Adjunct Realities

“So, every web server that would be accessible after the “plug is pulled” would need to be wired, somehow, to a server on this network.”

I imagine the point is more to be able to share information with each other. I read an article that spoke about how you can form a massive network with home routers in order to share bulletins about revolts with each other, and I imagine the point here is similar.

Did you mention to your students that your pay was docked?  This post is called “Adjunct Realities” and I believe it is helpful if students know about them, too.  They may assume you make $10,000 for teaching their class. (I had students think that thirty years ago, when full-time faculty at my community college made as little as $13,000 a year.)

I bet students have no idea that you don’t have even one sick day. Few, if any, instructors would penalize a student for one or two absences for a medical emergency.

Well, now you know what to do next time.

I have a colleague where I teach who was treated to the very same indignity as Ms. Osborn, in being docked for pay due to a sick day out. In his case, it was on a day when he had to deal with a near blizzard in his neighborhood, making his trip down to school (which was for some reason open) a matter of a very real health hazard. Yet he was still docked a small, yet insulting, amount of pay for not being physically in class that day, even with his emailing both the school to notify them of his circumstances, and his students with an online assignment for the day.

Just as long as academically clueless and totally inefficient, coldblooded and despotic administrators are in place in community colleges and other two and four year schools, with their tidy little “corporate plans” for refining the educational experience, just so long as the part time (and even full-time) instructors are viewed increasingly as irrelevant obstacles to the fulfillment of these “corporate plans”, with no meaningful feedback requested from them semester to semester or year to year, just as long as stand-up lecture and discussion pedagogy is being shouldered out the door by labor intensive online or hybrid formats, just so long as college instructors cannot choose their own texts, or will be held responsible for going beyond the Department head’s “master plan” for teaching this or that course… Just as long as all of these conditions apply, teaching in colleges and universities for most of the teaching staff there will become a increasingly hazard-laden chore, with teachers reduced to burger flippers and Walmart door-openers, with little to no control over their work, and fireable for no reason at any time at all.

Wait… are we supposed to alert people when we cancel class? I’ve always just built in more work (project!) or put stuff online (like the OP). What do other adjunct / tenured faculty do at the OPs institution. Do they have to make up hours doing admin stuff?

I was down with the flu earlier this semester, and had the same thing happen. It’s in the contract, so I knew it would…which means that I’ve got to be too sick to even get out of bed for me to cancel class.  I wouldn’t mind it so much if full-time faculty pay was also docked when they cancelled class, but alas, that is not the case.  

I wish I could say this was unusual, but in the three CC’s at which I’ve taught, this is the norm.

Students have a right to know where their money is going–or not going. I tell my students on the first day of class that from each of them I will receive $85 and assure them they will get their money’s worth–in spades. This is not asking them to rally–it is simply stating it like it is.

We (full-time faculty) try to cover classes taught by part-time faculty when there is an emergency, illness or other reasonable absence.  This is done with no reduction of pay or expectation of pay from the faculty member.  If no FT faculty is available and if time allows, we assist the PT faculty with planning Bb assignments, library assignments, guest speakers, tests in campus testing center or other course-related assignment.  We feel this support benefits our part-time faculty and our students.   This is both a professional courtesy and the humane way to treat our colleagues. .                                                                                                                           PS – We are a multi-campus college with over 2,000 students each semester and 25-30 PT faculty.  Our PT faculty does not take advantage of this coverage.  We have very low turn-over in part-time instruction, even though we also struggle with the problem of low pay and no benefits for our PT faculty.   This is not an official college policy, but we have never had an issue from administration.

Speaking as a full-time faculty member, and with the understanding that every campus is different, it’s only this past year that our union got the college to STOP docking our pay when we were sick.  In the past, we had to pay a substitute to take the class for us. 

Now the sub still gets paid, but it doesn’t come from the sick faculty member’s check. 

I think the whole situation is ridiculous.  If the instructor has made arrangements and work is progressing, why should the school be involved at all? 

Yeah, you’re old fashioned. Like, sixty years old. Before adjunctification. 
Students are being cheated. That’s part of it.
There used to be a professor working across the hall from me who would bitch me out if I came to work sick. I guess he was afraid of airborne germs. He had been the dean previously, too, so he knew I would pay the price for canceling.
These anecdotes provide more evidence of how acceptable it is, some places, to believe that some people’s lives are not important.

When I was a grad student, an adjunct had a stroke on Monday evening.  I walked into the office at 7:30 am the next morning to make copies and saw (and read) the memo the chair had written to the administrative assistant, telling her to terminate the contract as of the night before.
At 8:15 I realized that the colleague’s 8:00 class was sitting, clueless, as to why there was no teacher.  I left my class, went to hers, and said there was a medical emergency, and that they were dismissed.
CAN YOU IMAGINE?  the chair could make sure that she didn’t get a penny more than she earned, but DIDN’T think to inform her students. 

I know of several institutions who practice this policy.  It is offensive and unacceptable unless they also refund the tuition of the students who missed the class.  I have never heard of an institution practicing the latter.

Of course it will never happen BUT if all or most adjuncts refused to work for just a month, the miserable way they are treated might just might change. Maybe even the students might get involved, if they give a damn about what they are getting for their time, effort and money and the screwing many universities are giving them and their teachers.
After many decades, I guess I bailed from formal academe just in time – provided the sweethearts in Congress don’t destroy my SS and medicare.

Art W  Prof Emeritus, (Geology)
 Edinboro University of PA

this is one of the greatest injustices of being an adjunct. 

To dock the pay for missing one class suggests that an adjuncts work begins and ends during the scheduled class time.   
as we all know, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  

the pay is already insulting and barely livable… to take ANY of it away is just rubbing salt in the wound.  (remember in grad school when the roads were paved with gold?  … i miss those days.)  

the cruel irony is that as adjuncts, we have no benefits and cannot afford to go to the doctor in case we do get very sick.  

It is generally the number of tickets sold and given out. Thus, the numbers are easy to inflate, not by lying, but by making sure more tickets get out there. First, make sure that season tickets are so attractively priced versus individual tickets that most seats are sold out for the season. Very few of those seats get filled before conference games begin in January, unless there’s a big name opponent.

Secondly, tickets are given away to good causes to bring in busloads of underpriv. kids and such. Finally, all sorts of givaways (T-shirts, etc.) to build student and single ticket sales.

One should expect that there will be some who bought tickets but could not attend games due to weather conditions and other emergencies beyond control.

Are college administrators using the statistical data on game attendance for any meaningful decisions??? Three prominent lies –lies, damn lies and statistics!!!