Part-Time Advocate?

P.D. Lesko publishes a magazine for adjuncts, but stop telling her they're exploited

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By JOHN GRAVOIS

Ann Arbor, Mich.

Life is good for the Adjunct Advocate. Most mornings she starts her day by walking her two sons, ages 5 and 8, to school. It's a short, pleasant stroll through this college town, and it gives her time to chat with the boys and dote on them when mittens or shoelaces go loose. Then, after two kisses goodbye at the schoolhouse door, she heads back home to work.

Home is a handsomely furnished two-story house at the end of a short cul-de-sac, and work happens in a room just off the foyer, furnished with thick ivory-colored carpet and dominated by a big blond-wood desk. Here, within earshot of the wind chimes on her front porch, she sits down each morning and sets about communicating with tens of thousands of America's beleaguered part-time professors.

The Adjunct Advocate is P.D. Lesko, and P.D. Lesko is the Adjunct Advocate. She is founder, editor, and publisher of the only national magazine for part-time faculty members, an enterprise that keeps her household running. She also has become proprietor of a publishing outfit called the Part-Time Press, which puts out a series of professional-development handbooks aimed at adjuncts. Thanks to Ms. Lesko, adjunct professors — one of the loneliest and lowest-paid groups in academe — have a forum of their own. (In a recent issue, one writer compared the magazine to "a broadcast of 'Radio Free America.'") And thanks to that legion of low-paid academics, Ms. Lesko makes a pretty good living.

That alone is enough to irk plenty of people.

To many adjunct activists who have spent decades laboring in the trenches against a system that thrives on casual labor, Ms. Lesko seems like just another person doing the thriving. By, say, offering adjuncts a steady stream of teaching tips instead of demanding that institutions offer them professional development, they say, she only aids and abets the colleges that exploit them. Plus it bothers them that six issues of the Adjunct Advocate cost those underpaid part-timers 35 bucks a year.

Ms. Lesko is hardly ashamed of her success. "I had someone call me an ambulance chaser once," she says with contrarian delight. "I'm very proud. I've accomplished a lot." According to Ms. Lesko, the people out in the trenches are just that — entrenched. Besides, she has her own ideas and strategies for improving the lot of adjuncts. Hers just happen to differ wildly from the activists' line.

A forthright, stocky woman, Ms. Lesko has the kind of voice that seems made for talking on a speakerphone, and she talks naturally about higher education as an industry. On a recent afternoon, she is sitting at her desk dressed in a black turtleneck, black pants, black socks, and black oxfords — the cafe-revolutionary look — talking about rhetorical strategy. "What are the great moral causes of our time?" she wonders aloud, leaning back in her chair. "It's not the plight of adjunct faculty."

"The system," she says, "will never change as long as people describe adjuncts as exploited or underpaid."

Off the Presses

The creation story of the Adjunct Advocate goes like this: For 10 years, Ms. Lesko taught writing classes part time in the English department of the University of Michigan's flagship campus here. She once worked a whole semester without ever running into a colleague. Then, one day, she was standing in the department mailroom, staring at the array of mailboxes on the wall, and it hit her.

"l looked at the sheer number of part-time faculty members, and it took up a whole wall," she says. "And I wondered, Is there a magazine for these people?"

The first issues of the Adjunct Advocate rolled off the presses in the fall of 1992. Printed in monochrome on heavy paper, it looked more like a church bulletin than a trade journal. Now, the magazine is a glossy bimonthly that usually runs 40 to 50 pages, with advertisements, photographs, and cartoons. It has a full-time assistant editor, a handful of contributing editors, and a graphic designer on contract. Ms. Lesko's domestic partner, Marjorie Winkelman, handles circulation. According to Ms. Lesko, the magazine has about 109,000 subscribers. (The number is not audited.)

In addition to the Adjunct Advocate, Ms. Lesko has nurtured various adjunct-oriented side projects over the years. For a while, in the 1990s, she was president of an organization she created called the Adjunct Faculty Guild, a professional association that offered group health insurance to part-timers. But she folded the enterprise when she realized that what part-timers really wanted was their own union. "After a while," she says with a shrug, "you have to give the people what they want or stop taking their money."

Now her reigning side project is the Part-Time Press — a set of copyrights, really, that she bought two years ago from an author of teaching handbooks for adjuncts. In addition to marketing five of the author's titles, Ms. Lesko is starting to develop her own books. But the Adjunct Advocate has always been her bread and butter.

On any given day, Ms. Lesko gets 50 to 100 e-mail messages from readers, some containing (typically anonymous) letters to the editor, some with story pitches, and some with naked cries for help. She recently received a long rant from an adjunct who had just split up with his wife. Amid spews of profanity directed at his ex, he told a strangely eloquent story about working nights at a convenience store to buttress his teaching income.

The ending wasn't happy: Sleep deprivation eventually cost him his teaching job. Instead of canning the message, Ms. Lesko commissioned an article from the man, minus the verbal abuse. "It was a letter I should've probably deleted," she says, "and yet I found it really compelling."

Notwithstanding the flak she sometimes gets from labor types, Ms. Lesko covers union issues extensively, including reports that scrutinize the contracts of particular part-timers' unions, and a forthcoming organizing guide for adjuncts seeking to form a union.

Some in the labor camp do, in fact, have praise for the magazine. "I think it plays a useful role in publicizing conditions and some struggles that are woefully underpublicized, and that's all to the good," says Joe Berry, a Chicago-based activist, adjunct professor, and author, recently, of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, an organizing handbook for adjunct faculty members.

What gives the Adjunct Advocate its flavor, though, are the features that simply help adjuncts to be better adjuncts. Many of those articles guide part-timers through parts of their jobs that would probably make old-fashioned professors hold their noses. A sampling of recent headlines: "Tax Tips for Independent Contractors," "High Maintenance On-line Students," "Online Canned Courses and Academic Freedom," "Using Instant Messaging Chat to Engage Students On-line," "Course Development Contracts," and "Breaking Into Textbook Publishing."

Such advice might be the source of many objections. According to Mr. Berry, the main problem for adjuncts is that employers use them as a highly flexible, disposable, low-cost work force. "No amount of individual professional development is going to solve that problem one way or another," he says. "One of the reasons there's such a market for this individual professional development is that the institutions are woefully, criminally negligent in this regard."

Much of Ms. Lesko's magazine, however, dispenses with hand-wringing and instructs part-timers on how to fend for themselves. It is adjunct self-help.

Hearts and Minds

Lately Ms. Lesko has been thinking a lot about a guy in Peoria. A guy in Peoria who works at, say, Wal-Mart. She has been pondering how the prevailing labor rhetoric about adjunct professors might play to him.

When labor activists first took up the issue of part-time professors, they naturally began by describing adjuncts as exploited workers. "Equal pay for equal work," a classic labor refrain, became a slogan to underline the disparities between full-timers and part-timers. Other calls to arms referred to part-timers as academic day laborers, academic sharecroppers, or academic sweatshop workers — euphemisms straining to convey the irony that much of the hallowed work of higher education now happens under low-rent conditions. That rhetoric was designed not only to get adjuncts to see themselves as victims of a raw deal, but also to rally political support from other citizens as fellow workers aligned against employers.

As time has gone by, however, another kind of slogan has emerged from the part-timers' movement, one that appeals to outside citizens as consumers of education: "The teacher's working conditions are the student's learning conditions." It is a risky motto because it implies that some strapped adjuncts are doing shoddy teaching. To deploy that line without alienating part-timers themselves requires some extra finesse.

"Adjuncts by and large make heroic efforts to overcome the obstacles," says Rich Moser, a former national organizer of adjuncts for the American Association of University Professors. "The question is, do you want a system that creates incentives or disincentives to quality education?"

Ms. Lesko is all for making the pitch to consumers. But as far as she is concerned, it's the exploitation rhetoric that will never play in Peoria. Why? Because the guy in Peoria working a double shift to pay his child's college tuition won't feel solidarity with some highly educated but financially strapped part-time professor, she says. He'll feel something between curiosity and disdain.

"The people who work in Wal-Mart — the majority of them don't have graduate degrees," Ms. Lesko says. Working-class people are unlikely to feel sympathy for a group traditionally seen as elite, and for good reason, she argues. Overworked shelf-stockers, after all, have less freedom to choose an alternative career than do overworked Spanish-literature instructors. In fact, Ms. Lesko gets pretty fed up herself when she hears adjuncts cry exploitation: "I can't really look at someone with a Ph.D. and say, You really boxed yourself in there."

(In response, Mr. Moser would ask whether it is really in anyone's interest for teachers to have an incentive to quit.)

Ms. Lesko thinks that the best way to win beneficial restrictions on the use of adjuncts in academe is simply to focus on data that show, for instance, that an adjunct teaching seven classes cannot teach as well as an adjunct teaching two or three classes. Do that, she says, and the parents and students who pay tuition will pressure institutions to change because the current regime of part-time employment in higher education will be seen as delivering a lousy product. In other words, when playing to people in Peoria, aim for their wallets, not their class solidarity — and forget the rhetoric of abuse.

This is where she loses part-timers like Mr. Berry.

"Damn right we're exploited," he says, "and so are most of the people at Wal-Mart." Along with the rest of the labor movement, he sees part-time professors and Wal-Mart employees as fellow victims of the same malevolent, sweeping economic shift toward temporary, disempowered workers — and he contends that they can see it, too. "I believe that the common experience as exploited workers is a basis upon which to appeal to support and solidarity," he says.

Mr. Berry acknowledges that this kind of approach is yoked to the labor movement, which has lost ground in recent decades. And to someone standing outside of the labor camp, Ms. Lesko's thinking might make a kind of sense. But some would ask, Isn't it strange that the Adjunct Advocate's political strategy (essentially, leave the agitating to consumers) cuts adjuncts themselves out of the equation?

Diametrically Opposed

In Mr. Moser's and Mr. Berry's minds, both "Equal pay for equal work" and "The teacher's working conditions are the student's learning conditions" are, by now, necessary parts of the organizer's tool kit. "These two approaches have to both be there and are going to be in tension with each other," says Mr. Moser. "The issue of contingency cannot be addressed using traditional labor-union rhetoric. It is a public-interest issue."

Ms. Lesko, too, can juggle a few contentious arguments when it comes to putting out the magazine. The Adjunct Advocate, she says, "might at any given moment hold diametrically opposed views."

It is a Wednesday morning, and Ms. Lesko is on the speakerphone with one of the magazine's contributors, who recently returned from a stint at Central European University, in Budapest. The institution was founded by the international financier George Soros and has hired a number of American adjuncts. The writer raves about the experience: "To say 'fantastic' is just too pedestrian!" She calls Mr. Soros's university one of the most idealistic educational projects she has ever known.

Ms. Lesko, fishing for a story idea, is not impressed.

"George Soros wants to bring the ideals of freedom and open debate to former Soviet-bloc countries," she says, leaning into the phone. "That's an expensive proposition. Is he doing that on the back of part-timers?"

Ms. Lesko does not wait for answer, instead prodding the contributor with another hint of contrarian delight. "He's importing part-time labor!" she says. "What's the difference between that and people who come from south of the border to pick our grapefruit?"