next »

[pmsgsla]

I am trying to put together a report on Katrina's adjuncts for a Working Class Studies Panel.

I left Loyola University after Katrina and have been "adjuncting" for 2 years, only now finally getting a full time non tenure track position in my new state of NY.

A number of my colleagues from New Orleans universities have kept in touch, writing me about the struggle of non tenure track faculty to get work in academia in NOLA or in the states they have found themselves living in since Katrina.

What has been your experience? Are you teaching? Did you get any help during the year after the storm? My experience has been that tenure track faculty and students were given special consideration by the many US universities and colleges, but not adjuncts.

[tenured_feminist]

I am so glad that you are doing this project, but wow. This is such a heartbreaking post.

[anmfaspeaks]

I have an MFA in Writing. I was adjunct teaching gut-bucket composition and creative writing (five on-ground courses) for two local New Orleans institutions and three on-line courses for for-profit schools outside New Orleans the day I fled the storm.

I threw my laptop into the trunk of the car and drove 300 miles north to Shreveport, LA. Once there, I resumed teaching my three on-line courses using dial-up from my sister-in-laws kitchen table while watching the flooding of New Orleans on CNN.

Two days after I set up shop on the kitchen table, I began teaching a fourth on-line course.

While the on-ground adjuncts in New Orleans were being shown the unemployment line, I was pulling in $750.00 per week from the online teaching.

I visited the campus of the state university in Shreveport, but I was given to understand that anyone who was an adjunct from New Orleans was presumed to be a degenerate.

I returned to New Orleans three months later. By this time, I had five on-line classes and was making over $1,000.00 per week.

What I observed upon my return was nothing short of wholesale slaughter of the scholarly community by administrative brigands. The AAUP issued a letter of censure for all of the four-year schools in this city. The president of the top-ranked school said the letter would make fine toilet paper.

Believe me, the flooding of New Orleans provided ample opportunity to settle old academic grudges.

Of course, there was no shortage of outright insanity. For example, when I informed a department head (who is independently wealthy) that I simply couldn’t teach for pre-flood wages because the cost of living had risen some 40 percent, I was informed I was a miserable cur who didn’t appreciate a fine opportunity.

Such is life on a plantation.

I still reside in the Big Easy because of family, but I am only able to afford it because I figured out on-line teaching.

I have learned to stay completely away from on-ground schools in this state. I have no intention of ever again setting foot in a physical classroom in Louisiana.

[pmsgsla]

I have been hearing from other Katrina adjuncts in response to queries put out on a number of forums. Unfortunately, your experience is all too common. Another variation is the full-time position that has a fuse of 3 years--no matter what. While this is a temporary fix  to make up for need for teachers since the tenured faculty  were let go, these temporary (non-tenure and low paying) positions are beginning to hit their limit, with people scrambling for the next fix.

About your point of being considered "degenerate," this is the problem with adjunct stereotypes. We need to be much more public about who adjuncts are, how many of  are scholars, and how many have taught for more than 25 years in higher ed. Also, the ages, genders, and ethnic make up is not what some would assume--i.e. the old stereotype of the white middle class woman who is just bring home a little extra money for the family.

Data from the US Labor dept indicates  many new hires in universities and colleges will most likely be primarily part-time and non tenure--to provide financial flexibility for institutions. (http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm#nature)
The continuing Ph.D. program growth in some areas (like English) is making the pool of people wiling to settle for these positions even larger.   

I hope to make these conditions more public. In fact, as New Orleanians say all the time, "This is not just a Katrina problem." But for the next disaster, anyone anywhere could be in the same "boat." There are earthquakes, floods, and financial disasters that are not limited to the South.

[anmfaspeaks]

I completely agree that the academic community across the country could take a sharp lesson from what did happen and continues to happen in New Orleans. However, the academic community won’t bother to take the lesson. The reason no lesson will be taken is because far too many of the tenured gentry spend their waking hours indulging masturbatory fantasies of one day becoming administrative gangsters. What bloody glory, they lasciviously mutter to themselves, will be ours that bright day when we have the power to frog march teachers out to the edge of the campus and terminate, preferably with revolver bullets, their cheap contracts.

Oh, they will halfheartedly wave their soft hands as they mildly protest the very idea that they could be part of the problem, and they will label those that offer retorts composed of cold statistics as simple-minded malcontents, as leftover Marxists. I do want to be big about this, and I suppose some sympathy might be extended to any tenured faculty member lucky enough to still have a position; after all, even the most gin-soaked among them must be dimly aware of the stench of the adjacent corpses.

To put a high polish on this post, let me remind all and sundry that the head of the state university in New Orleans who invoked “force majeure” after the flood replaced the head of the same state university in New Orleans who helped himself to $50,000 of public money in order to pay for his daughter’s wedding reception. Know it as a fact that any teacher who brings up these seemingly related circumstances is quickly offered a taste of the overseer’s lash.

I wish you all the luck in the world with your efforts, but from the desk at which I write this message, the die seems to be cast. What is happening in New Orleans is fascism, and no one I know who still has a job retains enough wit to call it by its rightful name.