BY OLGA GARCÍA ECHEVERRÍA

This creative essay was inspired by Jane Harty’s Academe Blog post “Stress and PTSD in the Academy” and modeled after Judy Brady’s 1971 satirical feminist essay “I Want a Wife.”

I belong to a category of workers known as adjuncts. I am an adjunct. According to the Oxford online dictionary, an adjunct is “a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part.” In education, an adjunct is a worker “attached to the staff of a college in a temporary or assistant capacity.”

For the past twenty-five years, I have held many jobs, but mostly always I have been an adjunct. Despite my years of service and experience, I remain, in the eyes of my employer, a mere supplement, as do my adjunct comrades. Considering how profitable our labor is to the institutions we work for, I began to realize that I too want an adjunct. Actually, I need one desperately.

Why do I want an adjunct? I want an adjunct I can hire but that I don’t have to treat as a full employee. I want an adjunct I can pay an adjunct salary to, that is to say a fraction of what I’d have to pay a real professor. I want an adjunct I don’t have to invest in. Ever.

I want an adjunct I don’t have to provide an office for. If I’m feeling gracious, she may end up sharing a space with five or six other adjuncts, but adjuncts can work in stairwells, hallways, closets, and cars, or they can be sent to the library. They will figure it out—they are adjuncts.

I want an adjunct who, regardless of merit and years of service, rarely or never gets promotions, release time from courses, funding for research or writing, or sabbaticals—nada. Like Marie Antoinette said, let them eat cake! And let them buy their own damn coffee too.

I want an adjunct who works like a mule. I want my mule to carry heavy loads and to juggle two, maybe three, jobs to make ends meet. I want an adjunct who, despite degrees and a full teaching load, may have to go on public assistance to survive, support a family, pay the ever-rising rent, to afford that cake I want her so badly to eat.

I want an adjunct whose love of students and teaching I can exploit. Adjuncts, it’s been proven repeatedly, make excellent unpaid therapists, college counselors, career advisors, financial aid assistants, GoFundMe initiators. Women—in particular, women of color—are of special interest, since they tend to be very giving and they can (in addition to everything else) “mother” the most marginalized of students.

Aside from serving as a critical safety net (where the university falls short), I want my adjunct to roll up her sleeves on weeknights and on weekends too. It’s unpaid labor, of course, but how else is she going to grade those 180 essays? Unpaid invisible labor is what adjuncting is all about.

Meanwhile, I want to constantly evaluate the performance of my adjunct. What have you done for me lately? What have you contributed to the college and extended community? Why should I hire you again?

To be honest, I highly prefer an adjunct without a union. Without a union, it is easier to get away with no health insurance, no benefits, no bargaining. But listen, even with a union, an adjunct is still basically an indentured instructor. The gap between what she gives and what she gets is a cycle of exploitation for her and one of perpetual profit for those of us who employ adjuncts.

Yes, I want an adjunct! Actually, I want hundreds of adjuncts! I want thousands of adjuncts! I want adjuncts to become the primary workforce on college campuses throughout the country. Imagine all the money saved. We can create even more high-paying jobs for administrators who will never set foot in a classroom.

I want an army of adjuncts! I want this army of adjuncts to know their place in my university hierarchy. It’s a caste system, you see, although I will never publicly admit this. I want this caste system to function in practice, in theory, and in everyone’s minds, even in the mind of the adjunct, perhaps most importantly in the mind of the adjunct. Tenure/tenure track = real professors. Adjunct = well, what the word suggests, an add-on, a non-essential component, a cog in a huge mechanical apparatus. Think Metropolis—those factory workers in that multi-tiered churning machine.

Today, I’m imagining myself at the very top. I don’t mean to brag, but my salary is in the six digits and I get wonderful perks—sometimes free housing or, if I choose, an annual housing stipend that is higher than the annual earnings of some of my adjuncts. Isn’t that hilarious? Yes, I’ve heard rumors of homeless students on campus and adjuncts on food stamps, but what does that have to do with me? I’m not here to run a charity. I am here to run a lean, mean corporate machine, and for this I absolutely need an adjunct labor force. I demand an adjunct labor force! Adjuncts are essential to our institutions of higher learning/earning. I want an adjunct labor force, goddamn it! Don’t you want one too?

Guest blogger Olga García Echeverría is a veteran adjunct instructor who teaches literature in the Chicana/o Latina/o Studies department at California State University, Los Angeles.