Joshua Wilks
Published: April 28 2004
Always on the go and traveling from place to place for work, an adjunct college professor’s life sometimes might seem like that of a migrant farm worker — demanding, low-paying and ceaselessly insecure.
Teaching everything from how to write a five-paragraph essay to understanding the writings of Plato, adjunct professors teach in every subject area, never knowing if they will be wanted back the next semester.
Today, it is adjuncts, or part-timers, who account for 60 percent of all community college faculty in the United States, and it is part-time professors that teach a little more than one-third of all undergraduate courses, according to the National Education Association’s Higher Education website.
At PJC, adjunct professors make up close to 40 percent of the faculty, according to Dr. David Sam, vice president of academic affairs.
“Most adjuncts teach because they like it,” Sam said. But being an adjunct is definitely something that’s hard to make a living doing, he added.
There are adjuncts who do not aspire to be full-time instructors, teaching for pleasure or just for extra money throughout the year. However, there are adjuncts who depend on part-time teaching as their primary income. Usually their goal is to find a full-time job somewhere.
Most adjuncts are able to find part-time work without any problems, but they often find that gaining a full-time position is the most challenging task of their career. As adjuncts, they aren’t paid proportionally for teaching the same courses that full-timers teach. Often they have to teach at different campuses and different colleges just to make ends meet.
At PJC, making a living as an adjunct can be more challenging than anywhere else in Florida, because PJC adjuncts are the lowest paid in the state, according to a survey provided by the Department of Institutional Research at PJC.
“We aren’t paying them what we should pay them,” Sam said. “I’d like to get it closer to what other schools in this area pay.”
According to PJC’s Human Resources office, a typical adjunct with a master’s degree who teaches a three-credit-hour class is typically paid $21.50 an hour, averaging to about $65 a week, or about $1000 a semester.
At Okaloosa-Walton Community College, in Niceville, a typical adjunct with a master’s degree earned about $1,500 a semester last year for a three-credit-hour class, ranking ninth among the ten highest paying community colleges in Florida during 2002-2003, according to PJC’s Research Department.
The University of West Florida adjuncts typically make between $1,500 and $2,000 for a three-credit-class. The pay varies by department budgets, according to the university’s budget office.
These statistics do not surprise those who do teach part-time. Some might use the term “overqualified and underpaid” to describe adjunct life, as well as countless other professions. Ken Killam certainly uses that term to describe his six years as an adjunct professor at PJC.
Killam, an English and journalism teacher at Gulf Breeze High School, says that at the end of his interim period at PJC in 1995, teaching five classes a semester brought home about $150 a week.
Killam, who holds a master’s degree in English, has the qualifications to be a full-time faculty member, or a super adjunct, a term used to describe adjuncts who teach a full class load, usually 12 credit hours, and who are paid to have office hours.
He said that his typical workday would begin at 8 a.m. and would end at 2 p.m., when he would go to his other job as a bartender.
“I made more tending bar during happy hour than I did all week at PJC,” Killam candidly pointed out.
Killam said he often ran into his students who were patrons at the bar. He pointed out that PJC’s motto “You can get there from here” proved to be ironic because he was a PJC graduate himself and now a part-time professor whose students saw him slinging margaritas to pay his bills.
For such meager pay, he said he hung on as an adjunct because he thought it would be a valuable foot in the door when a full-time position became available.
But as offices emptied when faculty members retired or left PJC, their positions didn’t open up. In his six years at PJC, Killam said only one position opened in the English and Communication Department, and he was not offered the job, although he had qualifying credentials and his reviews were always superior.
Adjuncts do get hired, however. But, as Sam points out, competition still exists when faculty positions open. The job listings are posted, applicants with various credentials apply from all over the country, and search committees try to select the best candidate, Sam said.
The competition can be fierce, said Thom Botsford, head of the Department of English and Communications. “We recently advertised a job opening in English, and 89 people applied,” he said.
Because of funding problems, no one will be hired to fill this position anytime soon.
Some critics say the excessive use of adjuncts exploits and undermines academic quality and professional standards, penalizing students who pay the same amount of tuition for each class, regardless of their instructor’s status of tenure.
Those critics also say that students who do not have the opportunity to meet with part-time professors during office hours are losing more than just money; they are losing quality instruction, since part-timers are not required to meet with students outside of class, unless they do so as a professional courtesy.
If adjuncts do meet with students outside of class, their actual hours or work drops their hourly wage, since most are only paid for classroom hours.
Often referred to as second-class educators, or Wal-Mart workers of the academic world, some outspoken adjuncts say that they are only in demand because they are cheap labor. Killam agrees.
Sam, who served as an adjunct teacher of English for nearly 20 years while working full-time in other positions, said pay might rise for adjuncts here next year, but the college still has to balance the books and see what the State of Florida is going to offer community colleges before any decisions are made.
He points out that even if adjunct pay does rise, it still won’t be proportionate to what full-time faculty makes.
Full-timers are expected to do more than adjuncts, such as attend campus and department meetings, serve on committees, perform services to the college and community, along with advising students during office hours. All in all, these facts dispel the popular image of a college professor as a well-established, well-paid, full-time faculty member with job security.
So, as summer rolls around, some adjuncts might find themselves applying for summer jobs alngside their students at such places as Wal-Mart, where healthcare benefits and retirement plans are offered.
