By Dr. Jack Dempsey
I’m Dr. Jack Dempsey and, while I’m “only” part-time college faculty, like you I have more than a full-time dedication to educating and empowering the students with whom I’m fortunate to work. Through 20 years of teaching on this basis, I’m still always wondering why my university administrators just don’t get it—that if I had what academe calls a real job, I’d be there on the weekends with my own hammer and nails building what they call value into the school.
Instead through all these years, administrators have increased tuition and fees on students, increased class sizes, upgraded infrastructure, and spent more on Spring Day’s campus flowers than they pay me in a year, for giving raw and attention-starved students the very tools by which they benefit from being there. They said my “Best Adjunct Professor” award was prestigious, and gave the year’s best full-timer twice the honorarium. They held an annual dinner to thank us adjuncts for all we do, but we had to pay $5 to get in.
Beyond the part-time classroom, I meet and dialogue constantly with students who want special focus or need intensive care. To and from the classroom, where the world lights up as always, I wear a salt cloak of anger at the adjunct’s hapless function as a profit mule. And I think I’m ready to do something about it—because in fact we have the power and the leverage to do so.
I’m done with toothless resolutions and paper demands. I watched my graduate school simultaneously embellish and fortify itself while I descended into distinguished bankruptcy. But where is the power here? As always, it’s with the people who do the work. Administrators are not the school. We are the school and the value of what it delivers. Administration is what allows us to do that. But teachers are why students come into the classrooms.
For me, the time is come for college adjuncts to play the same level of hard-ball that’s been played against them for too long, with too much damage to a whole generation of dedicated teachers. The power is with the people who do the core-value work. And it’s time to demonstrate the proposition.
What would happen if all of us—the current 50%-and-more of all college faculty—one day truly realized that we have to be the first to stand, bodily, by it?
This is the only level of action that moved American schools, for example, to dis-invest in tyrannous regimes and unethical businesses.
If it can do those things, it will work as well for college adjuncts. We try harder. We enrich our schools in every way, and have earned the right and power to help ourselves.
So I want to see what Adjunct Action means. Until we first respect ourselves for real, and act upon it, the schools that are grinding us into profitable powder will not.
Love your students, and fight injustice.
The symposium will be held at the JFK Library in Boston from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. this Saturday, April 13th. RSVP here: http://action.seiu.org/page/s/Symposium. Hope to see you there.
Professor Jack Dempsey is an Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University in Boston.
