English professor turns her dissertation into a rallying cry for adjuncts

Rachel Nead really likes teaching.

A lot.

For years before she was finally hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of communications, Nead was an adjunct—the hard working, low paid, far ranging, barely noticed, often abused, seldom hired part-timers who teach 75 percent of the classes at Southwestern College.

Nead was the queen of “Freeway Flyers.” There were semesters the Long Beach resident taught nine classes at five colleges in four counties. Even though she travelled 1,300 miles a week bouncing between Los Angeles, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties, she made less than a full-time professor.

Much less.

Higher education’s abuse of adjuncts is the theme of Dr. Jessica Posey’s dissertation “The Plight of Adjuncts: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Favor.” What she found was alarming, she said.

Most adjuncts reported they lacked job security, health benefits, a livable wage and respect. Posey said adjuncts are treated as second-class citizens, even though they have Master’s degrees, a requirement in higher education that places them in the top 13 percent of adult Americans.

Nead’s horror story is repeated daily across America, Posey said. Her dissertation was an attempt to examine the adjunct experience with a specific focus on how part-time instructors are made to think, feel and act as a result of their employment status, she said. Adjuncts live in fear of many things, including speaking out.

“As an adjunct you are constantly worried about what you say and how you are perceived because you can get backlash,” she said. “If you are speaking out about injustice or being marginalized, you can be perceived as a troublemaker.”

Nead agreed. She said adjuncts’ health can suffer, as well.

“My ultimate goal was to be a full-timer, so I gave up my health and my social life,” she said. “I ate a lot of fast food on a daily basis because I wasn’t able to make meals for a 14-hour day.”

Darius (a pseudonym), a subject in Posey’s dissertation, said he felt like he is chasing a dream that may have already slipped through the cracks.

“I think trying to reach that full-time position is comparable to going to the moon,” he said. “Actually, someone wanting to go to the moon will have a better shot than I do at reaching a full-time gig at a community college.”

Nead admits she was lucky to be hired on a tenure track, but she also worked hard to create her opportunity. Averaging about 250 miles a day, she would spend more time on the road than at her job, she said.

“I would be gone 14 hours most days and I would easily do 20 hours or more driving in a week,” she said. “Sometimes I would teach 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. and had to go three hours early to my next campus due to the commute. I would start teaching at 4 p.m. all the way to 9:30 p.m. and sometimes students wanted to talk to me, so I wouldn’t leave campus until 10 p.m., which meant I wouldn’t get home until midnight.”

Prior to becoming a full-time professor Posey had to depend on MediCal and Food Stamps, she said, because she was not making enough money to get by as a graduate with a Master’s degree working out of five different campuses.

Lack of health insurance is another perpetual anxiety for adjuncts, according to Posey’s research.

Professor of English Laura Brooks served as an adjunct instructor for six years with no health benefits. She was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, which ironically later barred her from health coverage.

“Once you get cancer, you aren’t eligible to get life insurance anymore,” she said. “For the last couple years I’ve been getting really worried about my kids, their future and making sure they were taken care of. I was kind of burdened with this idea of debt that I would be leaving behind if I died. This week I signed all the Southwestern College benefit paperwork and I was offered life insurance. It was such a relief as a full-timer to get offered all this.”

Stress levels for adjuncts are among the highest in the U.S., Posey said. Nead agreed.

“As a part-timer it was really stressful going term to term,” she said. “You didn’t know if you were going to get the class or not. Oftentimes when you get offered a class you don’t want to turn it down even though you wanted to turn it down. One term I ended up teaching nine face-to-face classes because I didn’t want to say no. I was afraid I would not get a class again or not asked to come back.”

Geoff Johnson, the adjunct rep for the SC faculty union, said he fights hard to bring equity to his fellow part-timers. He has his own horror stories, including being the father of a sick child with no health insurance. He joined homeless and indigent people at a health and social service hospital.

“I’m standing on El Cajon Blvd, got my son in my arms, he’s screaming and I was asking myself if is this what I went to (graduate) school for,” he said. “I went to school and got a job where I couldn’t get insurance and couldn’t take care of my own family.”

Johnson said the experience 15 years ago still fuels his activism.

“Maybe I can’t end adjuncts’ suffering, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to accept it,” he said. “I’m going to be damned if I don’t try to do something about it.”

SC President Dr. Kindred Murillo said she is sympathetic.

“The area of deep concern is trying to help create the salary parity,” she said. “So we are moving money into that and recognizing we need to make strong progress in that area. We are trying to schedule adjuncts better. We are trying not to schedule classes and then cancel them, it’s an injustice to the students and an injustice to the adjuncts.”

Murillo said she would like to see SC hire more of its adjuncts.

“We will work on really solidifying the hiring process for adjuncts and onboarding (hiring from within),” she said. “SC has not done a really great job onboarding part-time, full-time, anybody for that matter, so we are looking to fix that.”

Despite monumental struggles and suffering, Posey said adjuncts love to teach.

“If there’s one thing I learned from adjuncts, it was that even though they are treated harshly and even though they don’t have benefits and the ideal salary or the sense of security, they are the type of people that could not see themselves doing anything else but teach others,” she said. “That’s where they feel they can make the most difference in people’s lives.”