For the Washington Post, Tanya Paperny reflects on life as an adjunct professor and on a system that seems to her untenable, a system where required courses are often undertaken only by adjuncts who earn on average $2700 per course.
Paperny, herself, taught as many as five courses per semester at four campuses across Washington D.C. It amounted to 13 hour workdays and not enough income to get by. She writes here on the heels of a nationwide adjunct walkout.
Last week was the first ever National Adjunct Walkout Day, a grassroots protest to push for fair pay and better working conditions. Protests and teach-ins took place on as many as 100 campuses nationwide, prompting at least one university to create a task force to address labor concerns. It’s little wonder that a national movement has sprung up around the adjunct system, which offers little or no job security or access to benefits and significantly lower wages than regular faculty. I sympathize — I was an adjunct, and I could only tolerate the stress and exhaustion for two years.
Read the article here.