Writing to Live: How To Weigh the Benefits of a No-Benefits Teaching Job

Academia has long been a secure, upper-middle class profession with cushy benefits like summers off and sabbaticals to pursue area-of-study related interests. Enter the stereotypes you will here: dusty chalkboards, corduroy, and cults of personality. But the notion of the tenured professor—a person who is paid a salary and is guaranteed a teaching position every fall until they don't want it anymore, is no longer as ubiquitous as it once was. These days, universities are more intent on hiring contingent (or adjunct) faculty members; teachers who are paid by the course and contracted semesterly. And now, in order to keep their soaring tuition costs down to propel or least maintain enrolment, colleges and universities rely heavily on this league of disenfranchised workers to buoy their own finances.

This didn't sound so bad—in fact, a part-time gig where I could get writing done on the side sounded ideal. I knew other people who were beginning to explore their adjunct options, and not out of desperation. Jaime Greenring, an MFA in creative nonfiction writing who is teaching two courses this fall at two Manhattan colleges, has even found kind of a groove. "I'm not one of those writers who can wake up at 6, write for an hour, and then go to work. I know that if I have a full-time job, I won't write. So my ideal situation—which, luckily, came to pass—was 2-3 well-paying adjunct jobs, which would allow me the flexibility I need to get any writing done," Greenring told me, describing what actually sounded pretty opportune.

Perhaps there was a good balance to be struck between my craft and my teaching, but that certainly wasn't the initial purpose of adjunct teaching, where positions were originally designed to be held by professionals and specialists who were winding down in the own careers and now had time to teach in their fields. And I still was bothered by several reports released in the past couple years that revealed that the balance I was seeking and some adjunct instructors like Greenring had found was an elusive one.

Contingent faculty members are paid by the course, the median pay for a 3-credit course being around $2,700, and then it's up to them to take on as many courses as they need to stay financially solvent. Their schedules often become bloated with courses, and because these teachers are not getting paid to do things like write lesson plans, meet for office hours or grade, these elements of teaching become taxing and burdensome, despite being necessary to the success of a student-teacher relationship. Juggling around three courses a semester, the average salary of non-tenured-track instructor is $24,926 a year. Turns out that there are four occupations in our country that rely heavily on government assistance: fast food worker, childcare and healthcare worker and part-time, non-tenured teacher.

These celebrities of your youth also face rampant marginalization. Despite the numbers being about even in terms of gender distribution in the contingent teaching world, adjunct teaching is well-known as being overtly feminized in the sense that it is a group of workers who are overworked for about half the pay of their more prestigious counterparts; tenured professors. They are often referred to the 'housewives' of the world of higher education, getting the dirty jobs done during the day, only for the breadwinning spouse to return home to reap the rewards of a clean house, and a warm dinner. It was a tough sell even for me, a woman who had fallen in shrine-building, internet-stalking love with nearly every single professor I had encountered in graduate school. Me, who had glamorized teaching at a university to a level of Dead Poets Society perversion.

It was true too, that some of my favorite teachers, who conducted classes where I achieved the most stimulated learning, were adjunct professors. Rivka Galchen, an essayist and fiction writer whose reported work appears regularly in the New Yorker, taught one such class in my program. When I asked her about her adjunct position, she made clear to me that to her, the classroom was kind of a magical environment. "I actually like teaching," she told me. "It kind of brings thinking into a mini-crucible, with everyone ideally trying to bring their best into the room for this brief, higher-energy span of hours." Some things clicked into place for me. Galchen, who on top of freelance writing, writing novels, and teaching, is also a mother. She juggles, but she makes it to the classroom every week because for her, it's about the enjoyment of being present.

And that was another looming question for me: motherhood. I also wanted to know how I was going to be a woman and cover some woman-in-thirties bases with a part-time teaching assignment. I needed health insurance for birth control to prevent a baby and then, in some dream timeline, eventually to have one. A friend of mine who is beginning to teach composition as an adjunct writing instructor in New York this fall and is encountering similar maternal ideas broke it down for me.

"I see a couple of channels—one where I work in a writing center, adjunct in two well-paying places, write essays, freelance as a proofreader occasionally, and have a baby." She continued, "There's another where I adjunct until my book sells and land that beautiful fantasy of a full-time professorship and have a baby. There's another where I do it for two years, feel run ragged, and look for low-stakes desk jobs or an academic administration or coordinator job that lets me write and have a baby. The next few years are really going to tell me for sure if adjuncting is sustainable in terms of the emotional and financial demands. And if I get to have a baby." Amen, sister.

I don't want to end this all starry-eyed, but something in me is angling hard for it because if I ever return to this field, I don't want to be so cynical. Contingent teaching seems like a full-blown life ruiner, but it doesn't have to be. For Porochista Khakpour, the author of two novels and many, many essays, the part-time teaching path has worked out. "I've personally always enjoyed teaching because it runs in my family," she told me but admitted that she always tries harder when she is an adjunct to ensure she gets an invitation to return the following fall. This strategy is common among adjunct teachers, who try to out-perform the full-time faculty with the hopes that one day they will get those same coveted roles. I first heard Khakpour's name when she was adjunct teaching in my MFA program, but today she is a Writer-in-Residence at Bard College, where she is no longer part-time and has benefits like health insurance, having achieved that golden dream of being a writer and a full-time professor.

It's a funny tradeoff, though: teach to write or write hopefully one day to teach. The bottom line is, you must value teaching enough over all the things that could factor against you as an adjunct faculty member. The transmission of new ideas to fresh and open minds must be the driving force behind your motivation. As Galchen put it, "the classroom remains the classroom, and it's a nice eddy out from the other 97% of the minutes spent outside the classroom."