Non-violent direct action for adjuncts

Making people wait. --A sure way to provoke people and to put malicious thoughts in their heads is to make them wait for a long time. This makes people immoral. -F. Nietzsche Human, All Too Human, ss. 309.

I was hired by a local art school recently to teach a course in existentialism in the fall. My wages: 2,500 (gross) u.s. dollars spread out over four months. I just called them back and told them that I would not be able to do it for ethical reasons. No, I am not going to cover up their dirty little secret at my expense, nor at the students. "Should we not use you in the future?" asked the woman. "Yeah, go ahead and put me on the do not use list" I quipped. I should have waited until the week before classes to resign and, if done collectively, this kind of non-violent direct action might make an impact.

We are far too polite to these administrators. They abuse our good natures, our cultivated politeness and civility, and we should cease to allow them to bend us over and fuck us like this. Adjunct labor--which comprises some 70 percent of labor at most community colleges and small schools--is a crime committed against teachers. It is a way of externalizing the costs and becoming more efficient at the expense of the teacher. Look, higher liberal education is badly needed in our society on account of the democratic deficit. We need citizens who can think, deploy critical reasoning, learn the ropes of political and moral discourse, and understand their true human interests and the true human interests of society. To expect humanities teachers to fulfill this role out of the goodness of their hearts, running deep debts year after year, is unreasonable and cruel. I have heard it said that noone goes into teaching for the money. But teachers don't go into teaching because they want to make a killing, but because they want to make a living--at teaching.

"2,500 dollars" you say "is good money for part time work". Yes, it would be good money for part time work if there weren't the massive costs associated with the procurement of a phd. Getting a phd is no light and easy task. Most often, those who are equipped to teach an adjunct course at a college will be trained for little else besides. It is their livelihood. This is not some easy part-time work above and beyond my regular work. THIS IS MY WORK. And this is the work of many, many phd's like me who service the university at bargain-basement prices. If you think that anybody can teach these courses, I ask you to go ahead and try. There will only be one requirement: your presentation must cohere with and use the same language as does the present state of exegesis and critical discourse on the topic in the secondary literature. Can you do that? When you work out what is required of a person to be able to do that you begin to realize what an immense social responsibility we have to these people on account of their hard work for the sake of the highest good in society.

By not paying them enough--or paying them WalMart$ type wages (and by most reasonable calculations of the average salary of an adjunct nationwide, the wage is about 8-10 dollars an hour), we have lost touch with the first virtue of social institutions, namely justice. To put into some kind of perspective the injustice of typical adjunct wages, we might use a formula similar to that discussed in connection with energy investment. EROEI--energy returned over energy invested--is a formula used to analyze the viabililty of a source of energy. Well, cost returned over cost invested might be a way of analyzing the viability of a profession as well. Post-graduate education for the medical and legal professions have a typically high CROCI ratio for the professional. A first year lawyer may have 100,000 dollars in debt or more, but it is not atypical for a first year lawyer to make 50-100,000 dollars in the first year! Nor is it uncommon for a first year dentist with the same debt load to have that same earning power. But it is wholly uncommon, virtually impossible for the same humanities phd to acquire anything remotely resembling that. Adjunct wages will, assuming it is possible to cobble together a 5/5 load (which it is virtually impossible to do, even under conditions of availability(an average full time professor is on a 3/3 load)) make said adjunct 20,000 gross u.s. dollars. Now, if said adjunct is saddled with the same debt load as the other professions (and indeed it costs as much to achieve the same), then we begin to see what a bad deal this is for humanities phd's. Debt peonage is not a rational financial position to be in. And let's not forget: they are making 3,000 bucks a head on these students x 30= 90,000 bucks, perhaps less in other schools, but let's say it's a 1,000 bucks a head. That equals 30,000 bucks. The teacher sees 2-3,000 of that. That's usury or whatever term of financial exploitation you want to apply. It's not as if they can't afford to give away another 5 or 10 percent of that.

From an administrative standpoint of efficiency, where students are equivalent to consumers and professors are customer service representatives, the humanities make no sense. That is why we need administrators that have strict legal mandates for a minimum wage for a lecturer. As a desideratum we might suggest a mandatory minimum of philosophy professors apportioned per capita--say 1 in every 50. But seriously, there needs to be something done about this, everybody admits it, and nothing gets done about it year after year. We see adjunct arrangements growing as full time positions with benefits are declining.

With regard to living within one's means--that is accepting what is "given", an adjunct could always try it, but noone is saying that it is possible to live off of it. Perhaps I could just give them 2,500 dollars worth of my time. Could I scale back on "quality" to make it more "cost effective"? Well, I suppose. But then its going to make the students suffer and my reputation will suffer as well. This "systemic" problem that all administrators hide behind to shed moral responsibility for their actions has got to stop. And, indeed, we also must not allow ourselves to be a part of the problem. I know no other way to handle this than to turn my back on something that I have long loved and respected as one of the sacred duties of a higher liberal education, to teach. What pain this causes me. And indeed the adminstrator got the last laugh. She thanked me because I had given her enough time to find somebody else.

But let's be clear. This is a moral action on my part on account of its universalizability. My imperative, which is the categorical imperative of all moral reason: a person ought never to allow humanity, whether in himself or in another, to be treated simply as a means and never as an end in itself.
My maxim: The systematic conditions of adjunct labor make it a moral obligation for every card carrying member of the kingdom of ends to forbid themselves to be used so that they are thereby deprived of adequate means to afford their place in civil society.