By Steve Street

I wore red to class on April 30, in honor of the first New Faculty Majority Day called by the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity. I had on my red T-shirt from a previous union rally over a checkered oxford —obviously a statement not of the fashion kind. But I didn't explain the red shirt, and no students asked, and in a way, that was good for education: My classes were about my classes.

But in another way, that silence illustrated something about the presence of so many contingent faculty members in academe —something less quantifiable about their effect than the graduation rates or other criteria that have been used to assess quality. Education is ultimately an inner experience, but schools are its communal interface, and when they create more silence than talk, less education is going on.

Not that I would have introduced my own working conditions into the classroom (although telling one's students about contingency is not really like involving children in a dispute between parents, as a colleague's false analogy put it, because the parents are equal partners). Faculty working conditions are indeed student learning conditions. But the economy, the culture, and life itself already provide too many distractions in the classroom; the last thing students need is another passion getting between them and what they are supposed to be learning.

One colleague, however, likens a teacher's decision not to mention his or her adjunct status to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality. Of course that policy is no real solution to anything, whether it be gay rights or any of the issues arising from the two-tiered faculty system. So contingent faculty members who want to consider their teaching jobs a career or a livelihood, albeit one at a quarter of the salary of their tenure-track colleagues, can't. They must either constantly protest their inadequate working conditions or be tacitly complicit in the very system that exploits them.

As you read this, thousands of ex-adjuncts nationwide no longer have that choice, and more are waiting to see if they'll keep it. In California alone, where voters have caused the community-college system to trim $200-million by summer's end and $625-million more over the next year, one early estimate is that 6,000 part-time faculty members will lose their jobs; some quarter of a million students will be turned away. Talk about silence.

But the kind of silence that comes from the inability to discuss the truth of contingency, or the assumption that it's irrelevant or too complex to get into, is just as poisonous to the atmosphere of a classroom. Even beyond the often-rehashed issues of the availability, continuity, and commitment of adjuncts, what Walker Percy called a "noxious gas" of malaise can fill the gap between our position at the front of the room and our scant compensation and lowly job status.

How so? Well, consider a hypothetical public university system whose in-state tuition and fees amount to $6,400 for an academic year, during which a typical student takes eight courses. In a classroom of 25 students taught by an adjunct making $2,700 for the course, the teacher's salary is paid by roughly 4.3 students in the class, not even 20 percent of them. Of course, all tuition doesn't belong to the teacher. But the vast majority of students, whose money adjuncts will never see, are also expecting informed, concerned attention from the person at the front of the class. All of them are calling that person professor and treating him or her accordingly. But the institution isn't: That's the gap. How wide it is, and whether it's justifiable, lamentable but necessary, etc., are matters to debate among ourselves.

But students can see clear evidence of it —an individual office for one faculty member versus a room shared by eight instructors is just one obvious indication. In the absence of official explanations for such disparate treatment, students may suspect the worst, not of a particular kind of faculty member, if they're unaware of the distinctions between faculty titles, but of the institution itself. Especially if those students already share the general public's misconception of faculty workload as equal to our number of classroom hours per week, and especially if they're already resentful of high tuition and graduating into debt, any indication that they're not being told the whole truth can fuel suspicion of a wholesale scam. Such suspicions and unspoken assumptions in what should be a cooperative venture are the noxious gas that can poison the simplest exchange between teacher and student.

In that environment, the only conversations and questions between faculty members and students are of a highly cautious nature, often limited to the labyrinthine ways of the institution itself. "Isn't a B in grad school like a D, really?" a student asked me last semester, not even outraged. She just wanted confirmation of a common wisdom that she was perfectly willing to abide by. But she might as well have asked, "You've all been lying to us all along, right?"

So it's time to stop the lying, and end the silence, and look at restructuring a faculty-labor system that Linda Muzzin, of the University of Toronto's Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, calls "colonial-like." Recovering from the current economic decimation may take a generation, as some have predicted. Let's recover as an open, equitable institution staffed by faculty members of equivalent credentials, commitment, and responsibilities with equivalent compensation, benefits, and job security.

As Caryn McTighe Musil has pointed out, "The academy figured out how to rethink entire fields when DNA was discovered and mapped, when technology changed everything about our lives and work, and when women's studies and ethnic studies forever altered the foundations of knowledge. The academy should be able to make this other change, too."

Some say that now is not the time; the executive board of the State University of New York's Council on Writing tabled a draft resolution for adjunct equity and plans to reconsider it next year, when the budget situation might be better. But what firefighter waits for rain to stop a conflagration? In April, the leadership of the Modern Language Association sent a direct appeal to department chairs suggesting six points of action, an "aggressive stance" on "the biggest challenge facing … our profession": "the current composition of the academic work force."

The alternative is a lot more red.

Steve Street, a lecturer in the writing program at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, has taught writing and literature in colleges and universities since 1980, never on the tenure track. He writes occasionally for the Adjunct Track column.