A question to ask yourself:
As ESL teachers, working for a purely for-profit corporation...Do we, or even should we, categorize ourselves as "adjunct faculty"?
It is true that most who officially bear the job title of
adjunct faculty teach at public or private/non-profit institutions, many of which, (ok
all of which) are institutions of far greater esteem than Kaplan. They also typically courses that earn students credits towards a college degree of some sorts.
However, before you answer this question, read through an article I came across just the other day. An excerpt:
Are Adjunct Professors the Fast-Food Workers of the Academic World?
By James Hoff
From The Guardian, Jan 24th, 2014
I am what's called an adjunct. I teach four courses per semester at two different colleges, and I am paid just $24,000 a year and receive no health or pension benefits. Recently, I was profiled in the New York Times as the face of adjunct exploitation, and though I was initially happy to share my story because I care about the issue, the profile has its limits. Rather than use my situation to explain the systemic problem of academic labor, the article personalized – even romanticized – my situation as little more than the deferred dream of a struggling PhD with a penchant for poetry.
But the adjunct problem is not about PhDs struggling to find jobs or people being forced to give up their dreams. The adjunct problem is about the continued exploitation of a large, growing and diverse group of highly educated and dedicated college teachers who have been asked to settle for less pay (sometimes as little as $21,000 a year for full-time work) because the institutions they work for have callously calculated that they can get away with it. The adjunct problem is institutional, not personal, and its affects reach deep into our culture and society.
Though there are tens of thousands of personal stories like mine of economic hardship and lives ruined or put on hold, it is not to these stories that we should turn when we consider the exploitation of adjuncts in academia, but to our universal sense of justice. For the continued exploitation of adjuncts is, to put it bluntly, nothing less than unjust. Here's why:
Wow. Sound like a familiar eperience to any of you guys?
Now, having read through this article, let's return to the question at hand:
As ESL teachers, do we, or even should we, consider ourselves adjunct professors?
As a particularly clever Englishman once said, "If an adjunct were not called an adjunct, would they not be any less exploited and underpaid?"
Or something like that.
The point is that the question, doesn't matter. What
does matter however are the situations we both find ourselves in: Highly-skilled professionals, working difficult jobs in an industry with no lack of customer base, providing
the very service that these customers shell out thousands of dollars for - yet being paid only just enough not to qualify for food stamps (unless you have a kid or two). We must be doing our jobs passionately as well, because why else would someone with face all the challenges of being a teacher, just to take home the yearly salary of a restaurant worker? At least when I was washing dishes in I could listen to my discman (Electronic Skip Protection!), and take home a free meal every night.
The similarities are eerie, Too eerie, in fact.
I don't which came first, the chicken or the egg, but it's obvious now that the non-profits and for-profits are now just learning from each other - learning ways to deprive honest people of an honest living wage for an honest an worthwhile job done. But what I do know however is that the journey of the downward spiral into a world where 18K per year w/ out sick days or holiday pay simply just becomes what people expect out of a teaching job - is a journey that we share together. As Galileo began to reveal, and further solidified by Newton, and Einstein - Everything is relative.
One can't help what would become of these great minds had they been born in today's world. Would their genius have been enough to earn them passage from the purgatory that is the existence of an adjunct? Well, sure, probably. I mean, they were pretty damn smart of course. But how many of those of only slightly less genius, though still smart enough to make great significant contributions in the various fields of scientific research and education, simply have had to run away away from adjunct purgatory all together in order to pursue more mundane fields, robbing us of their possible contributions towards the greater good of mankind, but were done to out of necessity to put food on the table and shoes on their kids' feet?
I don't want to be disingenuous here however. There are differences in having a PhD in microbiology and lecturing at a major university is different than being a Kaplan ESL teacher. Many of us have an MA, but typically a BA is all that is required. A degree from a good university is worth a helluva lot more than a certificate from Kaplan Intl. Centers (although laws of relativity are still applicable of course; depending on the job desired, evidence one is proficient in English might be ten times more valuable than that MA in Art History). However, our pay isn't based on how many courses we teach in a semester, we're straight wage per/hr workers. Part-time for us is around 25
teaching hours per week. We don't even have semesters even, we're open for business for the first 51 weeks of the year - then everybody gets laid off for a week from Christmas to New Year's eve.
I think, if nothing else, there's at least one to thing we could all agree with: We all know that
there's nothing wrong with just wanting to be a teacher, and don't think our contributions to society merit a life of poverty.
