“Two half-time adjunct jobs do not make a full-time income. Far from it,” Ximena Barrientos says. “I’m lucky that I have my own apartment. I have no idea how people make it work if they have to pay rent.”
We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.
As Barrientos chatted with another adjunct in the empty classroom, the conversation turned to horror stories: the adjuncts forced to sleep in their cars; the adjunct who was sleeping in classrooms at night; the adjunct who had a full mental breakdown from the stress of not being able to earn a living after all of the time he had put in getting his PhD. Such stories are common, from campus to campus, whispered by adjuncts who know deep down that they themselves are living constantly on the edge of personal, professional, and financial disaster. Other than academic credentials, most adjunct professors don’t have much. But recently, Ximena Barrientos, and her 2,800 colleagues at Miami Dade College, and thousands of others just like them throughout the state of Florida, have acquired, at shocking speed and on a grand scale, something of great value—a union. And they want nothing less than dignity.
When thinking about the struggles of thousands and thousands of people who are both employed as college professors and hardly able to pay their own bills, it is useful to keep in mind the fact that, as a rule, none of these people are supposed to exist. The accepted story of what an “adjunct professor” is—the myth that has drawn so many hopefuls into the world of professional academia—is that adjuncting is not a full-time job at all. It is something that retirees do to keep themselves busy; something that working professionals do on the side to educate people in their field; something that, perhaps, a young PhD might do for a year or two while looking for a full-time professorship, but certainly nothing that would constitute an actual career in itself.
In fact, this is a big lie. The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.
Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.
It has long been common for full time college faculty members to be unionized. Over the past decade, adjuncts (and grad student workers) across America have begun unionizing in earnest as well, as they come to realize that their stories of woe are not unique. In just the past few years, one union has organized close to 10,000 Florida adjuncts, in what is one of the most remarkable and little-noticed large scale labor campaigns in the country.
Carolina Ampudia was a practicing physician in Mexico. She moved to the U.S. for health reasons, and in 2009, she became an adjunct professor at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, teaching pre-med science classes. She was told that she would have a full-time position in two years. Ten years later, she is still an adjunct. She makes around $18,000, with an M.D. While the number of full-time jobs never seemed to grow, the sheer number of other adjuncts at the school has become overwhelming. “We have been growing in numbers of adjuncts these past 10 years. It’s become very, very crazy, to the point that you start the semester and there’s a bunch of people there you don’t know,” she says. “It’s almost like a first day of class, when you’re like—OK, what happened here?”
Even though a large majority of teachers at Broward, as at other schools, are adjuncts like Ampudia—67 percent of the Broward faculty in 2015 was reportedly part-time—she still felt isolated and neglected after a decade in the same job. Five years ago, the school had formed an adjunct committee to advise it on improving conditions. (“The provost that the college had back then came in the room and said we could come up with any idea we wanted, as long as it didn’t involve any money,” Ampudia laughs.)She continued looking for ways to improve the lot of adjuncts. In the summer of 2017, an organizer from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU’s) Faculty Forward higher education campaign showed up at her house. She was ready.
Five months later, 92 percent of Broward’s 1,700 eligible adjuncts voted “yes” to unionize. The SEIU’s Florida higher ed campaign was rolling.
In April of 2018, contract negotiations began. Little progress was made for the rest of the year. This year, the negotiating climate has gotten a bit more positive, but the two sides haven’t gotten to money issues yet. And for adjuncts everywhere, money is the issue above all else. The scramble to earn a minimal living wage is what forces thousands of professors to live lives of constant desperation.
“I would work morning, noon, and night. That is my problem—to be able to make a living, that’s what I had to do,” says Renee Zelden, who adjuncts at both Broward and Miami Dade Colleges. “I teach more than full-time faculty.” Indeed. This summer, Zelden is “only” teaching five classes at two schools—fewer than her usual six to eight classes at three schools per semester. Most schools cap adjuncts at four classes per semester, hence the multiple institutions. The gas money Zelden spends to commute from her home to Miami can eat up more than the $50 she is paid for a single hour of class, so she must be sure to get multiple classes on the same day just to make teaching worth her time. Fifty dollars for an hour-long class sounds decent, until you break down the time it takes to prep for class, commute, teach, and then grade papers for 25 or more students. “If I figured it out, I’d be afraid I’m only making like five dollars an hour,” says Zelden, “so I don’t want to figure it out.”
She needn’t be so negative. Other Florida adjuncts who have figured it out told me that, factoring in all of the time they spend on teaching and related work, they make as much as seven dollars an hour—less than Florida’s minimum wage. (...)
by Hamilton Nolan, Splinter | Read more:
We are not sitting on a street corner, or in a welfare office, or in the break room of a fast food restaurant. We are sitting inside a brightly lit science classroom on the third floor of an MC Escher-esque concrete building, with an open breezeway letting in the muggy South Florida air, on the campus of Miami Dade College, one of the largest institutions of higher learning in the United States of America. Barrientos has been teaching here for 15 years. But this is not “her” classroom. She has a PhD, but she does not have a designated classroom. Nor does she have an office. Nor does she have a set schedule, nor tenure, nor healthcare benefits, nor anything that could be described as a decent living wage. She is a full-time adjunct professor: one of thousands of members of the extremely well-educated academic underclass, whose largely unknown sufferings have played just as big a role as student debt in enabling the entire swollen College Industrial Complex to exist.
As Barrientos chatted with another adjunct in the empty classroom, the conversation turned to horror stories: the adjuncts forced to sleep in their cars; the adjunct who was sleeping in classrooms at night; the adjunct who had a full mental breakdown from the stress of not being able to earn a living after all of the time he had put in getting his PhD. Such stories are common, from campus to campus, whispered by adjuncts who know deep down that they themselves are living constantly on the edge of personal, professional, and financial disaster. Other than academic credentials, most adjunct professors don’t have much. But recently, Ximena Barrientos, and her 2,800 colleagues at Miami Dade College, and thousands of others just like them throughout the state of Florida, have acquired, at shocking speed and on a grand scale, something of great value—a union. And they want nothing less than dignity.When thinking about the struggles of thousands and thousands of people who are both employed as college professors and hardly able to pay their own bills, it is useful to keep in mind the fact that, as a rule, none of these people are supposed to exist. The accepted story of what an “adjunct professor” is—the myth that has drawn so many hopefuls into the world of professional academia—is that adjuncting is not a full-time job at all. It is something that retirees do to keep themselves busy; something that working professionals do on the side to educate people in their field; something that, perhaps, a young PhD might do for a year or two while looking for a full-time professorship, but certainly nothing that would constitute an actual career in itself.
In fact, this is a big lie. The long term trend in higher education has been one of a shrinking number of full-time positions and an ever-growing number of adjunct positions. It is not hard to see why. University budgets are balanced on the backs of adjunct professors. In an adjunct, a school gets the same class taught for about half the salary of a full-time professor, and none of the benefits. The school also retains a god-like control over the schedules of adjuncts, who are literally laid off after every single semester, and then rehired as necessary for the following semester. In the decade since the financial crisis, state governments have slashed higher education funding, and Florida is no exception. That has had two primary consequences on campus: students have taken on ever-higher levels of debt to pay for school, and the college teaching profession has been gutted, as expensive full-time positions are steadily eliminated in favor of cheaper adjunct positions. Many longtime adjuncts talk of jealously waiting for years for a full-time professor to die or retire, only to see the full-time position eliminated when they finally do.
Students at Florida’s enormous community colleges (Miami Dade College alone has more than 165,000 students) may not be conscious of this dynamic, but they sit at its center, and they pay the price—not only in their student loan bills, but by sitting in classes taught by teachers who are overworked, underpaid, given virtually no professional resources or continuity of scheduling, and who are often forced to rush from job to job in order to make ends meet, leaving little time for helping students outside of classroom hours, much less for publishing work in their fields to advance their careers. Now, Florida’s higher education system sits at the center of another trend as well: the unionization of those well educated but miserably compensated adjunct professors.
It has long been common for full time college faculty members to be unionized. Over the past decade, adjuncts (and grad student workers) across America have begun unionizing in earnest as well, as they come to realize that their stories of woe are not unique. In just the past few years, one union has organized close to 10,000 Florida adjuncts, in what is one of the most remarkable and little-noticed large scale labor campaigns in the country.
Carolina Ampudia was a practicing physician in Mexico. She moved to the U.S. for health reasons, and in 2009, she became an adjunct professor at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, teaching pre-med science classes. She was told that she would have a full-time position in two years. Ten years later, she is still an adjunct. She makes around $18,000, with an M.D. While the number of full-time jobs never seemed to grow, the sheer number of other adjuncts at the school has become overwhelming. “We have been growing in numbers of adjuncts these past 10 years. It’s become very, very crazy, to the point that you start the semester and there’s a bunch of people there you don’t know,” she says. “It’s almost like a first day of class, when you’re like—OK, what happened here?”
Even though a large majority of teachers at Broward, as at other schools, are adjuncts like Ampudia—67 percent of the Broward faculty in 2015 was reportedly part-time—she still felt isolated and neglected after a decade in the same job. Five years ago, the school had formed an adjunct committee to advise it on improving conditions. (“The provost that the college had back then came in the room and said we could come up with any idea we wanted, as long as it didn’t involve any money,” Ampudia laughs.)She continued looking for ways to improve the lot of adjuncts. In the summer of 2017, an organizer from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU’s) Faculty Forward higher education campaign showed up at her house. She was ready.
Five months later, 92 percent of Broward’s 1,700 eligible adjuncts voted “yes” to unionize. The SEIU’s Florida higher ed campaign was rolling.
In April of 2018, contract negotiations began. Little progress was made for the rest of the year. This year, the negotiating climate has gotten a bit more positive, but the two sides haven’t gotten to money issues yet. And for adjuncts everywhere, money is the issue above all else. The scramble to earn a minimal living wage is what forces thousands of professors to live lives of constant desperation.
“I would work morning, noon, and night. That is my problem—to be able to make a living, that’s what I had to do,” says Renee Zelden, who adjuncts at both Broward and Miami Dade Colleges. “I teach more than full-time faculty.” Indeed. This summer, Zelden is “only” teaching five classes at two schools—fewer than her usual six to eight classes at three schools per semester. Most schools cap adjuncts at four classes per semester, hence the multiple institutions. The gas money Zelden spends to commute from her home to Miami can eat up more than the $50 she is paid for a single hour of class, so she must be sure to get multiple classes on the same day just to make teaching worth her time. Fifty dollars for an hour-long class sounds decent, until you break down the time it takes to prep for class, commute, teach, and then grade papers for 25 or more students. “If I figured it out, I’d be afraid I’m only making like five dollars an hour,” says Zelden, “so I don’t want to figure it out.”
She needn’t be so negative. Other Florida adjuncts who have figured it out told me that, factoring in all of the time they spend on teaching and related work, they make as much as seven dollars an hour—less than Florida’s minimum wage. (...)
The overwhelming victory of the union vote at Broward came with little formal opposition. At Miami Dade College (MDC), on the other hand, the school did its best to scare its adjuncts away from SEIU. Between the time that the adjuncts filed for a union election in July of 2018 and the time the election was held in March of this year, the administration sent a stream of ominous anti-union warnings, culminating with a multi-page letter mailed to everyone’s house urging them to vote “no,” offering rationales such as “The SEIU would certainly want every adjunct to pay union dues,” and “The SEIU organizers do not know academia. They have never been faculty.” By this logic, college professors should also never allow themselves to be represented by attorneys or accountants—they have never been faculty.
Miami Dade is known as “Democracy’s College,” a title that purports to capture the school’s noble mission of educating everyone, no matter who they are. The hugeness of the student body certainly backs up this characterization. The hugeness of the underpaid and stepped-on academic work force—which includes 2,800 adjuncts—seems to undercut the message. At MDC’s Wolfson campus downtown, a hunk of the Berlin Wall is on display. The school says that this symbolizes how it is “Walking the walk as ‘Democracy’s College’ in each and every one of its endeavors”; several adjuncts, on the other hand, brought it up as a tangible, irony-drenched reminder of the gulf between the school’s lofty rhetoric and its determination to block their own democratic organizing if at all possible. (...)
SEIU can reach 10,000 unionized adjunct faculty in the state of Florida if it wins several ongoing campaigns. Besides SPC, another hotbed of organizing is Santa Fe College in Gainesville, which acts as a major feeder school for the University of Florida. Josh Braley, a soft-spoken Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D in religion, has been an adjunct at Santa Fe for 15 years. He saw it as “a good way to get your foot in the door,” before the full-time job offer; as usual, the full-time job never materialized.
When he was still actively searching, Braley was told that there were about 80 qualified applicants for every single full-time professorship. In a decade and a half, he can recall getting a single raise. He now makes $2,000 per semester per class. “Of all the people that I went to graduate school with [at Vanderbilt], I think I know only one who ended up with a tenured, full-time teaching position,” he says. In the spring of 2018, an SEIU organizer showed up in his classroom and asked him to sign a union card; he was skeptical, and put them off. A few weeks later, another organizer showed up at his house. He figured that if they were that persistent, there must be some support behind it. Now, he’s helping organize his coworkers himself.
When he was hired at Santa Fe 15 years ago, an administrator told him that a lot of adjuncts were just people who loved to teach, and who didn’t do it for the paycheck, and who were supported by their spouses; just last year, he read an interview with the college president in which he said the same thing. Yet Braley has never, in his 15 years, met an adjunct who fit that description. “What this tells me is that they don’t actually believe this, but they’re saying it because it’s a convenient fiction,” he says. “Or, what’s even more alarming is if they think this is true. They’re so out of touch.”
Miami Dade is known as “Democracy’s College,” a title that purports to capture the school’s noble mission of educating everyone, no matter who they are. The hugeness of the student body certainly backs up this characterization. The hugeness of the underpaid and stepped-on academic work force—which includes 2,800 adjuncts—seems to undercut the message. At MDC’s Wolfson campus downtown, a hunk of the Berlin Wall is on display. The school says that this symbolizes how it is “Walking the walk as ‘Democracy’s College’ in each and every one of its endeavors”; several adjuncts, on the other hand, brought it up as a tangible, irony-drenched reminder of the gulf between the school’s lofty rhetoric and its determination to block their own democratic organizing if at all possible. (...)
SEIU can reach 10,000 unionized adjunct faculty in the state of Florida if it wins several ongoing campaigns. Besides SPC, another hotbed of organizing is Santa Fe College in Gainesville, which acts as a major feeder school for the University of Florida. Josh Braley, a soft-spoken Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D in religion, has been an adjunct at Santa Fe for 15 years. He saw it as “a good way to get your foot in the door,” before the full-time job offer; as usual, the full-time job never materialized.
When he was still actively searching, Braley was told that there were about 80 qualified applicants for every single full-time professorship. In a decade and a half, he can recall getting a single raise. He now makes $2,000 per semester per class. “Of all the people that I went to graduate school with [at Vanderbilt], I think I know only one who ended up with a tenured, full-time teaching position,” he says. In the spring of 2018, an SEIU organizer showed up in his classroom and asked him to sign a union card; he was skeptical, and put them off. A few weeks later, another organizer showed up at his house. He figured that if they were that persistent, there must be some support behind it. Now, he’s helping organize his coworkers himself.
When he was hired at Santa Fe 15 years ago, an administrator told him that a lot of adjuncts were just people who loved to teach, and who didn’t do it for the paycheck, and who were supported by their spouses; just last year, he read an interview with the college president in which he said the same thing. Yet Braley has never, in his 15 years, met an adjunct who fit that description. “What this tells me is that they don’t actually believe this, but they’re saying it because it’s a convenient fiction,” he says. “Or, what’s even more alarming is if they think this is true. They’re so out of touch.”
Image: Hamilton Nolan
[ed. See also: If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would Be Worth $10,000 (Longreads).]
[ed. See also: If I Made $4 a Word, This Article Would Be Worth $10,000 (Longreads).]
