Steady Diet of Adjuncting, Part 2

by Russell Mayo, PhD

The academic job market today poses nearly impossible odds for graduate students today. As I discussed in my previous post “In Casino, Out (of Academia),” the gamble of the academic job market makes finding a secure job that pays well nearly impossible for most job seekers today. But not for all.

This series for Ethical ELA is about why graduate students and adjunct professors should consider transitioning to working in K-12 schools. But the idea for it did not spring from my failure on the academic job market. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In 2019, I secured a job as an Assistant Professor of English while I was in the process of completing my PhD. I am one of the incredibly small percentage of individuals who manage to completed graduate school and find a tenure-track job at a university. I also surprised many when I decided to leave after just two years and return to working as a K-12 teacher. With good academic jobs so hard to find, why would I leave? Why would I willingly give up a Golden Ticket? There are many reasons, which I will speak in future posts. At the moment, I want to offer some details about why good academic jobs are so competitive, and how most professors today work as part of the academic underclass.

While many people with graduate degrees still find jobs in academia, these tend to be precarious jobs with dismal pay and benefits. According to the most recent data reported by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), “over two-thirds (68 percent) of faculty members in US colleges and universities held contingent appointments in fall 2021, compared with about 47 percent in fall 1987.” Today, the majority of college professors are adjuncts or “contingent” faculty, meaning that most work on semester or yearly contracts with only the expectation of teaching. Most only work part-time with little-to-no benefits.

In her fantastic book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone, Sarah Jaffe calls these contingent professors “Proletarian Professionals” (231), and her chapter on the subject of “adjunctification” in higher education clearly lays out the alienating situation that awaits many current and future graduate students. If you are an undergraduate student at most American universities today, the majority of your classes will be taught by these adjuncts or graduate students. Adjuncts are often exceptional scholars who hold PhDs from excellent universities, but they cannot find work on the tenure track, so they’ve joined the lower rung of academia’s two-tier labor system.

Most contingent faculty are assigned to teach introductory or remedial courses year after year, often the most challenging classes, and they enter this work with little pedagogical training. They are typically paid by the class, sometimes as little as $2,000 or $3,000 per class taught. Even so, there is no guarantee that they will be called back again. There is little room to negotiate teaching loads or course assignments, and adjuncts certainly have little-to-no power over the operations of the department or university. This is unlike tenured and tenure-track faculty, who typically enjoy much higher salaries and stable contracts. They have significant control over their teaching and research activities, and they participate in the shared governance of their department, college, and university.

Adjuncts who make up the majority of the professorate today have the least amount of power, operating as gig workers, often with six-figure student loan debt to pay off. As Jaffe’s reporting illustrates, adjuncts have little job security, with many working on a part-time basis at multiple colleges just to make ends meet. Many don’t see an alternative, or they hope that by continuing to work within the academic labor system that they one day be promoted to the upper-tier. Unfortunately, such moves are exceedingly rare, especially the further they go away from completing their degree. But alternatives do exist.

I am proposing an alternative path. Becoming a K-12 educator can provide an off-ramp for thousands of graduate students and contingent faculty away from the “gig economy” of academia toward a career that offers better pay, benefits, and job security, while simultaneously allowing them to actually engage much of the skills and knowledge their obtained through graduate school. Such work can be found in schools in every community across the U.S., offering better pay and job security than almost any adjunct has today.

I encourage you to share your experiences in the comments. What is your experience as a contingent faculty member? Would you consider shifting to K-12 teaching if you could? I will do my best to answer your questions here or in future posts. 

*Note: The name of this article is borrowed from the title of the incredible 1991 album Steady Diet of Nothing by the aggressive, inspiring post-hardcore band Fugazi.

Russell Mayo is an English Language Arts teacher at Burley School, a public K-8 school on the northside of Chicago. Previously, he worked as an assistant professor of English at Purdue University Northwest, where he served as Writing Center Director and Writing Program Director. Russ completed his doctorate in English Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020. His research centers on writing studies, critical pedagogy, and the environment. Most recently, Russ co-edited and contributed to the Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change, (Lexington Press, 2024).