The Adjunct Track

Finding Time for Writing and Research

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By Jill Carroll

All scholars struggle to find time to write and do research, but we adjuncts face a particular challenge because of the nature of our jobs. We're hired purely to teach. Employers do not give us leave time or money to do research; we're left to find both on our own.

An obvious solution would be to reduce our teaching load so as to have more time to write and conduct research. But to reduce our teaching load is to reduce our income. And that's not always a viable solution for people who are already struggling to make ends meet.

So, what can we do?

The first step is to try to find grant money that will allow you to take a term off from teaching, or at least to reduce your load for a term so you can have more time to write. The good news is that more and more professional organizations and other groups are making their support available to adjuncts and to "independent scholars," so called because they do research without an institutional affiliation.

So, get on the Internet and search for grant opportunities. Start with the professional groups in your field. Go to other major players in academe -- leading foundations and general academic associations. Search high and low within academe. Take an entire Saturday and use up a ream of paper printing all the application information. You may be surprised at what you find, and you'll probably feel energized just by the possibilities.

I did this several years ago, and secured a small grant for independent scholars from the American Academy of Religion that allowed me to take much of the summer off from teaching. I was able to spend that time reading, writing, and revising (as well as recovering from an excruciating spring semester of teaching). It really made a difference for me in terms of the actual writing and research, but also in terms of my self-esteem. I felt like a real scholar, with real funds and purpose, not some academic stepchild forever banished to the cellar of the scholarly edifice.

If all this fails, you may need to rely on your own money. This is really difficult but it's worth a try. Review your financial situation, with an eye toward how much money you have coming in now and how much you expect in the future. Maybe one semester looks more flush than another. Consider setting aside a little bit of money from the flush semester to use during the leaner one. Then, rather than drumming up more courses to teach during that lean semester, use your extra time to write and pursue your research.

Maybe you feel that your income is so low that you can't find any extra money to save from one semester to tide you over in another. If that's the case, your only option may be to keep your full teaching load but ruthlessly manage your time.

Don't wait for free time to materialize on your schedule, because it rarely will. Instead, make a commitment to a project and then find the time. For example, try submitting a proposal to present a paper at a conference, preferably a regional meeting that you can get to without spending a lot. If it's accepted, then the pressure is on for you to get your thoughts together, and to find blocks of time to use for writing. And you will.

For adjuncts seeking to build a research record, conference papers are a good place to start. The review process for these papers is far less rigorous than for articles in top-tier journals. With a conference paper under your belt, you have a nice line to add to your CV, you can get good feedback from your fellow presenters and your audience at the meeting, and when it's over, you may be able to revise the paper into a more substantial article. I've done this a few times in recent years. Lots of scholars use conferences as the "rough draft" stage of what will later become journal articles or book chapters. The conference presentation forces you to put something down on paper, even if it's not totally worked out. It gives you momentum.

Maybe you're not interested in writing another article, maybe you've got a book-length manuscript in mind. If you already have the manuscript, say a dissertation or other work, find a publisher that will let you submit it as a manuscript (instead of as a proposal) and just send it off. Don't put off submitting it until you revise it. You have no idea what revisions, if any, the publisher will want, and the revisions you may do now may not be what the editors want. So just send it in and let them tell you what revisions to do.

I did this with my dissertation finally, after I retrieved it from the trunk of my car, where it had sat in a box for two years. I sent it in to a publisher, warts and all, knowing that it needed revision. To my surprise, the publisher accepted it as is. I had all these ideas of how it needed to be fixed, and I proposed them to the publisher, who said they weren't necessary and asked for only minor revisions. It worked for me, although I think the experience was a fluke, but it may work for you, too. The main thing to avoid here is procrastinating in the name of revision.

My concluding comments here may irritate some readers, but please remember that I've been a working adjunct for more than 11 years and I know intimately the struggles we face. I'm not advising you to do anything I haven't had to do myself. Here goes: We find the time to do what we want to do -- the rest is just excuses. So, if you're not writing or doing research, after many months and many years, maybe you don't really want to. It may be time for some soul searching.

I've done this myself lately. For years, I told myself that I wanted to do more writing, but that I didn't have the time. Finally last year, I got tough with myself and said, "Either you want to write or you don't -- which is it?" And then I began to make the hard choices about how I spend my time.

The end result is that I've had a very productive year and a half despite teaching scads of classes, having hundreds of students, and having no terms off whatsoever. I don't watch as much television (only about 2 hours a week, and I'm probably going to get rid of that, too), I don't rent movies, I don't go out with friends as much, and I don't spend as much time on my hobbies. But I've gotten a lot written, more than I ever dreamed.

It's all about choices. Decide what you really want, what you truly value, then start doing it.