I’ve had a class taken away from me a week before classes were to begin because they had to give it to a new full-time faculty member to fulfill their workload.
After 18 years as an adjunct, I had surgery during an intersession that should have had me bad to work in plenty of time for the next semester, but things didn’t go well and I had to back out of teaching that semester. Of course that meant I didn’t get paid, where’s the compensation for the hours and hours of work I put into preparing for the semester? On top of that, I’ve now lost my status of getting a year long “”commitment”” of teaching, rather than one semester at a time.
Each semester I have a knot in my stomach until about a week before classes begin worrying whether or not I’ll have a job.
At first blush, the hourly salary seems decent, but when you consider the hours and hours of prep time for classes, grading papers and tests, writing letters of recommendation for students, meeting with them, emails 24/7, my salary is a fraction of what it seems.
I don’t feel as though I have the same academic freedom full-time faculty enjoy. Adjuncts serve at the pleasure of the chair. We could be gone tomorrow.
