BY CAPRICE LAWLESS

An illustration by the author, who once started a birdseed company to supplement her academic income.

Hauling rocks. Nailing fence posts. Painting walls. Babysitting. Folding sweaters. Making photocopies. Cleaning horse stalls. Laying sod. Pouring coffee. Packaging candies. Watering plants. Driving UPS vans. Delivering pizzas. Delivering flowers. This is just a short list of what many of America’s 768,000 college teachers will be doing this summer to try to make ends meet. Many of us will fall into bed at night, exhausted from work. Many of us will become sick with worry. Many (like me) will go into debt, charging food, utility bills, medicine, gas and other necessities. Where we can, we may seek utility bill assistance and charity help for car repairs.

Half of our nation’s higher-education intellectual capital, those on the front lines and teaching, will not spend the summer improving their courses, or keeping up with the latest industry trends. In the Colorado Community College System, adjunct faculty are more than half: We comprise 80% of the faculty. Like countless other adjunct faculty so necessary and yet so overlooked by our colleges, we will not be the ones meeting at conferences to learn from our peers’ best practices or reading research reports on how to keep students in school. Most of us won’t even be invited to get together with faculty colleagues to collaborate on new learning approaches, lesson plans, senior-level projects and portfolios. We will not be engaged in research we are trained to do, in service to the public good.

Some of us will be injured on our summer jobs, our bodies unaccustomed to tough, physical labor. Some will become ill with worry from it, will contract hives, will come down with shingles, or a spend night in an emergency room (as I did once), waiting for administered medications to quell anxiety attacks brought on by the stress. Trained to succeed, we will largely fail, and blame ourselves for the failing, as we switch gears from nine months’ work as sensitive, bookish scholars to three months’ work as day laborers. In a few states, adjunct faculty at some schools can collect unemployment benefits (at best a portion of their meager wages). In states like Colorado, and with anti-faculty administration such as that in the Colorado Community College System, unemployment benefits are denied to adjunct faculty.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts our profession will add 197,800 jobs by 2026, and that most of those jobs will be part-time faculty jobs. Already, more than half of the 1.6 million post-secondary teaching positions are part-time, as verified by the April 2018 AAUP Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. As full-time faculty retire, their positions are being filled by two or three of us adjunct faculty. We are expected not to enjoy summers, but only to endure them. What does that look like up close?

For the past several years, since the passage of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, our college system limits the number of courses adjunct faculty can teach to seven per year, which means three for fall and spring semester, and, if we are lucky, one for summer. One summer I had no classes at all to teach.

At times I am able to snag freelance work, but much of that work has dried up since 2008. Also, as companies cut costs by offering unpaid internships to workers eager for any experience, there is less incentive for them to pay for professional work.

Most short-term assignments are grunt work, though, and so I have spread mulch, painted houses, supervised moves, and packed candies in a factory. One summer I did general office work for an insurance agent. I started a birdseed company. I have sidelines as resume writer, web editor, and crossword-puzzle creator. One summer I landed a job transcribing for a large family the 320 treasured love letters between a cowboy in the Oklahoma territory and his school-teacher sweetheart in Udall, Kansas, 1888-1892. (The cowboy and the school teacher were their great-great-great grandparents).

As interesting as these assignments can sometimes be, they are not the same as having a career and having a steady income. What’s worse (and seldom mentioned), is how, once you have worked as an adjunct faculty member for a few years, it is more difficult than before to find full-time work. Employers imagine you must be a poor performer if you have worked part-time for a college for so many years, and yet never offered a full-time position.

Since 2009 I have been a year-round property manager, making some (not all) ends meet by renting out furnished bedrooms in my house. It’s a mountain of work and a nearly complete loss of privacy, as I have had to divide the refrigerator into areas for this one or that one, to keep schedules for kitchen and laundry use, and to endeavor to keep things quiet. People are people, and so there have been a few tough transitions when I had to ask a housemate to leave. One had to leave because, in spite of the “no smoking” clause in the lease, it turned out she was a smoker. One was very kind and sweet but was a hoarder who believed she only needed to empty her wastebasket once a month. Another one would, at night, position the knives sharp-end up in the knife drawer and do other spooky things that scared the rest of us half to death.

A few summers ago, I was desperate because I owed $1500 for an ER visit co-pay. Ironically, stress about bills had brought on the anxiety attack, and stress about how to pay off the ER co-pay was bringing on another attack.

To solve this problem, I took a Care.Com gig to house-sit and pet-sit two big dogs, one small one, and a cat, while an M.D., her husband, and their two girls went on a three-week vacation. Long story short, the police visited the house three times. Whenever I left the dogs in the backyard while I was away at school, they chewed through the fence to chase cars, nip the heels of children, dig in gardens, poop on lawns, and drag off toys or shoes left on porches. If I left them in the house while I was away, the dogs chewed holes in the drywall, ate my books, wicker furniture, stacks of student essays, and portions of the drapes. After the third police visit, whenever I had to go out or to sleep, I left the dogs in the garage. They may have eaten the plastic snow sled collection and part of the lawnmower out there. I neither checked nor cared.

I had my invoice ready to hand to the family the moment they returned from their trip. In it, I added to my $1500 fee: copies of the police reports, a typed sequence of events and a hefty 20% tip. In addition, I included a separate fee, along with reimbursement receipts for: new fence posts and nails I had to buy to fix the fence, the charge from the library to replace a book, a half dozen beef ankle bones (that the Animal Control officer told me I needed to purchase, bake and feed to the dogs), and a $30 bottle of Bombay Sapphire I was forced to buy (and use) to get to sleep at night. They paid me immediately, no questions asked, and sent me on my way.

Adjunct faculty who need surgery are obliged to have that done during summer or winter break, as we have no sick leave. Our pay is docked if we cannot teach a class. Accordingly, one Christmas Eve my left knee was replaced, and, a few months later in August, my right hip was replaced. The co-pays for both surgeries came to more than $18,000; more than I earn in a year teaching academic writing. I wrote a long letter at the start of the Fall semester to the hospital administrators, explaining how the Colorado Community College System pays 80% of its faculty $10K below the living wage for a single adult in our area. I enclosed a few W2s that showed an annual income less than $20K, along with a press release outlining how our six-figure-earning college system administrators had paid their lobbyists $132K to defeat our House and Senate bills that tried to secure equitable wages for adjunct faculty. My entire bill was forgiven by the hospital.

I was lucky to have health insurance that year, because, like so many adjunct faculty, before the 2010 Affordable Care Act I had no health insurance at all. Since then, many of us qualify for taxpayer-subsidized policies, but those policies are bare-bones and have high co-pays, especially for hospital or emergency-room visits. I found that out the hard way when I had the anxiety attack and had to go to the ER for help.

One night last summer I felt unusually achy and tired, so I went to bed early. Pain in the middle of the night woke me from sleep, and I began peeing blood. I called the ER at my local hospital to confer with a nurse. She urged me to come in right away. I did not have the money for an ER visit co-pay, I told her, but thanked her for her concern.

By 3:00 a.m., and by then weeping, I made another call to the same nurse. She insisted I come to the ER right away and asked if I wanted her to send an ambulance. I promised her I would make it over in half an hour.

I crept out to my car so as not to awaken my three housemates and drove on deserted roads over to the hospital. I parked my car in the dark lot and stared longingly at that ER door, the way a kid stares at a candy store, I suppose. I debated whether or not I could afford to go inside. I decided I could not. I did not want to lose my house.

When I got home, I called the ER to speak to the nurse.

“Oh, honey,” she said, and then told me what to do. It hurt to hear her crying a little herself. She told me to drink a gallon of water, a cup at a time, and to call her back every so often. She surmised that I was passing a kidney stone. By dawn, exhausted but somewhat better, I fell into bed.

Mid-morning on Monday, I saw my primary-care doctor during regular office hours. She confirmed that I had likely passed a kidney stone.

These are real-life glimpses from just one of the 768,000 part-time college faculty members who keep introducing ends, but they refuse to meet. Those of us who haven’t given up yet, and stay on the job, will suffer through in-service events in late August. Inevitably, a well-meaning (but clueless) full-timer will start an ice-breaker exercise, requiring us to join in and, when it comes our turn, to list “just one of all the fun things” we did over the summer. That is when salt pours into the wound.
This blog post is part of a series inviting AAUP members to write about their summer plans, challenges, and experiences. You can read about the series here.