My Letter of Resignation from Kent State: The Adjunct Situation Part 2

Dear Administrators at Kent State University,

It is with sadness that I write to say that I will not be teaching for Kent State next fall.

When I returned to Ohio in the summer of 2011, I so looked forward to coming and teaching at home, and my year at Kent was wonderful in many ways. I liked the writing curriculum, and I loved my College Writing II students, several of whom have stayed in touch in the intervening year. In fact, I deeply love students and teaching anywhere. Recently reading Mark Edmundson’s advice to college freshman (“Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?”), I was most struck by this sentence: “Education is about finding what form of work for you is close to being play,” and though I would say that the play of teaching is exhausting, I think I found my form of work in 1972, when I began my career, or even before, when I lined the neighborhood children up and assigned reports to them.

Some aspects of adjuncting can be discomfiting, as I learned when I was an adjunct at Cleveland State in the early 1980s, but being a tenure-track and tenured professor at The University of Findlay involved big swaths of discomfiture, too. However, none of that prepared me for the discomfiture of the salary at K.S.U. in this decade. I honestly did not pay much attention to the salary when I interviewed here—my bad, I know, as the kids say—I so wanted so to continue teaching as long as I could.

But then it hit me mid-fall semester. I was making less than $8000 a year for half-time work—or if you prefer, 40%-time work (figuring 80% teaching and 20% administrivia a full load for those who teach 8 courses a year). When I left my adjunct position at Cleveland State in 1984, I was making $10,000. Even if I could teach two sections of composition in 16 hours, which a dean suggested I do by not correcting papers, that’s not much over $7 an hour. Now, I spend way over 16 hours a week when I teach two sections of writing. I prep a lot, attend professional events, keep up with the latest technology, publish a fair amount, and spend eons responding to student work, but let’s ignore them and stick to 16 hours a week work for two sections of writing: it is still less than minimum wage.

So I took the past year off to think about it. I miss teaching more than I ever thought I would. However, I am not willing to be abused by Kent State University.  I trained too hard, worked too long, and received enough recognition for my effort to now be disrespected this way by the institution and by some full-time faculty who assume their part-time colleagues are less qualified than they, though I have many publications, fellowships from the Fulbright Association, NEH, Yaddo, and the Ohio Arts Council, national and local teaching awards and reams of positive student evaluations and colleague observations. 

I have worked decades on the issue of the over-use and underpayment of adjuncts, who constitute 43-67% of KSU’s teaching faculty (depending on whether we count courses or faculty), so I am saddened to have seen nothing being done on the issue at Kent State. Here in Ohio and elsewhere, other universities have managed better models of employment in the area of Composition, for one, and I would highly suggest KSU faculty and administrators educate themselves about these other models. Meanwhile, I am not willing to work under such a sorry lack of leadership. 

I have seen no one here, including the union, doing much about it. Today’s Inside Higher Education has pointed that fact out on a national level:

 

Why have so few outside these ranks [ of adjuncts] taken up this cause? While non-tenure-            track faculty have been vocal in advocating for change, virtually no institutional, foundation, 

or policy leaders have acknowledged the hard realities of these conditions or expressed concern. In fact, in private, a few postsecondary leaders will note that they feel bad and think the model is morally bankrupt. In public, though, they often show no leadership, nor do they voice their objections to a model that surely cannot be sustained -- nor should it be.

In researching what has been done at KSU faculty meetings on the issue, I would say this statement seems particularly true of the KSU faculty.

 

I will say that I understand the difficulty of making inroads into the problem. My partner, who is also an academic, has worked on this issue in every situation he has been a part of, since his grad school days in 1982, and it is very difficult, even dangerous work. I also have been involved in the issue since my grad school days and as an officer in our local AAUP when I was a tenured faculty member. I believe that objection must come from the leadership of the faculty and not the sharecroppers, to use University of Cincinnati English faculty member Catherine Wagner’s term for adjunct staff. [Note to blog readers: I should note that Wagner has been a sharecropper before she landed her tenure track job, and she is not being disrespectful but accurate. You can read her terrific blog on sharecropper faculty here.]

Until then, much as it pains me, I will not be teaching at Kent State University. In leaving, I want to send many thanks to [names deleted to protect the innocent] assistance to me—terrific colleagues all.