Hooked on Higher Education and Other Tales from Adjunct Faculty Organizing

How I Gave Up My $50,000-a-Year Teaching Habit and Learned to Live Again

It started innocently enough. It was late summer or early fall of 1989, and a friend who was teaching at New York University—let's call him Jim—invited me to take over a class on contemporary social issues. At first I hesitated. I'd seen what happened to friends who'd gone down that road. The early signs were subtle. There would be gradual changes in their appearance. Their grooming habits changed. They began to appear haggard. Later they stopped going out on the weekends and evenings, preferring to stay in to mark papers or conference with students. They were often sick—knocked out by the flu every year. And their other professional work almost always deteriorated. Artists who had been showing stopped. Writers who had published were "blocked." The longer they taught, the more resigned and bitter they seemed to grow. That was not for me.

But Jim cajoled me. "Come on," he said, "what harm can it do? It's only one class. You're only signing on for one semester." He was right. What harm could it do? So I agreed, and soon I was teaching cultural theory one night a week. My partner immediately noticed the changes in my behavior. I'd get home around ten o'clock after my evening class and I'd be flying. Often, if we'd had an especially good class, I couldn't sleep: my head would be spinning with ideas for the coming week's class, with ideas for new readings or screenings we could talk about. I'd stay up late: reading, watching videos, and later, after arrival of the Internet, I'd be on-line, searching for good sites for students or corresponding with them on bulletin boards we'd set up. But I'm getting ahead of myself. . .

The fall semester of 1989 came and went, and in the spring my department asked me if I wanted to teach a writing workshop. It would be more work and less money, but at that point I was hooked. Sure, I said. And so it began: a teaching habit that escalated out of control.¹ Over the next decade I would teach three, four, five courses a year, all the while holding down a full-time day job that supported my teaching habit. I was what they call a "high-functioning" addict. My day job in a nonprofit arts organization, though not particularly lucrative, provided health benefits and compensation adequate enough to maintain appearances. I was so hooked on teaching that I even enrolled in a doctoral program, imagining that I might find a full-time position if I had a Ph.D. on top of an M.F.A.

Things began to spiral out of control in late 1997. Somehow, in spite of my adjuncting habit, I'd managed to become pregnant. My partner and I were thrilled. At that point my teaching habit was so all-consuming that we'd all but given up hopes of ever starting a family. I was expecting and I was delighted. But still I wouldn't give up my teaching habit. Even in the final month of the pregnancy, when my doctor urged me to remain in bed to control pregnancy hypertension, I couldn't do it. Fearful that I'd lose my classes or seem "unprofessional," I was in the classroom, dizzy with high blood pressure, the week before my daughter was born, not surprisingly, by emergency C-section. This was insanity. This was an addict's insanity.

For two years I continued teaching, leaving my daughter in the care of a college student whom I paid more per hour than I earned for teaching. Then in September 1999 I finally hit rock bottom. Alcoholics turn to AA—I turned to the AAUP—and my long road...