The Entrepreneurial Adjunct

To make a living, contingent faculty sell their labor on the open market. What happens to professional identity in the new era of free agency?

By John Hess

Increasingly, the higher education community is witnessing what I call the "entrepreneurial adjunct phenomenon": a kind of merchandising of the needs, concerns, and activities of faculty with short-term, often part-time, appointments that depend on factors like enrollment, budget, and program changes. These faculty members are called any number of things: adjuncts, part-timers, lecturers, nonregulars, sessionals, and so on. I will call them "contingent faculty" to draw attention to the most important aspect of their employment relationship: its tenuousness.

A number of recent articles, e-mail postings, and Web sites have advocated an entrepreneurial approach to the experience of contingency and have endorsed a commodification of contingency itself. To comprehend the entrepreneurial phenomenon, we need to understand contingent faculty in their role as sellers of their intellectual knowledge and skills as well as of their emotional and physical labor. The entrepreneurial approach sees contingent faculty as participants in a free market for academic labor, and it also conceives of them as potential consumers in a marketplace of goods and services.

Contingent faculty have advanced education, at least a master's degree, usually more. They have acquired considerable skill and experience. Most people, including most administrators, couldn't do what contingent faculty do: respond to the great variety of student needs and deal with a range of behaviors, emotional and cultural, as well as different levels of skill and potential in the classroom. In this sense, the work of contingent faculty is like that of social workers or counselors. Contingent faculty also do a lot of physical labor. Many drive miles from campus to campus, toting large sacks of books and papers with them.

The entrepreneurial approach leads to a trivialization of contingent academic labor and a dismissal of any collective approaches to changing its conditions. In fact, the entrepreneurial approach depends on maintaining the conditions of contingent labor. This approach, to my way of thinking, only increases the alienation of contingent labor without explaining much about it. Let me begin by looking, a bit sarcastically, at some of the simpler examples of this phenomenon.

A reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education recently sent the following post to the Listserv Adjunct-L: "As part of a package [of articles] about good places to be a faculty member, we're creating a short list of good places to be an adjunct. (Nothing too scientific here; among the other categories are best off-campus bars, good housing deals, and most unusual perks.)"¹

I read this post by with some astonishment. Here was the august Chronicle finally taking the issue of contingency in higher education seriously and trying to help us pick where we wanted to contingent (now a verb). I liked the light-hearted approach to the issue, usually discussed in hushed tones or outraged cries. I have to admit that I am tired of the incessant statistical approach to the situation of contingent faculty. I know the percentages and the numbers. Here was a positive way to think about things. My spell-checked reply, including my clearly made-up examples, expressed my sense of the absurdity of the initial request:

Here are the places that get my vote. At San Andreas Fault State University in southern California, adjuncts pay a prorated fee to use the university's beach. The discount, unfortunately, doesn't include air rafts and boogie boards. New York State Community College, fifty miles north of New York City, schedules art classes back to back on Tuesday and Thursday, to cut down on bus fare for the contingent faculty who come up from New York City to teach them (for $1,000 apiece). During the summer, at several state universities near me, contingent faculty can now take out half the number of books full-timers can take out. It used to be one-fourth. We're making progress. Near a delightful community college in northern Florida, there is a bar contingent faculty are allowed to patronize after class if they come in the back door. I am glad to hear that there are so many wonderful places to teach as contingent faculty. It cheers me, and I hope that my little list will boost the spirits of the rest of you as you trudge home from your sixth class of the day. Let a chairperson smile on you tomorrow.

When I put my little list out on Adjunct-L, I was inundated with real examples of friendly places. My heart soared. A community college in one of the Plains states helped its contingent faculty learn to save. It paid them for a semester's work only at the end of the semester and after they had turned in their keys. We contingents certainly need to learn the saving habit. Why, even $10 a month can turn into a sizeable nest egg through a career of contingenting. And since many don't get retirement benefits, this nest egg will come in handy in the twilight of life.

My favorite is this one from a contingent teacher back East (I live in California, so all the rest of you live back East):

N was eight months pregnant and still teaching as an adjunct. She got a call from a colleague who had just been offered N's usual courses for the following semester. They got to talking about the situation. The Chair had told the colleague, "Oh haven't you heard, N is having a baby. She won't have time to teach anymore." The most ironic part of the story is that the colleague was also pregnant—due six weeks later—but she had concealed her pregnancy due to her own apprehensions about pregnancy discrimination. They were giving one pregnant adjunct another pregnant adjunct's courses! Finally, with sense enough to be embarrassed, the chair, with a kind of perverse Solomonic wisdom, offered the course to both future mothers, he let them share the work and the pay. But in a wonderful dialectical twist, that moment of pregnant solidarity led to the formation of a small group of people who started an adjunct organizing campaign.

Then there is Adjunct Advocate, which also has trouble under-standing what's going on. A writer for this magazine, which calls itself a "part-time faculty magazine," wrote to Adjunct-L seeking information for "a story that explores motivations of ad-junct faculty to conduct research and/or publish in their field of expertise. Our online poll shows us that 60 percent of respond-ing adjuncts do so, and we are interested in finding out why."

Reeling from dealing with best places to be an adjunct, I was taken aback by this survey and became intemperate once again. On August 10, 2003, I wrote:

What an odd, insulting question to ask contingent faculty, especially since studies show that the percentage who do research is about the same for tenured faculty. We've all gone to graduate school and studied subjects we were and are still interested in. We teach; the body of knowledge in any discipline changes. We are intellectuals. We like ideas. We like to read and study. We like to teach new things, even when we can't usually teach new courses. We did not go to graduate school to become contingent faculty; we went because we wanted to become college professors. That that hasn't happened yet, doesn't mean we give up the urge to read, write, learn, and teach and the pleasures we gain from it.

Implicitly, if not explicitly, this question comes out of the Jill Carroll school of entrepreneurial adjunct-ism [see below for more on this]. What's the incentive? What's in it for me, if I read, write, and publish or create? Why would any rational person spend their Saturdays writing a paper, or a long weekend presenting it at a conference, if there were not some immediate monetary/economic incentive? . . . Many people no longer understand why anyone would do these things for the fun and love of it. How sad!

The reporter got upset, as is his right, but then just repeated the goal of the magazine's investigation: "We are merely trying to discover why some do . . . and some don't. What we will find out may be precisely what you've expressed to me in your e-mail. However, it takes asking the questions to find out." Fair enough, I suppose, but I couldn't let it rest and weighed in with more the next day. Isn't e-mail great? You can become an instant pundit.

It's not personal at all. Your question is insulting to contingent faculty who are trying to survive as academics in a system that wants to throw away that part of who they are. That is what the unbundling of the profession is about. Why wouldn't contingent faculty do research? It's what you do when you are a practicing academic/intellectual/teacher. They do it for all the same reasons that tenured and tenure-track faculty do it (except as part of a current tenure process). To separate out contingent faculty for this question further undermines the struggle for dignity and fairness. The underlying assumption is that contingent faculty have no apparent reason to do research/creative work. A more useful survey might be to ask how they find the time and the resources to do research. That is something we could all learn something from. That would be a survey about ingenuity and aliveness, not one that reaffirms what we already know.

A while back, I came across Jill Carroll's conception of the entrepreneurial adjunct. To be ever so slightly sarcastic, it was a real eye-opener and finally helped me understand why my own contingent career and that of so many of my friends and acquaintances are or have been so difficult. We didn't have the right attitude. We thought we were part of a collective effort to teach, learn, mentor, develop ideas, and advance civilization. When thinking of ourselves in this way grew increasingly problematic, we joined a collective effort to reverse the corporatization of the university. Foolish us with our medieval notions of professors professing away, surrounded by their students, all engaged in an effort to understand the world we live in and change it for the better.

But now here was Jill Carroll bringing us the good tidings: don't complain, do business. We had somehow forgotten that we were in the business of selling a rare commodity, our hard-won cultural capital. We just needed to learn a few easy techniques—couple of hours a week for a couple of weeks. Success was simple, even proven. Here is how Carroll's Web site asks for our attention:

Adjunct Solutions was founded in spring 2001 by Jill Carroll (PhD, 1994, Rice University) in Houston, Texas. Jill has worked as an adjunct lecturer in the Houston area for the last decade. In that time, she has built her own highly successful teaching practice using basic, proven entrepreneurial strategies that most people associate with freelance businesses. Over the last several years, as her career has blossomed financially, Jill has advised "new PhDs" and others on strategies for creating a successful adjunct teaching "practice." Finally, she decided to offer this information in a more formal way, thus founding Adjunct Solutions (http://www.adjunctsolutions.com/).

Now here was the answer we had all been looking for without knowing it. We really are the professionals we thought we were in graduate school. We have our little letters after our names. We can put out our shingle and start signing up clients and developing our practice. With the proper high-paying clients, customers will flock to our classroom door, follow us from campus to campus, bringing great reward.

Carroll's no dummy, of course. She is apparently a great teacher. In fact, she is so good, her bosses feel guilty using her as cheap labor. "We at Rice get a huge, almost unfair deal," Deborah Harter, co-director of Rice University's program in the humanities, told the Chronicle for an August 3, 2001, article. "We're paying her as an adjunct and getting the quality of a first-rate professor." Professors are so funny. I love the wiggle in this sentence: "almost unfair deal." How is it not quite unfair? I want to ask. Carroll is certainly not so naïve as to accept this sleight of mouth. She understands full well the miserable conditions in which contingent faculty work. "Yeah, it sucks," she told the same Chronicle reporter who interviewed Harter.

In this new entrepreneurial world, quality takes a backseat to efficiency. Don't sweat the small stuff; don't stay up all night. Carroll says she rarely works evenings and never on weekends while teaching twelve courses a year. The key, she told the Chronicle in August 2001, is to "develop courses like products: Systematize their production until you can reap the benefits of economies of scale. Make them classes you can teach over and over, without mountains of preparation each time."

This cynical approach is well and good for some courses, but not for many of the courses that contingent faculty teach, which include labs, music instruction, composition, and so on. Such work is not so easily simplified and routinized. The possibility that much of the pleasure of teaching a course is exactly in the preparation—finding new ways to present information, developing new examples, reading more about the specific subject—is lost here, run over by Henry Ford's Model T production line. But that's the old me talking. I am forgetting the pleasures of a well-oiled machine that helps flush those students through the system as cheaply as possible: efficiency, economies of scale, just-in-time production, and so forth.

I should take a hint from AAUP staff member Richard Moser, who got serious with Carroll in an online discussion hosted by the Chronicle on August 2, 2001:

By encouraging entrepreneurial values are you not contributing to the erosion of academic freedom and quality education? If hundreds of thousands of faculty around the country begin to reorganize and tailor the content of their courses to suit market demands and if the customer is always right, as entrepreneurial values suggest, then what is to stop controversial and disturbing subjects from being marginalized or students from displacing teachers as the arbiters of what kinds of learning experiences and accomplishments constitute quality education?

Carroll's no dummy, as I said, and she didn't bite. She replied:

I don't think I'm the first to suggest that entrepreneurial values have a place in higher education. Colleges and universities across America have run themselves as corporate entities for decades. And in those decades, we've seen tremendous diversity and richness in curricula. So I don't think that suggests that entrepreneurship and academic freedom are entirely at odds. Beyond that, you know, I'm just trying to make a living.

She misses his point, perhaps purposely. Entrepreneurial values have certainly always been part of higher education, and most private universities are indeed not-for-profit corporations. The fastest-growing segment of higher education includes the for-profit universities that buy and sell one another to increase their market share and their bottom lines. Moser criticizes bringing these values into the classroom, into the relationship between teacher and student, and thus commercializing that relationship. When Carroll and many administrators talk about streamlining courses, they mean just that. The disappearance of academic freedom is not just a matter of curricula, but also about the relationship between teacher and student. It's about what gets said in the classroom, and what can be said.

Since fall 2001, Carroll has written a monthly advice column for the Chronicle, in which she has passionately and effectively argued for her vision of the new entrepreneurial adjunct. Two things have to be said in her favor. Carroll gives some good advice about how to survive as a contingent faculty member, and she clearly sees the extent and viciousness of the exploitation of such faculty. She often mentions her favorite fantasy: a nationwide walkout of contingent faculty. She clearly sees the shameful waste created as a new kind of academic worker is forged in the new corporate university.

Her advice is of the traditional self-help sort, available in innumerable books and articles, but tailored to the specifics of contingent faculty work. She urges her colleagues to be the professionals they were trained to be and are expected to be. Take the work seriously, get as good at it as you can, do the best job you can, take pride in your work, don't whine, get yourself organized. Much of this advice points to traditional and useful time-management techniques.

However, it is placed in a larger ideological structure that I find troublesome. I believe her notion and description of the entrepreneurial adjunct tend to undermine her good advice. She sets up a dichotomy between what she calls the older institutional university mode of employment and the current freelance mode of employment. She sees the former as essentially gone and the latter in full flower. She may not welcome this transition, but she sees it as inevitable (at least until all contingent faculty are willing to walk out together). In December 2001, she wrote, "The institutional model is one in which you work for a company for a time, earn your tenure, or demonstrate your worth otherwise, and the company then takes you on permanently for the rest of your career. At your retirement, you get a party, a pension, and a watch."

This mode of employment, in her view, hardly exists anymore. In the same article, Carroll commented, "hundreds of thousands of Americans in recent years have left long-term corporate employment in favor of freelance consulting, contract work, or other forms of self-employment. Instead of having one employer, they have multiple clients. And the more clients they can hustle up and serve with quality and consistency, the more their businesses thrive."

Thus Carroll describes the corporate model of higher education: the increasingly tentative relationship between the employer and the employee. In the extreme example of this model, the employee is really no longer a direct employee, but a freelancer, a contract worker, or even a completely self-employed entity. There are two ways we can view this reality: from the institution's perspective (institutions still exist, of course) or from that of Carroll's entrepreneurial adjuncts.

Corporate-style institutions want the maximum possible rationality, the greatest possible efficiency. They aim to serve as many students as possible at the lowest possible cost. Each student represents a certain pot of money (in the form of tuition and various kinds of state and federal support). By holding down costs and increasing the number of students, the institution can make a "profit" that it can then invest elsewhere, perhaps in its administrative cadres.

Contingent faculty, according to Carroll at least, want to minimize the work they do and maximize the pay they get by becoming consultants and specialists who are brought in to do special things others can't do. I have a different view of what contingent faculty might do. Nonetheless, what we surely have—no matter how we respond to it—is a greatly changed relationship between employer and employee.

I am reminded of critic John Berger's discussion of advertising in Ways of Seeing. What he finds most destructive about advertising, basically the public language of capitalism, is that it "recognizes nothing except the power to acquire. All other human faculties or needs are made subsidiary to this power." The new university addresses its faculty, not just contingent faculty, only insofar as they have some discrete skill to offer (say, teaching, administrative work, research, fundraising, grant writing, and so on). It has little or no real interest in other skills, abilities, or potentialities, not to mention the needs, desires, imagination, or commitment to intellectual life of faculty members.

This approach is most obvious in the treatment of contingent faculty. The corporatized university would like to treat all employees like contingent faculty, and will do so sooner or later if it can. That is the ultimate logic of its employment practices. Through these practices, the new university also teaches its students about the benefits and logic of inequality, as Richard Moser points out in "The New Academic Labor System: Corporatization and the Renewal of Academic Citizenship." Inequality is raised to a standard of behavior.

By advising compliance with and adjustment to this system of inequality, Jill Carroll ends up supporting it and asking her readers to do the same. The corporate system I have described is one marked by extreme alienation; all faculty, but particularly contingent faculty, are ground down into production-line workers. Carroll's advice urges going it alone: you're on your own, do it yourself, keep your distance, protect yourself, do your own thing. The world she envisions for contingent faculty is one of competition, self-promoting human relations, minimal contact with students (preferably by e-mail), repressed emotions, and rigorous insularity. The relationships she describes and advocates are business relationships, not fully human relationships. What is missing is any notion of solidarity, except in the impossible fantasy of the mass walkout of all contingent faculty.

In British Columbia, the higher education unions have bargained for what they call "regularization." It means that after someone has taught at an institution for a certain amount of time, he or she automatically becomes a "regular" member of the faculty. Based on ideas the California Faculty Association learned from talking to union activists, we bargained three-year appointments for contingent faculty who had taught for six consecutive years and added a "preference-for-work" clause. That means that before new lecturers can be hired, the lecturers with the three-year appointments must be considered for courses they are qualified to teach, up to a full-time load.

The forces tearing higher education apart are powerful indeed, and we will never be able to go back to the old institutional university Jill Carroll describes. That does not mean, however, that higher education must emulate the University of Phoenix. Right now, contingent faculty are in the forefront of the struggle to rescue higher education from the dismantlers. The contingent faculty movement may not lead to Carroll's total walkout, but it will engage a lot of people in this struggle for real education instead of what McUniversity has to offer. The movement is made up of many hundreds of thousands of the best-educated people in this country. What we can accomplish is limited only by our will, our faith, our sense of solidarity, and our imagination.

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John Hess is a northern California field representative for the California Faculty Association. For nearly twenty years, he was a lecturer at Sonoma State and San Francisco State Universities. He co-founded and co-edits Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media (www.ejumpcut.org).

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