We’ve all heard that universities are replacing full-time tenured professors with underpaid adjuncts who work at will, have no benefits, and often live in their cars. This is a penny-by-penny account of how that looks.
An Account of A Day In The Life of An English Adjunct
By Anonymous
$3.89
I broke my leg on an icy path leaving Fred’s University after hours. The university has cut the snow removal budget, so night school classes often get out to a snowed-in parking lot. Not surprisingly, it is mostly adjuncts like me who teach late classes.
The injury wasn’t so bad, but the crippling medical bills meant I could not pay my rent. As a result, I am couch surfing and living with some nice friends with real, non-academic jobs.
Breakfast is free as I retrieve a perfectly good uneaten yogurt my hosts have thrown away because it is a few days past the expiration date. Yum!
There is only one serving of oat milk left in the carton, and taking that last serving makes me look like a parasitic guest. I don’t want to feel like a vermin. So, after dripping the final drops of milk in my coffee, I walk to the corner store to replace it. Oat milk is cheaper at Trader Joe’s, but the cost of driving there negates the savings. Half an ounce of oat milk has now cost me the price of a liter at $3.89.
The cost means nothing to my generous hosts but everything to my pride.
$13.08
Accounting for gas, amortized insurance, repair, depreciation, and loan payments using the AAA Cost Per Mile Calculator, it cost me $13.08 to drive to the first of the two campuses where I work.
In the car, I go over the lines of the Walt Whitman poem I have memorized for my class tonight.
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
When I’m in my old green Honda, which has served as a home and an escape car many times, I feel the quiver of freedom.
Then I realize the quiver might be vibration from the rusty shocks on the car, which I can’t afford to replace (lowest estimate $650). To drown out the sound, I turn up the radio and revel in the fact that the music costs me nothing.
$5.00
Since I am not on the faculty, I must pay for parking. I only ended up paying the minimum today because when I arrived, it turned out the college had canceled the section of the Kafka course I was supposed to be teaching this term. No earnings for my $13.08 in transportation costs.
Last night I spent three hours on lesson plans for this Kafka course. The first slide was about Gregor turning into a cockroach in The Metamorphosis:
Vladimir Nabokov, who was a lepidopterist as well as a writer and literary critic, concluded from details in the text that Gregor was not a cockroach but a beetle with wings under his shell and capable of flight.
Thank you, Wikipedia, a wonderful source of free trivia like this. I wish I could afford to tip you.
I feel like a bug with tiny flailing arms.
$9.99
My Department Chair requires us to listen to his podcast on Spotify and has placed essential departmental training and enrichment materials on the service. I believe he is trying to start a side hustle as a consultant and is building his materials off the university platforms so he can retain his intellectual property. To save money, I only sign up for Spotify by the month, so I can skip months where there are no required materials.
Today the Chair emailed us that we need to listen to a special episode of his podcast devoted to “Excellence and Greatness In Universities,” so I have to buy a month of Spotify at $9.99. My car is too old to connect to my utility-grade cell phone, so I have to wait to listen to it at my friends’ house while I search for other adjunct jobs tonight.
$8,976
I suspect the reason my Kafka section was canceled was so the university could make sure I fell below the minimum hours worked to qualify for health insurance benefits. Losing this job means I now lose my health insurance.
I am out $8,976 per year for very poor insurance, not to mention the countless unpaid hours it takes to enroll.
Switching plans means I will also lose my preferred GP and my kind allergist who dreams of being an English professor and spends my appointments quizzing me about poetry.
I send a portal message to my allergist explaining I will have to cancel my upcoming appointment and find a new provider. I tell him he can keep the poetry book I loaned him.
He writes back with a Kafka quote: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
$158
I stand in line for 45 minutes to see if I can return any of the books I have already bought for the Kafka course. We were required to buy the books far in advance, and now the return period is over. I cannot get reimbursement for materials for a class that is canceled, so I am stuck with these books.
And, no, I cannot deduct any of these expenses from my taxes. Adjuncts are W2 employees even though they must provide their own computers, internet, and post-its.
They also serve those who only stand and wait.
Milton quotes make great bookmarks, too expensive at $2.99. But when grumpy old John Milton went blind, he had his daughters to stand and wait on him, dictate his poems, including Paradise Lost, and read to him in languages they did not even understand. No one is helping me with my books, and people in line behind me are getting annoyed.
Can I sell these books on eBay, as one student suggests? Ha! These are books no one wants to read. Perhaps another reason so many courses end up canceled at the last minute.
Note to self: try to teach a graphic novel course next term so I can easily resell the books at the end of the class.
$2
I park downtown for twenty minutes. My mission is to crash a lunch with a Very Famous Invited Speaker. As an adjunct, I am not included in the official schmoozing events, though I am often invited to help put out chairs and distribute fliers. Us adjuncts are hidden/invisible in the long tradition of mostly-female service workers.
But a friend gives me a tipoff about where the Very Famous Speaker will be having lunch, and if I can arrive before any orders are placed, I can leave without having to contribute to the unaffordable shared lunch.
$5
Unfortunately, it takes so long to find on-street parking that I arrive as orders are being taken, and I am forced to order some water. My goal is to make one memorable comment that marks my presence/existence. I notice that the Speaker orders the most expensive thing on the menu and three appetizers. Because, of course, his meal is expensed.
Everyone is talking about the gala dinner the night before, to which I was not invited, and I do not get a word in edgewise.
I silently entertain myself by observing the fancy restaurant I would not normally visit. I can’t hear what the Very Famous Speaker is saying at the far end of the table, but I notice he is wearing a bowtie. Is the bowtie ironic? Or is the bowtie a sentimental throwback to the genteel era of gentlemen scholars with houses on Martha’s Vineyard and secretaries who typed up their memoirs and met them for lusty Martini lunches? Hard to tell.
To avoid bill-splitting, I leave the cost of the water plus tip with my seatmate and beat a hasty retreat before I become obligated to share in the cost of the meal. I try to convince myself that my $7 investment in a lunch with no food is worth it for the networking value, but I’m too hungry to do a very good job cheering myself up.
$15
My meter runs over while I am extricating myself from the lunch, so I end up with a parking ticket.
$9.52
I drive to my next job where, yay, parking is free, and I hope to make back the cost of the drive by actually teaching a class. In the car, I field calls from students since I don’t have an office for office hours. My first student is thinking about going to graduate school. I try to talk them out of it.
$1
Before my first class, I pick up an aging black lab named Moby Dick for one of my dog-walking gigs. The dog has seemed depressed lately, so I have bought him a treat. Yes, I have come to love Moby Dick (still don’t like the book though.)
When I return Moby, I learn that his owner is moving, so the gig is up.
Rudyard Kipling said it best:
I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear
$65
As I dry my tears from saying goodbye to my favorite dog client and contemplate my second loss of income today, I realize that the sudden decline in work hours has a silver lining.
Now I can get the discounted part-timer rate of $65 for the upcoming Modern Language Association conference. That saves me $132 on the full price of $197 for this essential professional event, where I hope to land an interview for a better job.
It is very tempting to pull a Charles Dickens and treat the registration savings as money in my pocket the way Carstone does in Bleak House: a penny saved is a penny got! Perhaps I could treat myself to a real meal before class!
But the money I saved on the MLA is money I do not have. I was going to have to charge my registration fee to my beleaguered credit card. Before I engage in more detrimental mental accounting and convince myself that I’ve also pocketed the interest I would have paid on my credit card charge of $132, I pop a lifesaver I find in my pocket and call it a meal.
That Lifesaver also feels Dickensian, and I am now in the mood for my Victorian Literature class.
$29
On the way across campus to my Vic Lit class, the unlikely happens. I bump into the Very Famous Speaker from earlier today. He is on his way to a book signing at this campus.
Improbably, he remembers me. And not for the fast and furious literary comment I had hoped to make. “You ordered water!” he laughs either with me or at me. I’m not sure. To reassure himself he has it right, he looks me up and down, lingering, Boomerishly, on my chest.
“And you didn’t get my book signed!” he admonishes me, insisting that I follow him into the bookstore to get a copy. He takes me by the elbow, turning a deaf ear to the inconsistent excuses I can’t even articulate properly (already own it, took it out of the library, want to buy it from my local bookseller).
On the way, the Very Famous Speaker asks me if I am in the teacher’s union. Without waiting for a reply, he tells me to stay away from unions. His tone is Dark and Avuncular. He stops in the street to put his arm on my shoulder and engage in some penetrating eye contact on the subject of organized labor.
I grasp my union pin in my pocket and dig my finger into the sharp pin. In my pocket, I draw a drop of blood.
By the way, here is where you can contribute to our teacher’s union: https://www.aft.org/solidarity-strike-fund. Says no one. Certainly not me.
At the bookstore register, Very Famous introduces me to an imagined audience as his first customer of the day in a voice suitable for a large auditorium. I pray my credit card will be rejected, but no.
The minute his large black sharpie hits the title page and his autograph sinks into the expensive cotton paper of a book, I know I won’t be able to return it.
Sensing Very Famous is not done with me. I step back, protectively clutching my expensive token of outsider insiderism to my bosom. But Very Famous pulls me into an unwanted hug before I can get away.
I notice his bowtie is coming undone. Not ironic, I decide.
$0
Amazingly, my Victorian Lit class costs me nothing (apart from $9.52 driving to campus).
When I ask my students if they know the Little Match Girl from the Hans Christian Andersen story, I draw blanks. “Is it a band?” they ask.
I prompt them… The homeless girl who warms herself by lighting a box of matches one by one and sees in the flames visions of delicious dinners and domestic bliss until she freezes to death? She dies as people walk past her on the street.
“Unhoused,” one student corrects me. “Not homeless.”
No one knows this Victorian meme, once so cliche it elicited a groan of over-familiarity.
I reflect that Victorian stories are too dense and sappy for kids to read today, and Victorian novels are too long. The once “universal” literary references in them are being forgotten. I let class out early.
It is snowing, and I am very hungry. As I walk past the expensive shops on College Row, I pause to stand in front of a lavish window display of gourmet cheeses.
One of my students walks by and offers me a vape pen printed with the logo of his weekend DJ business. He hands me a flyer for his next gig with the promo pen, and I note the cover charge for his party is $20.
“But for you–free!” the student tells me. “Little Match Girl.”
To Cheer Yourself Up Please Read: Funniest Tweets from Adjuncts This Week
The Little Match Girl Public Domain Image by Bertall, Wikipedia Commons.