In looking at the issue of part-time labor, there’s a curious problem. Almost everyone from administrators and union reps to full time faculty and adjuncts will tell you that part-time employment, while sometimes necessary, should be minimized. Ideally we would never hire part-timers to perform regularly offered courses that we know need to be staffed year after year. And yet we do that all the time. If we were able to avoid it, then the number of adjuncts would be seriously reduced and the problem of paying them a decent salary would not be so daunting.

However, there’s another problem that comes in here. In our department there’s something like a dozen part-time faculty who teach on a regular basis. A few may perfer part-time work, but the vast majority would take full-time positions if they were offered. The truth is they’ll never make a living wage as part-time faculty. The only way that could happen is if they were full-time. And we don’t need another ten full-time lecturers. Now of course these folks have never been promised full-time work, but that doesn’t make closing the door on them any easier. For various reasons, adjuncts are willing to keep showing up; the college is willing to keep exploiting them; and the faculty don’t have the will to change things.

In my department we teach more than 60 sections of composition and advanced writing and close to 30 sections of other general education courses each semester. Adjuncts and lecturers teach around 90% of these courses (and amount for around 2/3 of the courses the department offers). Those are estimations, but I believe they are fairly accurate.

This is not a problem that will be solved by working for pay equity (though that’s a useful thing to do). Part of it depends on thinking about curriculum design. Obviously, our first priority in designing majors, creating courses, establishing course sizes, and so on is thinking about the educational experience of the students. However, we also must consider material constraints and ethics. For example, we might all agree that students would benefit from spending a semester abroad, but we would never require students to do that because, for one thing, we know many can’t afford that. Equally, we should consider that even thought we may deem a certain approach as valuable, if it creates a situation in which we rely heavily on adjunct labor then perhaps we shouldn’t do it!

Hypothetically, in my department, we would have to cut some 25-30 sections per semester to break our chronic addiction to adjunct labor. What would it take to do that?

• currently students take two semesters of composition; if they were required to take only one then we could cut out sixty sections per year.
• or we could double the size of our general education courses (say 50-55 students per section)

I don’t mean those as real solutions, but rather as an indication of the extent of the problem. Of course many would argue that dropping a section of comp would be detrimental to students. Raising the size of GE classes would also affect pedagogy and obviously increase faculty workload. Those are bad things, but so is a chronic addiction to adjunct labor: which is worse?

The solution lies probably in a more subtle combination of remedies. A couple more moves from adjunct to full-time lecturer. Perhaps some increase in GE class size (see my previous post). Shifting the second semester of composition to the junior year means not having to teach it to students who transfer, reducing the need there by about a third. And maybe there are a few other things we can do to make sure that courses fill efficiently.

In any case, my point is that I don’t think the solution lies in hoping that the pay becomes decent or praying that somehow all these folks will find their way into lectureships, which in themselves only create another kind of exploited class.

Responsible curriculum design includes not only adhering to the rigor of one’s discipline and insisting on certain standards for students but also planning a sustainable material practice. This doesn’t mean that we have to lay down and accept all the limits placed on us by administrators, but it does mean recognizing that material limits do exist and that we need to operate ethically within them.