A Better Summer This Year

The spring semester’s over and at my small-town community college, there aren’t many teaching opportunities for an adjunct like me in the summer. Luckily, thanks to James Madison University not renewing my contract for the spring 2011 semester, I receive unemployment benefits.

That’s right, I’m saying that I’m lucky to be on unemployment.

I had a rude awakening about summer teaching assignments during my first summer as an adjunct in 2008. I’d been teaching full time during the academic year and thought I would be able to get a few summer courses. Surely the full-time faculty members would want their summers free of teaching duties. But I was wrong. Turns out they like the extra income, and who can blame them? But for this adjunct, summer classes were part of my plan for regular income, not “extra.” How naive I was.

After searching furiously and fruitlessly for temporary summer work, I applied for unemployment in Virginia. All my teaching contracts had ended and I was, in fact, unemployed. Sure, I had a good chance of getting rehired in the fall, but that wasn’t definite.

Lo and behold, I was denied unemployment benefits. The reason? I was told that I had a “reasonable assurance of employment” in the fall. I was between contracts, by all accounts, so maybe that was true. And I understand why the rule is in place — to prevent some K-12 teachers from receiving unemployment during the summer. But for me, an adjunct, was it really true that I had a reasonable assurance of employment in the fall?

I checked all of the wording in my contracts. They all say that my employment begins and ends on certain dates, and is contingent upon enrollment, budgets, and other factors. As an adjunct, I am a contingent employee. But by the very definitions of adjunct and contingent, it seems that my “assurance of employment” in the next semester is never very “reasonable.”

When my contract wasn’t renewed at James Madison in the spring, I qualified for partial unemployment benefits. Now that summer is here, I can get the full amount.

So let me get this straight. Virginia law says that when I’m unemployed in the spring, I get benefits. But in the summer, I don’t. Spring? Summer? What’s the difference? I’m just as unemployed in one as the other.

Nevertheless, while I am still looking for a permanent job, in higher education or elsewhere, I feel pretty lucky that I now have unemployment benefits to help me through the summer instead of borrowing money from family and running up my credit card — again. Thanks to losing my job, I may have the best summer in a long time.