On Mondays and Wednesdays I drive 40 miles from my home in west central Maine through the towns of Farmington and New Sharon and Rome, to Waterville, where I am an associate professor in the English department at Colby College. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I stop after the first 10 miles, in Farmington, where I am an associate professor of humanities and director of the honors program at the University of Maine campus there.
I've been making these drives, evenly splitting my life, for 16 years; yes, I am a part timer, contingent academic labor. Only, not exactly.
Unlike others who have written firsthand accounts of adjunct life, I enjoy my situation; indeed, I wouldn't trade my dual adjunct titles for a full-time tenure-track one.
My professional contentment dawned on me at a party one night, when a university colleague asked me bluntly whether I wouldn't rather be working full time at one campus or the other. I hesitated, then realized what the answer was. "No," I said, surprising myself. "I wouldn't want to give up either."
This is heresy, of course, among part-time faculty members, and even among some tenured ones, and there are reasons why my situation is both serendipitous and rare. (And I should acknowledge that I have done nothing to earn this state of affairs -- it just happened.)
First, central Maine is not a fertile field for unemployed or underemployed academics. The pool here is shallow, and thus I am more valuable as a resource than I might be in Boston or New York or Seattle, or anywhere large numbers of unemployed academics gather.
Perhaps because of that market reality (although I hope it's also because of their enlightened values) my two employers have created positions that are close to tenure track, but not quite. I have a "permanent half-time" position at each place. At the university, which is governed by the language of collective bargaining, my position is that of a "part-time regular"; at Colby, without a faculty union or a contract, I am considered "continuing part-time."
The end result is the same: I have a stable position on each campus and am compensated at roughly the same rate as full-time faculty members, although my pay is pro-rated since I'm only half time. Taken together, my two positions provide me with a teaching load and compensation close to that of a full timer.
I've discovered a host of unexpected but powerful rewards that I would be unlikely to exchange now for the comforts of a tenured position. Chief among those is the virtue of variety -- having the experience of teaching both at an elite, private, liberal-arts college and an underfinanced public college. At the former I teach many students who are the sons and daughters of privilege, as well as students from all over the world who come to Colby via the United World College's program. At the university, I teach the sons and daughters of my neighbors, students who, for the most part, are first-generation college students, and for whom college is not an entitlement but a marvelous and frightening adventure.
What, then, am I missing by not being on the tenure track? Obviously tenure, for one, although I view tenure as a mixed blessing. Another thing I'm missing is sabbaticals, although I am eligible for them at Colby. The one difference that pains me the most is that I cannot take advantage of a tuition benefit that Colby provides to full-time employees, which could be a significant blessing by the time my 12-year old starts college.
However, I benefit by being able to pluck opportunities from two sources, rather than one. As director of the honors program at the university, I guide a small program designed for our best students, creating courses, encouraging students from modest circumstances to grapple with intellectual life, providing academic and social opportunities. And through Colby, my family and I have been able to live in London for half a year while I directed a program for the college, and soon will spend another half year in South Africa, accompanying a similar group.
I am fortunate, I realize, and my situation doesn't analogize well to that of most part-time faculty members in American higher education. And I wouldn't want to give administrators any more reasons than they already have for treating part-time instructors as a great way of balancing budgets and ignoring the true cost of higher ed. The logic of the marketplace is already used too often in American colleges and universities.
Still, I see other advantages to the part-time life. One adjunct friend, whose teaching work is more tenuous than mine, was recently offered a permanent half-time position and declined, saying that, at this point in his life, time was more important than money, and declined. Another friend left a tenured, full-time position at a Midwestern university in order to have more time to write, and has been irregularly teaching part time ever since. Some adjuncts I know teach part time because that is all the work they want; others teach part time so they can do other kinds of work, such as publishing, editing, or being musicians.
It is only recently that I quit marveling at the experience of arriving at Colby each Monday and Wednesday, entering this privileged and rarified domain which I, a graduate of large public universities, had never experienced, had hardly known existed. It took me a few years to get used to Colby students, but now I thoroughly enjoy them. For the most part they are decent, interesting, bright students, with a wealth of valuable experiences behind them, happy futures, and good values. I enjoy the company of my colleagues, too, who rarely make distinctions between tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members. I appreciate my university students as well, who are grateful for their education, and the part I play in it.
I have been able to live two academic lives, which together have made for a rich experience. I remember a friend of my wife's and mine, a tenured professor at a state college in Connecticut, lamenting the fact that now, since he was a full professor, he could never go anywhere else; his academic life would always be at that college. Even when a position opened up at Colby that exactly fit his qualifications and experience, he knew there was no point in applying, since departments generally want to bring in young scholars at the lower end of the pay scale.
While the debate rages over how institutions treat part-time faculty members -- and that treatment should be an embarrassment for many colleges and universities -- it is also useful to acknowledge that there are benefits to part-time teaching.
That my situation doesn't fit into the usual academic model is evidenced by the fact that, every year, some colleague I've known since the 20th century asks, "Are you still at Colby?" (Or, "Are you still at the university?") And I grit my teeth and respond cheerily, "Well, yes, I am. I guess after 16 years this may have become a regular thing."
My colleagues imagine that all non-tenure-track work must be temporary and is always on the verge of evaporating. In the context of tenure, I suppose it might seem that way, but here's the message: It doesn't have to be.
Honorable people (read: administrators) can make part-time positions long term if not permanent. They can create positions that are less than full time but not exploitative. Certainly, most academic appointments should be on the tenure track, but when that isn't possible for one reason or another, the alternative to being tenured doesn't have to be a lifetime of inadequate, frustrating work. There is a third way.
