In last month's column, I wrote about the mistaken assumption in academe that adjuncts are people who weren't good enough to land a tenure-track job. This month, let me take on another common assertion -- that adjunct faculty members compromise the quality of higher education today because of the very nature of our jobs.
Several readers have made this case to me in recent weeks. Here's their argument: Yes, many adjuncts are as good as their full-time counterparts when it comes to teaching and scholarship, and sometimes better. But the simple fact that adjuncts don't have full-time commitments to each of the campuses where we teach means that we can't give ourselves to the students as much as full timers. We just don't have the time. We rush from campus to campus, class to class, barely making the time to grade papers or hold office hours before we have to speed away to our next assignment. Our heavy teaching load translates into little or no quality time for students.
Therefore, the argument runs, students are getting a compromised educational experience when an adjunct is the instructor simply because the adjunct doesn't have the time for them that a full-time faculty member does.
In short, a part-time contract means part-time availability to the students.
Well, as you might guess, I reject that argument outright as a general truism. Sure, you can find adjuncts who give virtually no time to their students outside of class. But the same can be said of plenty of full-time faculty members. Your contractual status has little to do with your commitment to students.
I see several flaws in the "part-time status equals part-time availability" argument. First, it assumes that full-time faculty members have lots of time for students since they generally don't teach as much as adjuncts. An adjunct may teach four or five courses a semester while a full timer may only teach two or three. So, that means the full-time professors has more time for students, right?
Not exactly. Do full-time faculty members have some inherent virtue that makes them give all of their extra time and attention to students? Some do, of course, but plenty of them don't. They teach their classes, grade their students' papers and exams (if they don't have teaching assistants to do it for them), and speed away from the students as fast as adjuncts supposedly do. Ask most undergraduates if they have ever had difficulty getting quality time with a full-time professor. Clearly, adjuncts don't have a monopoly on brushing off students.
In addition, the idea that full-time professors have a far lighter teaching load than adjuncts is itself problematic as a blanket assertion. While it's true on many campuses, it's not the case at some big state systems and community colleges. The first college I ever worked at as an adjunct required its full-time instructors to teach five courses a semester. So while some full timers may have a light teaching load, others struggle with a load that rivals that of adjuncts.
Another flaw in the "part-time availability" argument is that it ignores the fundamentally different job descriptions of full-time and part-time faculty members.
Besides their teaching, full-time faculty serve on committees, help with fund raising, manage departments, and perform other sorts of administrative work. And of course they are expect to publish and do research. At the end of the day, full-time faculty members often have very little time to give to their students. They are dashing from meeting to meeting, from class to the lab, from their office to the dean's conference room, right alongside all of the adjuncts who are dashing from campus to campus, class to class.
It makes no difference to the students where we are all dashing to. The end result is the same: We're unavailable.
Adjuncts have few, if any, of the service duties facing the full timer. We teach, and do the tasks related to teaching. That's it. All the time taken up by the extra duties of the full timer is ours to fill by working with the students we have, or teaching an extra course or two to make a living. In my view, a full timer teaching three or four classes gives no more time to students than an adjunct teaching five or six.
Giving quality time and attention to students -- or to anyone else in our lives -- has more to do with our commitment than with anything else. Even those of us with the most hectic schedules will find the time to spend on the people or projects that matter to us. We will make the time.
Despite a heavy teaching load, students routinely write on my course evaluations that I always seem to have time for them, that it is refreshing to have a professor who is available to them. And I'm just one of the thousands of adjuncts out there doing the same thing. Adjuncts have to be committed to students, or else we wouldn't keep doing this work for the paltry pay we receive.
An adjunct with five or six classes, more than 100 students, and a commitment to teaching will find a way to meet student needs in a quality way. Meanwhile, a full-time professor with two classes, 25 students, a TA, tenure, and no commitment to students will find a way to be out of the office every time a student drops by.
The determining factor is commitment.
