Adjunct Island and the New Navigational Charts

We have all heard the stories, haven't we? Stories of the adjunct or the contingent academic; the ones that paint a bleak picture of people who often hold masters degrees, or even doctorates, forced to cobble together a living by accepting two classes at University A and another two from Community College B, with maybe even a little editing work or tutoring on the side. They accept a class on the last day before the term starts because someone else couldn't take it due to a conflict in scheduling with another other job. They think themselves lucky they were offered the class because there seems to be more and more of their kind each term. They drive to the wrong university in the fourth week and get a ticket in Week Five for parking in the wrong lot. They take texts on their personal phones to meet with students in the halls and the lounges because they don't have a desk or a phone. They listen while the tenureables comment how good it would be to "just teach and not have to worry about the pressures of publication" at the same time that they resist the urge to show them the latest issue of the regional journal that bears their own work. This is a conglomerate story, of course, but the offenses are just as real as the sensibilities that they offend. It has often been lamented that these stories do little except make us feel miserable and just a little guilty, but, Seth Kahn comments, they also seem never to solve anything (A12). It is my hope that this paper will first show us the plight of the contingent academic laborer, explain how we got to this state, and then entertain the likelihood of joining the contingent, perhaps even noting some actions we could engage in to move toward improvement.

There is a brand of political activism that uses the government and organizational influence to break the hold on power that the last forty-five years of unchecked distillation in Writing Programs and English Departments has accomplished. Steve Lamos writes,

We who comprise NCTE, CCCC, WPA, MLA, AAUP, NFM, and others must begin to think more explicitly (and hopefully in concert) about the role of affective-labor-in-space within things like mission statements, websites, press releases, and the like, as well as about how such labor can and should be construed across our various subdisciplines and sites.

(382)

These solutions must not become competing causes but rather unified efforts to harbor the best chance for success. There is, after all, strength in numbers.

We start this examination of what has been done at the macro-level, as we must, in Laramie, Wyoming, where a group of scholar teachers who, outraged by the working conditions of the profession, undertook to improve those conditions. The account of the drafting of this first modern NCTE proposal to grant professional status to instructors and professors of composition is filled with a certain fevered hope. This distant mirror of the past seems to reflect the feeling prevalent in the field of Rhetoric and Composition today, except that now the hope has been replaced with determination and anger from New Working Class academics. The failure of the professional associations in the field of English to act upon the resulting Wyoming Resolution did not cause—but has contributed to—further stratification of the field. The first section of the Wyoming Resolution proposal, with its lofty ideals, demanded attention but, as James Sledd indicated in his essay, the second and third sections sought to establish a voice for the exploited compositionists and a mechanism for actual punishments, sanctions, and censure for enacting the conduct that the administrators and the professoriate had come to rely upon to keep the efficiency gains rolling in (277). These familiar conditions of labor included the lack of expectation of continued employment, oversized classes, short notifications for work assignments, and very heavy teaching loads. The resolution's ideals fell into obscurity for a time, at least in the public scene, once the teeth of the document...