BY CATHERINE M. YOUNG
Follow the foibles of Claire Park, a Walt Whitman expert and part-time instructor at a small liberal arts college and large public university as she looks ahead to the fall semester and wonders how she will pay her November and December rent if her third class is canceled because not enough students registered for “iSing the Body Electric: Walt Whitman in the Digital Age.”
Guffaw as Claire picks up an extra class at a religious college and has a hilarious outfit-changing montage in which Claire decides to risk wearing pants, then decides against it, then puts on a long black skirt and a loose sweater, and her BFF tells her, “You look like a pregnant witch.”
Cringe as Claire can’t print her course materials on the adjunct printer and asks the Visiting Assistant Professor, Maria, if she can use her personal office printer, causing Maria to spill coffee on HER course materials. Claire and Maria, who might have been friends in another life, never speak again.
Watch Claire stand at the computer that sits between the microwave and mini-fridge in the main office because the computer in the faculty lounge has an ancient browser that won’t load any websites except AOL. Claire does not have the “administrative privileges” to update the browser.
Holler “YIKES!” as the department chair tells Claire to print her course materials at home. Claire debates confessing that she’s been out of ink for eight months.
Chuckle as Claire tries to hide her dented 2012 laptop from students by quickly removing it from her bag to the lectern before class starts.
Purse your lips as Claire conducts unpaid required office hours with students in a loud crowded hallway because she has no office.
Celebrate Claire’s triumph in securing a shared cubicle, only to discover that one of her cubicle mates leaves evidence of Acral peeling skin syndrome all over the keyboard.
Watch Claire petition the office manager for a can of compressed air with which to clean the keyboard. This is a twelve-week process. In the end, the office manager agrees to give Claire access to the compressed air for five minutes each week. When the office manager discovers Claire using the compressed air to clean her 2012 laptop, Claire’s weekly access is revoked.
Chuckle at the university security guard’s total exasperation at Claire’s “aw, shucks” face when she tries to swipe herself into work using her ID from the other college.
Grimace as Claire is cajoled into teaching a twenty-seat senior seminar and then finds out it’s been intentionally over-enrolled to twenty-seven students.
Wince as Claire eats her bagged lunch of peanut butter and jelly while her students swipe their meal cards for sushi and smoothies.
Let the pit in your stomach grow as Claire smiles incessantly to make the department chair feel at ease while he slings his leg over the armrest of his chair during their syllabus meeting. While debating the nuances of the meeting with her BFF, Claire calls this move “the chair chair.”
Watch Claire teach a newly developed class with controversial content while the person who developed the class is on paid research leave. Follow the “cancel culture” debate as a student makes good points and Claire tries to defend a curriculum she didn’t develop.
Cheer as Claire finally gets up the courage to ask the illustrious physics professor who has the classroom before her to erase the whiteboard when his class is over.
Tear up as a student discloses to Claire that she is the victim of a sexual assault, making Claire realize she has received no training from Human Resources. Watch Claire’s surprise when she finds out she is a mandated reporter.
Deeply inhale your breath through clenched teeth as Claire pauses while adjusting the lights because she got distracted by reading the “active shooter” directives posted next to the door.
Clench your fists with anxiety as Claire accuses a student of plagiarism and his response leads her to think he might commit an act of violence. Watch Claire request that the dean intervene.
Blanch as Claire brings substantial evidence of gender and racial bias in student evaluations to her department chair and the chair tells Claire that her “merit raise” will be based solely on the student evaluation score.
Cringe as Claire hides from the department chair for the entire fall semester because the chair told Claire she might have to resign due to pregnancy.
Tsk tsk when Claire is dropped from her regular teaching gig at one school so that the school doesn’t have to give her health insurance. Tsk tsk again when Claire gladly teaches at the same school a year later because “it looks good on her CV.”
Sigh heavily as Claire accepts too many classes for the spring because she doesn’t want to “burn any bridges” with the department chair, whom Claire overhears describing adjuncts as “horses in a stall.”
Whisper “yikes” when Claire applies for a tenure-track position at one of the colleges where she teaches and does not get an interview.
Catherine M. Young studies popular entertainments including musicals, circus, and vaudeville. She advocated for and helped collaboratively develop the City University of New York Graduate Center’s first-ever Doctoral Student Parental Accommodation Policy. She has been and is currently contingently employed. Her Twitter handle is @fickle_freckled.
This is so good. Chronicle of Higher Education should reprint this to make up for all the soft and fawning reporting it did on the series.
It IS so good. Chronicle, publish this!
Perfect.
Brilliant. You know and see and describe it. A thousand thank-yous on yellow post-it notes, the official stationery of adjuncts everywhere. This breaks hearts, opens eyes, and raises fists. Did I mention it is brilliant? Thank you for writing this. I know it was not easy.
Thank you, well done. I’d add the juggernaut of a QEP though the quality enforcement goes only one way, and no benefits, six-week delay in pay as the semester gets started and the added juicy morsel of a complicated, cumbersome and out-of-touch LMS curriculum enforced, micromanaged and provided with last-minute video trainings and glitches galore — and even in light of serious problems, the LMS curriculum remains mandatory.
So good. That last sentence, happened to me. Tsk tsk when I continue teaching at that same school.
Sigh. Too true in too many ways.
In the Covid episode, watch Claire spend the entire summer converting her courses to remote learning for no pay.
Excellent. Netflix really should pick this idea up, iff they give real credit and pay real money.
Brilliant!
Your only peer here is Mc Sweeny’s.
While “The Chair” hit home based on my grad school experience, that’s old news. The adjunct experience is more commonplace than ever now and I have watched faculty I know suffer many of the slings and arrows above. It’s spot on.
Bravo. I hope Netflix is playing attention.
The only problem with this series is that it’s too real and too true. Nobody who hasn’t been or known adjuncts will believe that this S…T really happens! Every day. All. Day. Long. Year after year.
A few honest questions based on this article.
1) when is “it looks good on the CV” no long a valid reason to teach a class you don’t really like? I am teaching several classes out of my area of expertise because I keep seeing it as an “in” to courses in my field, but the “in” never comes.
2) what are appropriate ways to handle overbooked classes. Teaching classes of 50+.
3) Im fortunate to get several courses from various schools but most are “out of sight, out of mind.” I already lost one school for turning down a course, at least temporarily. What’s the best way to say no without burning those bridges?
Just a friendly note re one moment in this otherwise wonderful piece! See this: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pit+of+stomach
It’s high time higher education gets its comeuppance. This series would peel back yet another layer, or should I say expose the wizard.
This article saved lives and stopped hair from being pulled out. Thank you, Catherine Young!!!
I am in awe with realizing I lived Claire’s life for years. The biggest benefit of being an adjunct was it allowed me the ability to homeschool my daughter and finish my doctoral program. It was exploitive and actually destroys a pathway to a tenure position. Well done.
A review — apologies for the length:
Inequality: How The Chair misses the point
The Chair, a 6-episode Netflix series, builds its plot around inequalities of race and gender in the academy. The Sandra Oh character, an Asian woman, steps into the position of chair of the English Department at a small private university (“second tier Ivy”) and is immediately asked by the Dean (white, old, male) to solve his budget crisis. He wants to do it by laying off three tenured professors – two men, one woman, all white and old. They have been there a long time and make high salaries. The happy ending (sort of) is that the lone tenure-track Black woman in the department goes off to Yale, the senior woman (white) who has suffered 30 years of discrimination replaces Oh as Chair, and Oh goes back to teaching.
Focusing on the pervasive race and gender inequalities of the academy is good. It is a realistic corrective to the public image of higher ed as an island of progressive and leftist politics. But most actual faculty who watch The Chair will want to know what happened to the adjuncts? Is this really a department without part-timers, temporaries, contingents (multiple names for the same thing)? All seven faculty who show up on camera appear to be either tenured or tenure-line. Has no Dean at this place, this one or previous ones, apparently addressed their budget problems the way it’s really done: by hiring faculty who will teach for $3,500 per class (this is typical) and can be fired at will?
This is simply not reality. If there are 7 tenured or tenure-line faculty in any normal department, you can bet there are twenty or thirty contingents on the payroll.
It is well known that in most colleges and universities, contingents make up over half the faculty. Nationally, we constitute nearly 75% of faculty. Therefore contingents, in the real world of higher ed, do most of the actual teaching, and we do it without the perks that the seven people sitting around that shiny table take for granted (and tussle over): offices, sabbaticals, expectation of continued employment, just for starters. We typically do it without health benefits or retirement plans. Needless to say, we (sometimes desperately) try to stay current without support for research or attending conferences, all while working multiple jobs. The wages of contingents range from as little as $1000 per three-credit one-semester class to $3,000 or in a few places (like the California State University system) as much as $5,000 or $8,000.
The situation in The Chair manages to smudge this whole reality of the faculty workforce out of the picture.
Race and gender, of course, play into this dynamic. Historically, Deans did not just suddenly notice a half-million dollar annual shortfall (the total cost of three high-paid senior tenured professors, along with all their perks) and expect to solve it overnight with a few layoffs. Starting back in the late 1970s, as money got tight, students got older (“re-entry” students) and more diverse, college and university administrators started hiring “flexible” workers – gig workers, essentially: a just-in-time workforce for just-in-time students. Faculty unionization expanded as this trend went forward, but contingents were not at first welcomed into the major education unions (this has changed). Part of this trend was the increasing presence in the higher ed workforce of women and people of color. This new workforce (now we’re talking about the 1990s and the 2000s, well into today) looks different, both in race and gender, from the senior white men who are the stereotype of “professor”. Inequalities have a multiplier effect; this new workforce is more vulnerable. This means it is more in need of solidarity, a challenge for unions.
Did making professors into gig workers start out as a fully envisioned administrative strategy? Probably not: more likely, it was step by step, one local solution after another. This is not the first time a job has gone bad when a workforce with less social power arrived to claim it: “secretary” used to be a man’s job and a step into management; when women came to work as “typewriters”, wages dropped. The first casualty of contingency in teaching is academic freedom, of course. This is true of K-12 as well as higher ed; not good thing, given the current state of the world
The writers of The Chair seem to take it for granted that there is no one out there who knows this real story behind higher education today. How could they make a mistake like that? Plenty of tough, bitter jokes are waiting to be made about the realities of jobs in higher ed. They’d have to capture the pain of rubbing shoulders semester after semester with someone who does the same work you do for five times the pay (more or less) plus the bundle of perks that floats them above the bear-traps that litter the floor of our free-market economy. Contingent faculty love their work (despite hating their jobs), try to do it well, but are basically subsidizing their institutions while they wear out their health (and their cars) as the years pass. This anguish could travel, in the right hands, way past tragedy into comedy. And there is no end of no-holds-barred comedy in union organizing or bargaining.
This is also PERFECT.
In fact, small private colleges of this type often do not have much in the way of adjuncts and the like.
What bugged me more was the derailing of focus on Prof. Kim’s story with—that’s right, the same ol’ “lovable scamp” white guy down on his luck. Endless screw-ups—but we’re meant to be on his side, because he smiles appealingly and has a SAD backstory.
I also disliked the way the series increasingly endorsed a bogus right-wing narrative of “cancel culture”: these students were over-informed and way more political than most students…but also clueless about how to effectively raise political concerns in the classroom (a ‘Hamilton’-like diss track about Melville? Oh puh-lease…)
Also: the college was laggard on diversifying its faculty but somehow has a student body even more diverse than the community college I teach at? Makes for good TV…but tied in with the right-wing cancel-culture narrative, creates an unavoidable suggestion that diverse student body=cancel-culture warriors. Again: ugh.
Thank you for this. I have family and friends of the X gen (who followed the boom) who are nurses and educators and they all suffer these slings and arrows of poor institutional support for the essential work they do holding society together. I am 50 and perpetually sad that the boomers ahead of us with so much power, when resources were plenty and economies were good, didn’t pave an easier road for those to come, my nieces and nephews who are just starting their own higher Ed trek. Where did the money go?
Amelia, What are you talking about? The boomer educators got trashed too. This has been going on since at least the 1980’s. Please don’t turn this into a generational attack.
100% no generational attack, my comment is not about the boomer educators, it’s about the boomer capitalists who controlled the largest federal surplus in history back in the 80s and then it was spent on war instead of education and healthcare. I’m an econ person, this is a demographics comment, boomers were the most powerful group in the history of earth for 40 yrs (and gen x was so small they had no political voice) I think the current generation – many who can’t even afford to enter higher ed – are going to more than point the finger at those who came before and had an opportunity to right the ship, and I agree it was the 80s/90s that had the impact we’re seeing now. I was a college student, so I wasn’t in charge, and I was politically/socially active, but nobody took us seriously when we protested women not being tenured at our college while the white tenured men laid back and phoned it in. Just an observation per experience.
So this is amazing. I would literally pay my adjunct-earned dollars to watch such a series where I’d have to pay to watch it. Seriously. I have no idea how shows or movies get made but, someone should make this.
Catherine, thanks for this hilarious and horrifying satire! I really hope you do develop it into a mini-series–it’s a point of view (and a reality) that needs to be heard. Someone would make this.