In the spring of 1995, Angelica was offered her first position, as an assistant professor at a private university in the South. One of the many factors that led her to accept the job was the apparent willingness of her humanities department to help find adjunct teaching for Henry. This was a pivotal issue for us, because the relative isolation of the university precluded commuting to another institution.
In addition, it seemed that such an arrangement could be beneficial to both parties; the department lacked a specialist in Henry's chosen field of early modern culture. We were comforted by the notion that we were not soliciting an outright expression of academic charity for a needy spouse.
However, the possibility of adjunct teaching for Henry mysteriously evaporated once Angelica signed her acceptance letter and began making preparations for the move. The chair who had so graciously offered to address our needs stepped down the following summer. His successor was either unaware of the informal discussions that had taken place, or simply unwilling to help. We were told that funding was unavailable for any additional hiring.
Desperate to avoid the scourge of unemployment, Henry began calling around the university to determine whether there were any possible openings. He managed to piece together a patchwork quilt of teaching assignments in three different departments: history, comparative literature, and the university extension program.
Henry's days were marked by nomadic wandering from building to building, from one historical time period to another. A morning lecture on ecclesiastical reform during the Counter Reformation would be followed by an afternoon seminar on the poetics of desire in Troubadour poetry. The evening might conclude with a presentation on the architectural evolution of the pre-industrial city. In between classes, Henry scheduled conferences with students in one of his three departmental offices.
As a result, Henry came to be plagued by an intellectual form of multiple personality disorder (a postmodern affliction if there ever was one). The exhausting cycle of preparation and teaching in his newly adopted disciplines often left him unable to recall exactly which information had been imparted to which student audience.
The financial compensation for these labors totaled less than $20,000 for the year.Yet the university's return on its meager investment was rather substantial. A cursory examination of the economics of just one course makes this clear. Henry was hired to teach "Introduction to Western Civilization" in the history department. The professor who typically offered the class had taken a leave of absence due to illness, and no other member of the department was willing to teach it. Their reluctance was understandable. The course was an unwieldy, 300-student lecture that ranged from the birth of Classical Greek culture through the Reformation.
It was a daunting task for any first-time teacher, much less one trained in another discipline. Despite his lack of previous experience, Henry accepted the job. He was paid the sum of $6,000 for the class. It should be noted that this was an unusually generous wage for an adjunct lecturer, even though it was only a fraction higher than the salaries of the five teaching fellows who assisted in grading and review. Indeed, the compensation for teaching a humanities course can slip as low as $1,500 in areas where there is a glut of Ph.D's competing for a limited number of adjunct teaching positions.
In one particularly cynical moment, we calculated that the university grossed $750,000 in income from a $30,000 investment in staff salaries for this one course. For the record, we arrived at this figure by dividing the undergraduate tuition at our institution ($20,000 a year) by the average class load (8 per year), and then multiplying the result by the number of students enrolled in the course.
By raising these issues, we do not want to give the impression that we are somehow ungrateful for the employment opportunities afforded to Henry. He was able to add valuable teaching experience to his curriculum vitae while enjoying the relatively rare privilege of living and working in the same city as his spouse. With the benefit of hindsight (and a healthy dose of repression), Henry can even assert that the challenge of developing courses in multiple disciplines was actually rewarding.
On the other hand, we would like to dispel the common misconception that adjunct professors are somehow compensated for their low wages by the freedom to pursue their own research.
It is true that they are not burdened by the institutional responsibilities (committees, advising, etc.) that fill the calendars of their salaried counterparts. However, the "free time" that theoretically could be used for publishing and research is devoted to other, more mundane concerns: struggling to find affordable medical insurance, seeking out and negotiating contractual teaching for the following semester, or preparing for myriad courses outside one's field or even discipline.
In addition, Henry paid a certain emotional toll for his decision to follow Angelica. Even though our colleagues knew that he had taken on an adjunct position for personal reasons, there was an unspoken assumption that Henry must be the weaker half of the academic couple. The fact that that it was the husband who had accommodated his wife's career, and not the reverse, only served to strengthen that impression.
After all of this, we are left to ponder a disturbing question: What will be the price in vocational terms for Henry's desire to live with Angelica? By teaching instead of publishing, was he jeopardizing a long-term career for the sake of a short-term salary? To discover the answer, we would have to wait for another round of job applications.
Angelica Lawson and Henry Byers are pseudonyms.
