(I'm attempting to use this new weirdass keyboard that I thought was going to make things easier but is instead weirding me out with its sinewy curves and allegedly ergonomic contours and split layout and makes me feel like I'm trying to reach its G Spot while typing. At least the vowel keys don't have to be hammered with thrice the force of the other keys and the space bar delivers actual spaces. Okay. Here goes.)
Wednesday was National Adjunct Walkout Day, a loosely convened national effort to highlight the issues facing contingent faculty at our nation's institutions of higher education. I'm not sure how many adjuncts and other temp-professors at how many other colleges participated, but at the Community College of the Damned we did not walk out, since we do have a relatively good contract thanks to a strong and active union (although CCotD did participate in other activities for the larger National Adjunct Awareness Week).
Having said that, I did have a walkout of my own that day. I decided to walk out of my adjunct career.
Wednesday was a rather Big Day for your unreliable narrator. In addition to a full afternoon and evening schedule including a last-minute scheduling of a nighttime information literacy class, that morning I had an interview with a search committee and demo class to teach for a full time, tenure track position right in my own dear library at CCotD, among several of the very people I work with every week, all of whom I have the utmost admiration and respect (and that isn't just me covering my own tail in case any of them happen to stumble their way onto this blog - they are each pretty awesome in their own way, and besides, they're librarians, which means they're superheroes).
That alone was bizarre enough, to be in a room with my team, being asked pre-approved, canned questions and then teaching them at rapid speed for twenty minutes as if they were students doing a research paper. But this time it was extremely weird, to be going through this dog and rhino show (we're all out of ponies) for the fourth or fifth time in the last few years. I have honestly forgotten how many times I've sat at the business end of that conference table and answered roughly the same questions from roughly the same people in different ways and managed not to become totally sarcastic - although at the end of the interview portion I did lob a killer question into the middle of the table. (Candidatemon used Shit Grenade! It's Super-Effective!)
Still, after buzzing through the classroom demo portion of the Ordeal, which compresses what we normally cover in over an hour into twenty minutes, I felt pretty good about my performance throughout the whole jawn, and I tried to let go of all the tension I'd spindled up inside myself as motivating energy - but couldn't. I realized there was one thing eating away at me, and it was that I'd been through this process again and again without much success - some, though, as one of those go-rounds landed me a temporary full-time project last year, but otherwise I'd been through it time and again and not only gotten no feedback but was passed over for outsiders each time. And I walked up to my department head (who was not on the search committee and is both a friend and a dear ally) and simply said this: In the immortal words of George Costanza, "Well, I am never doing THAT again."
It was at that point that I realized that this was my last dance with the CCotD search committee circus, and the beginning of the end of This Adjunct Life in general. I simply can't beat my head against this wall any more, certainly not while expecting different results.
I came back to academia a little over four years ago after a long trek through corporate environments, startups, small businesses,and a few years of babymaking and childrearing. It seemed like a good place to do what I'd originally intended when starting out on this Library Quest: find a place where I could do good and do well and still have time to live as I wished during the rest of my hours, work in this field enough and have the time to write and explore. Instead I've faced down some of the worst aspects of bureaucracy, pettiness, silo syndrome, and too-frequent instances of outright incompetence, caprice, and malice. I've had to spend most of my free time just filling in the gaps with places like Missspeld College (where the adjunct pay is far below the national average, but they do let me teach courses that other schools might not be so bold as to let me tackle, plus they feed me and give me toys at least twice a year).
Still, to be able to help a student - whether they're barely a teenager or an older student returning to finish a degree - to be able to help them move forward to cross some threshold of understanding, advance their scholastic or life skills, or to just learn something because Knowledge - that has been worth it every step of the way.
I just won't be able to do it for peasant wages and random job security any more.
And that's what my own personal #NAWD turned into: a walking out from that idea that's kept me living too close to the edge of subsistence for the last few years, more or less voluntarily. I realize that compared to the rest of adjunctdom I have it pretty good - our contracts are better than most, and our pay, benefits, and working conditions are far better than what most contingent or non-tenure track faculty endure. And let's not forget that compared to the rest of humankind we live like freakin' kings: roughly half the world lives on about $2 per day.
But for all of our training, both in our advanced degrees and ongoing study, development, and project work; for all of the genuine good we do for other human beings, helping some of the most at-risk people in our cities and towns develop the means to live sustainably and break out of both the mindset and habit of dependence and powerlessness; for all the direct economic and social benefit we demonstrably provide to our communities - it doesn't seem like too much to have a less tentative seat at the table, or at least not have to worry about how we're going to budget for our heating bills or whether or not we can afford health insurance.
So I've started the countdown clock. I will no longer be a full time adjunct by the end of 2016, full freaking stop. This may mean I finally crack through the ivory ceiling, or it might mean I leave the academic world altogether. Later today I have a phone interview with another institution for a vice-director position (not as prurient as it sounds, but I will aspire to make it so), to which I may only have been invited thanks to an inside connection with the director. I have an application in over at Shrine University, which is partially evil but also a steady and respectable spot, but beyond that my irons are now headed toward other fires. I'm either all the way in or all the way out. I suppose we'll see.
