By Deborah Schwartz
What brings us to this place, where we must organize a union to win a strong voice so we can negotiate with the private universities that employ us? Why do we need access to professional development, publishing opportunities, and support, as our tenured colleagues do?
Simply, it is because we care about the quality of our students’ learning. And we know that the quality of our teaching, in terms of our own production over the course of our careers—both as inspired classroom teachers, and as academics and artists grounded in the intellectual discourse of our disciplines—is, in effect, based on the quality of our own working conditions.
My Story
In the summer of 1991, having completed my MFA in poetry and holding a secondary education English teaching certificate through a low-residency program that allowed me to work full-time (in this case house-cleaning and teaching writing in an adult literacy program in Boston), I borrowed a friend’s suit, rode the commuter line from North Station to Lynn, Massachusetts where I strutted into the English Department of North Shore Community College.
I felt prepared to be a great writing teacher. Come hell or high water, I was going to bring my skills and experience (having taught as a substitute teacher in the Boston Public Schools and a writing, history and social studies teacher in a myriad of adult literacy programs in communities and prisons for the past five years) to higher education.
After ten minutes of browsing through my CV and transcripts, asking me how I would manage a class of students who weren’t interested in and didn’t really have time to learn how to write well, the English Department Chair (long since retired) of the North Shore Community College pronounced that I had a job teaching two composition classes, “which for someone my age, was very, very lucky.”
In fact, during that summer, I landed three separate adjunct positions for the following fall, teaching a total of seven composition, literature and creative writing courses per semester for a total of $1,300/course, or for a total of 14 writing courses/academic year, a gross total of $18,200. My salary included nothing—no benefits, no retirement, and I always seemed to owe taxes when April approached.
However during the first five years of such adjunct work, all three of these public institutions unionized, and as a member of the collective bargaining unit, I started to see small increases in pay, cost-of-living-adjustments, and options for a pre-taxed retirement savings plan. Living on rice and beans, bringing papers to friends’ house parties on Saturday night and writing my novel long into the morning hours, seemed like a fine enough life to me. I did feel, in the words of that well-meaning, patronizing department chair, “lucky.”
I loved my work. I loved my students. I heard similarities and uniquenesses in my students’ stories, and in that moment before sleep, when I did finally get to bed, I hoped, secretly that my students were learning as much from me, as I was from them.
In 2005, I was hired for a contracted faculty position at the College of Public and Community Services (CPCS) at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Because the progressive educators who served as the college’s administrators were committed to providing livable wages with benefits for its non-tenured writing faculty, because they had the vision to recognize that many non-tenured faculty had the credentials, experience and vision to be excellent teachers and to contribute to the overall quality of the college, many of my contracted colleagues had served as members of the college’s ranks for twenty or so years.
Non-tenured faculty taught, received awards, published, made decisions in the college’s governance, conducted themselves as professionals who received the support they needed and gave back three-fold. It seemed too good to be true—both for the individuals such as myself who had never been treated as part of the faculty infrastructure, and for the students that we taught and cared about. It seemed to be too good to be true, and it was.
The following Labor Day weekend, all thirteen of the contracted faculty were given a pink slip. The university administration had decided that the competency-based educational pedagogy, and the public and community service mission of the college was not a cost-effective approach to educating the non-traditional students that the college was charged with serving. The university dismantled the administrative and faculty positions that allowed this college to deliver excellent educational services to community, and civic-minded, non-traditional students as it had been doing since the early 1970’s.
But not without a fight. Because all thirteen of us were unionized, we grieved, and though we didn’t win our jobs back, nor reinstitute the structure of this historic college within the University, we did win our lost wages for the semester. And of equal importance, the faculty union at the university has become more active and inclusive of it’s non-tenured contracted and adjunct members.
Having transversed the public higher education system, the publicly funded adult basic education system, and most recently, the private higher education system, I still feel lucky to be teaching as adjunct. I still love my students (not all of them and certainly not every day), but fundamentally, I love them. I believe in their rights to a good education based in core academic values that position critical and compassionate inquiry alongside competitive market skills. And as our students face a more desperate economy premised on notions of individual competition and Reaganomics that we are still recovering from, I believe that the work that we all do has even further reaching, long-term consequences, than we have even figured out how to measure.
But I wonder how long can I maintain two full-time positions? What are the consequences for remaining in positions that don’t value me, my labor, my time? I finally have finished my first collection of poetry and need to “shop it around.” The unpublished novel still needs a final draft, and I have a second collection of poetry that’s emerging. My life as an adjunct professor in a myriad of English department across greater Boston’s higher education institutions is untenable. Like all of us, I love what I do. We are lucky, in many, many ways. But if the institutions we work for are unwilling to value us, how can we sustain this level and quality of production? Together and organized, I believe.
Deborah Schwartz is an adjunct faculty member in the English Department at Boston College and the Assistant Director of the Graduate College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
