncts -- or anyone else -- for the occasional missed office hour or class; I'm pretty sure that even adjuncts are technically "non-exempt" employees -- paid to accomplish a job rather than to put in a certain number of hours -- and the assumption (correct in most cases) is that if a professor of any sort has to miss a class or office hour, he/she will find some way to make sure that the associated material/student contact is made up in some other way (just as any other salaried professional will work on a project on his/her own time if need be). However, if administrations insist on calculating an hourly rate for adjuncts, they need to include some sort of factor (x hours for every contact hour) representing preparation and grading.
It would also be interesting to see if there are regulations at your institution regarding how quickly faculty should reply to emails and/or return graded papers; if such requirements are written into a document that is part of the employment contract (as is often the case), then it would seem pretty clear that the university is, officially, requiring work beyond the "contact hours," and needs to take that into account in any pay calculations. It seems to me that the adjuncts, as a group, might want to raise this question with the administration, and, if they don't get a satisfactory response (i.e. if the policy isn't changed or rescinded), they should get in touch with an outside organization that could provide legal help and advice (the AAUP comes to mind; though they're not always as interested in non-tenure-track faculty as they might be, they seem to be waking up to the fact that the majority of the professoriat is now contingent, and that they're going to have to represent contingent faculty interests if they want to stay relevant).
I agree with Laura, if we the students get penalized for being late, so should professors. There is no excuse to not be in your office during office hours. I had a professor once who was feeling some abdominal pain in the morning so he went to the hospital. He was told that he needs to get his appendix removed posthaste. He, however, being the responsible person that he is, said “It is almost time for my office hours and there is no excuse to not be in your office during office hours. My students await and I’ll be damned if I should let them down!” He then jumped into his prof-mobile and rushed to the university. His appendix burst later that day and he almost died, but dagnabbit, he was in his office during office hours because he knew there is no excuse to not be in your office during office hours.
ReplyDeleteI feel that we can all learn a little something from this story.
LOL @ Anastasia.
ReplyDeleteI still wanna know if the adjuncts will get docked if they go to the restroom during office hours.
I pass around an attendance sheet too, never at the same time in class (i.e. at the end one class, mid-way after the frst break (4.5 hour classes), etc. Once I had a student complain that she had gotten an F in a course because "I didn't like her." I just showed my department chair the attendance sheets that proved that although she had signed up and never dropped, she had never attended even once. Hard to dislike the invisible, inaudble, and therefore inattentive student, don't you think?
ReplyDelete