In my fifth year of adjunct teaching, I parked my car on one of the upper floors of my university’s student garage and willed my body to move. I had 15 minutes to get to a class. My students disliked me, and I disliked them back. That same semester, I had tried to harm myself by turning quickly into oncoming traffic outside the one university that treated me with respect and kindness. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted to hit pause on the misery of part-time collegial instruction.
Time ticked. I took a minute to cry and scream in my car while students with bored or smug faces ambled to class in my rear-view mirror. Then I grabbed my legs and hoisted them outside the car, and I made a compromise with myself: I would run 10 minutes late. I grabbed an accordion portfolio of what I hoped were the right essays, crossed my fingers I had graded all of them, popped an edible, and started the walk to the classroom.
My bleak journey began six years prior. After getting an English degree from a college of zero repute, I’d spent my next year depressed, drinking and trying to pass the time in between glasses and bottles. In those sober hours, I’d write bad poems and apply for jobs before ending up with a Craigslist job like “women’s self-defense practice body (padded costume included)” or “document shredder” that would promptly close, fire me, or some gray area between. After writing more bad poems and getting a Master’s in two years, the same pattern emerged, but with herbal tea and acid substituted in place of alcohol.
My friend and mentor at the time, Gordon, suggested adjunct teaching after seeing my spirit decline over a series of meetings in his humid office. He regaled me with tales from his own road to tenure, and I fell for it, imagining students standing to applaud me as I entered, the life-transforming lectures I’d deliver. It didn’t matter that it was part-time work. I was catching adjunct fever, and believed Gordon when he told me, “You could probably build up your CV and then get a full-time position at a community college in a year or two.” Leaving his office, I felt triumphant: I was becoming the person I was meant to be.
Adjunct faculty are part-time professors who have their contracts renewed semester to semester. They often teach full workloads despite being part-time. They earn lower wages than full-time nontenured faculty. Adjuncts make up more than 50 percent of all postsecondary instructors.
As Herb Childress details in The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission, the number of students enrolled in America’s colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Full-time faculty hiring has roughly kept pace, from 370 thousand to 790 thousand. Yet the number of part-time faculty has increased sevenfold, from 105 thousand to 755 thousand .
The rise of the adjunct reflects changing expectations of U.S. higher education institutions. As universities hired non-faculty staff to run the growing list of campus amenities, administrative costs swelled and administrators felt pressure to make cuts. With professors retiring, and graduate schools turning out large numbers of PhDs willing to teach a course or two, hiring non-tenure-track teaching faculty became increasingly appealing.
Against this backdrop, there I was one August, sweating in my suit in the air-conditioned comfort of a department head’s office, trying to sell myself. I needn’t have worried. The job was mine before I entered the building, the meeting a formality. I met with them for five minutes, and the only thing they said was: “You have an MA, which is great. Would you prefer to have two sections or three to teach?”
At orientation, I mingled with other adjuncts in their mid-20s in a marble-walled ballroom, all of us calculating our interest in sleeping with one another while retaining our professional veneer. Once we’d stopped making the smallest of talk, we sat at a long dark oak table in our Estée Lauder and J. Crew dress clothes and practiced grading essays that were better than anything we’d ever read from our actual students. Amid the hiss of pens marking up papers, I thought: I could do this no problem.
However, after completing the exercise and having our photos taken for the department website, we shuffled into a classroom for a seminar about designing syllabi. The talk mixed obvious information (you need to grade a minimum of three to four essays per student) and confusing jargon (the sliding scale of determining A and B+ grades) that had us all scribbling notes for follow-up email questions. By the time we left, the summer sun was high in the sky, and we went blinkered into the evening just as unsure about everything as when the day had started.
On my first class one September morning, two-dozen fish-eyed students walked into the fireplaced former drawing room of a slave owner and took seats. When we shared our favorite musical artists, I was unprepared for a.) how long it would take, and b.) the students’ overwhelming love of the country duo Florida Georgia Line. We managed a simple discussion about music and a few pages of the syllabus in the 80-minute class. When the bell rang, I knew that I needed to be better with time management. I went to my car to get high and hoped a future me would figure out how to do that.
Unless I was hustling to teach eight sections of a comp or lit course, there was no such thing as making $50,000 a year, let alone 30. I made $2,400 for a section at a community college and $3,200 at a four-year institution. If I was very lucky, I might teach at a state college, making about $10,000 to teach six hours a week for four months—but that entailed eight or more hours of commuting each week.
In my first semester, I found out that at one of the colleges I taught at, adjuncts weren’t paid until after they’d taught for two months. Standing in the bright sun, I paced between the literal former slave quarters that contained my office, and the white master’s former summer mansion where we held English courses, trying desperately to get someone from payroll on the phone. When I managed to get through and ask why we weren’t paid bi-weekly, I heard a tired sigh on the other end. The voice took a minute to compose itself before saying “Honestly, there are so many of y’all part-timers that we have no idea who ever is actually doing their job. We pay you this way so we have time to try and guess who is actually showing up to teach.” Later, when I called the same college for not paying me, the bursar gently explained that, this semester, adjuncts wouldn’t get paid until they’d taught for three months.
I applied for a full-time position with a community college that seemed to like and respect me enough to ask me to host workshops. I thought I would at least get an interview. I’d been toiling away there without complaint for three years. One of my best friends was on the hiring committee, and my faculty reviews were stellar. But in the end, I reached out to the department coordinator and learned I’d been tossed out with the other rubbish candidates. Over dinner, my friend confided that in the committee meeting, someone said “we should have someone with a PhD, but that person shouldn’t be, you know, an adjunct.” Sitting alone in my basement office, I began to realize just how much time I’d wasted teaching, and how disrespected and unimportant the adjunct caste is viewed in the eyes of college hiring committees. I looked out the small bay window across the room, watching it catch dust particles in a beam of light, and began to have a panic attack.
The one benefit to getting rejected is that it encouraged me to double down on pursuing the writing work for which I’d gotten my Master’s degree. As students whose names I didn’t bother to learn whiffed on turning in assignments, regarded me as a jester they could wave off, or treated me with unwarranted contempt, the frustration of the job continued to fester, calcifying into a need to publish as much as I could for the most prestigious titles I could. The intense spite that allowed me to white-knuckle through a semester was sated only by my ability to work on other things in between classes that would carry my byline and stand in digital ink as a “fuck you” to the blank stares I faced every day for 80 minutes or so at a time.
As an English adjunct, I was relegated to teaching the worst courses in the department: composition one and two, or literature one and two. These survey classes are the bread and butter of the department, ensuring funding keeps piping in, since every student has to take them.
I taught eight of these a week each semester and didn’t change my approach at all to cope with fatigue. I essentially lived in a rerun: I would take an edible, walk into a classroom with high energy, run ten minutes of warm-up where I tried to get students excited to learn about rhetorical arguments, and then… time would melt as I stood there, faux-smile plastered on my face, waiting for a group of students to share thoughts on MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and its use of diction and argumentative tactics. Two hundred and forty sets of eyes all stared at me, blinking, confused, or bored. One dark-haired female student raised her hand to cut the tension of the awkward silence.
When it came time to grade, I doubled down on the THC gummies and mild psychedelics to combat the hopelessness of grading what were essentially 240 identical essays. I came up with a system of giving five comments per page, two consisting of the phrase “this is interesting,” and three critiques. I had two weeks to turn all essays around, and found myself grading in the morning, on the dashboard during long drives to and from each campus, and nights where I’d take the small green bottle a friend kindly put into my mailbox each week so I could microdose as a means of combating depression.
One semester, a white baseball player came into my office, frustrated with a grade. While I tried to stand my ground, he kept pushing me to change it. With each smack of his gum, I felt more pressure to just give in and shut him up. When I relented and gave him a C+, he smirked with crossed arms, but I figured there was no way to tell academic advising to add that to his file.
Another time, a loner student requested a higher grade, and I had to meet with a department council about the paper he’d turned in—which argued for the incarceration and deaths of Antifa supporters, the resegregation of school systems, and a new outlawing interracial marriage—to figure out how to handle it. The student’s family donated to the college, and thus it was decided I should meet with him in my office to let him down, explaining that his views were “interesting” but that the sourcing was an issue. “Change his grade to a B, but don’t go higher than that. You know, if you want to.”
You wouldn’t necessarily know it to look at me, but my family is largely Black. This—combined with the renaissance of Black entertainment and culture in the 1990s—shaped me in profound ways. Everyone I knew, regardless of race, was cheering on Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, whose psychic connection led the Bulls to victory time and time again. All of us packed cafeteria and gymnasium dances to awkwardly flail to Q-Tip rapping “Bonita Applebum,” DMX informing us we were going to make him “go all out, up in here,” Ms. Lauryn Hill singing us something beautiful and broken we weren’t ready to appreciate, and Mark Morrison bestowing “Return of the Mack,” one of the few true anthems we could carry from preteen to adulthood. We had Seinfeld, Friends, and George Carlin. But perhaps more importantly, we had Martin, The Bernie Mac Show, and Chris Rock. The day Aaliyah died was the first time I remember crying for anyone other than myself.
This is the context for the defining moment of my adjunct experience, which took place on November 9th, 2016, the day after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency. Driving to my first class, I watched drivers get into arguments with one another. I myself had a brief altercation with a woman—not because there was a problem, but because we both had our hearts broken from seeing a crook beat someone with passion and experience, despite a long, slimy trail of assault, fraud, and tax avoidance.
I walked into class to find that the white students decided to arrange their desks in the back of the class, like a conspiratorial barricade, leaving Lisa, the best student in my class, and coincidentally the lone Black person, sitting in a row of one, crying as if in an art installation.
I don’t know what happened prior to my arrival, but for the next 80 minutes, the election result weighed heavily in the classroom. While my white students were noticeably emboldened by the news, folding their arms and blatantly texting to show their disinterest and refusal to be corralled into any type of academic discussion, Lisa locked eyes on me, the only other person in the room that understood that the assumptions about transcending our race problems we’d formed during the Obama administration had been proven wrong, and that while we were asleep, antiquated racist groups we’d forgotten about had gathered—to remind us just how powerful they were, and worse, that they counted among their members people we knew.
The semester darkened. Previously, when I had challenged students who parroted bigoted quips about Asian people’s dietary habits, gay marriage, or Black women’s intelligence, they had dropped the subject and flushed red with embarrassment. But in the play the semester became, Lisa and I would talk about the assignment and discuss rhetorical modes of persuasion or proper source citation, while the other students watched, daring me to get angry.
One day, the building in our classroom lost power. We were temporarily relocated to a classroom that had different tiers of seating, with the professor situated in front of a podium a few steps up, and then two circular arrangements of desks below this, not unlike 19th-century Parliament. We were discussing artistic integrity in connection to Mo Tzu, and no one contributed except for Lisa. When I pushed for more participation, Carly, who had never spoken out before, snapped back “Why bother? You just want to hear what Lisa wants to say.” When I asked why she felt this way, Carly popped her gum and said, “You know, because she’s dark.” The class snickered, flashing weasley smiles of agreement with Carly. From my podium, time slowed to a halt, and when I looked at Lisa, her head tilted down and tears streamed down her cheeks as she headed for the door.
Lisa aspired to produce for TV or film, and I’d often stay after class to give her advice, primarily helping her with an application to intern at Vice. When she didn’t get the internship, she stopped attending and only showed up for the final after a month-long absence. I gave her an A and took strong THC-infused chocolates to grade the rest of the class, crying as I read what Bryce thought about climate change.
In these Trump years, I adopted the celebratory approach to teaching of one who is not long for the profession. Everything I found interesting and worthwhile about academics I packed into my courses. In one spectacular failure of a class, we examined male privilege and the lack of substantive female power in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and other centers of cultural influence. I overestimated both my class’s interest in discussing such topics, as well as their familiarity with their own feelings on feminism and power. The students met my every question with strained faces, as they did their best to separate their own thoughts from those of their parents, or begin forming opinions on this for the first time outside TV and film narratives that had colored their worldview. In another more mild failure, we examined racism in sports and medicine. The evaluations were terrible, but I was undeterred.
One time, students staged a “sick out” that I failed to notice until a student without any hard feelings one way or another explained to me what was going on. “They think you unfairly favor… certain students, um, and reward certain ways of thinking that they don’t like. They think by not being here this will, like, get you in trouble. But if you didn’t notice, I guess that kind of proves they’re wrong.”
Covid came next. Instead of teaching to bored students, I was suddenly teaching to (possibly) the idea of bored students, as many logged into class but didn’t turn on their microphones or cameras. I let class run this way, assuming that if students were absent, they had their reasons. For a few weeks, I didn’t mind the cameras being off, the uncertainty about whom was listening.
I staved off malaise and depression with writing, and my burst of teaching topics I found essential in the early days of Trump thickened into a straitjacket of suicidal ideation once lockdown hit. Even upstate in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley with my partner, I found myself losing my grip. The more I taught to an online void of students clever enough to both skip class by signing in and turning their cameras off and complain to my chair for not getting better grades despite their skipping class, the more the world dimmed.
From sunrise to sunset, I became needier than I was used to being, and tried to yield to the love of my girlfriend, the voice of my parents crackling on Facetime, the laughter of my friends during virtual game nights. These things helped me survive, but I felt my body shut down at the idea of teaching again. I knew that if I didn’t walk away, I’d find myself in the kitchen or on the road, making the wrong call.
As I eyed the end, my class was not demanding, and I went to some lengths to respond to students’ thoughts through email. Still, complaints came in about slow grading. One student went so far as to not email me or the department chair, but the president of the college directly: “Professor Farwell said he’d return our grades promptly. It has now been two weeks, and with the stress of the pandemic being enough I do not need the extra concern of not knowing my grade. My parents pay $80 thousand a year for me to attend this college. I demand Professor Farwell either grades more quickly, or is swiftly fired.”
Still, pockets of solidarity remained, When a white student said “Fuck, I’m hungry” just before class began, a Japanese student said, “Then fuck off to eat. Don’t complain here.” I looked at my computer screen, at five people who decided to turn cameras on to ask questions during class. It was the international students who, between class, were trying to navigate safe passage home. ▩
