By Darren Johnson
Campus News
OK, I’ll be honest. One of the main places where I test drive ideas for this column is an angry Facebook group titled, “Con Job: Stories of Adjunct and Contingent Faculty.” It’s easy to rile up people there, so I will make a post and see what level of ire it arises; lots of ire, and that makes for a decent column idea.
Two posts I’ve made there since the last column asked whether adjuncts noticed that their students usually drive better cars than them; and if anyone knew of a business similar to colleges – where a customer pays a set fee and may get a high-paid employee or a subsistence-level contingent employee helping them.
In other words, a student is paying, say, $1000 a credit, but the instructor may be getting paid $5000 per credit OR $800 per credit. Everything else is the same: Same classroom, same course number, same value on your report card, same number of hours per week.
Which gets me back to the first question – cars.
The best car I’ve ever owned was a Hyundai Sonata. It was only two years old when I’d bought it, over a dozen years ago. It’s long gone because, as an academic nomad, I pile up a lot of miles on Thruways and Parkways, but it was a comfortable ride considering I usually have rickety subcompacts. I’m back to a tiny, dented-all-over car now, but 12 years ago I was pretty happy to have a car considered “full size.”
I’d gone to a local car dealer just looking to get the usual martyr car to help me keep recreating my low-self esteem youth, but something weird was going on at that dealer that day. The owner brought in a bunch of scabs from out-of-state – a nomadic group of salespeople – to take over the dealership and to show his permanent employees “how it’s done.”
I didn’t get a local salesperson with a pinky ring. Instead, I walked the lot with a salesman who seemed much cooler, less crass, didn’t seem desperate, actually seemed to have a philosophy on life. He essentially was an “adjunct” to that car dealership; not a vested employee. Hired to do a job. So he could be honest.
He asked me what kind of job I did. I told him I’d just moved to the area to assume an assistant dean’s role at a community college.
He led me to the Sonata, even though I’d been pointing out my usual cars-of-woe (since then, I’ve had a relapse and currently have a Nissan Versa Note – nothing notable about it, by the way).
I’d mentioned my credit score was probably mediocre – that’s what car dealers try to tell us. He said, “It’s fine. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you have a low credit score.”
He wasn’t trying to upsell, at least it didn’t appear that way, but he’d read me, and said this is the car an assistant dean should have. Not that I’m materialistic, or into cars – I drove that car over 200,000 miles until it was rusted and unsafe – but he did have some points about confidence.
Most of the adjuncts on Facebook reported that, indeed, their students usually had better cars than them. But I often sense that same martyrdom I have on that site. Some reported that they couldn’t even afford a car and took the bus to teach.
No one came up with a good analogy to how higher education pays instructors startling different rates – but students pay the same, regardless. The closest analogy was an Urgent Care medical center – a patient pays a set fee and may get a veteran M.D. or a newly minted Nurse Practitioner to treat them. However, this is different from higher education in that a full-time-tenure track professor and an adjunct may have very similar academic credentials, while the difference between an M.D. and a N.P. is light years, as far as training goes.
One adjunct had a great idea – how about if students got to pick who their classes were taught by and pay accordingly? A class taught by a distinguished faculty fellow would cost, say, $2000 a credit, and a class taught by a harried adjunct working out of his Nissan Versa Note, $500 a credit.
Higher Ed would never go for that model, though – because we all know students would choose the latter. Even the rich kids, with the fancy cars.
Darren Johnson publishes Campus News and taught 13 credits this past semester.
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