Adjuncts this fall

[hester]

Hello,

   What are you adjuncts seeing for teaching assignments this fall? On my end, I am high and dry ( as are many know). A few years back, one could put together several assignments each semester and do ok. Not anymore.

Your observations please

Thanks

[Caracal]

Hello,

   What are you adjuncts seeing for teaching assignments this fall? On my end, I am high and dry ( as are many know). A few years back, one could put together several assignments each semester and do ok. Not anymore.

Your observations please

Thanks

No change for the fall for me. However, I've been teaching at the same place for a while so I'm a little more insulated from fluctuations in budgets and enrollments than some.

[downer]

I'm doing fine, teaching at my ususal 3 places. Looks like all courses will run. Guess I could still get bumped from a course or two, or maybe I will piss off someone enough so that they take me off the schedule, but I can probably remain diplomatic until Sept 1.

[sinenomine]

My school has consolidated course offerings to reflect a dip in enrollment and to help with the budget, resulting in fewer adjuncts being hired.

[Ruralguy]

We have several fewer adjuncts (never have more than 20 out of about 100 total faculty) due to decreases in enrollments.  One that I know of found another job locally. The others were closer to retirement, but I am not sure if they intend to throw in the towel just yet.  We also are hiring fewer full replacement VAPs for those on sabbatical or working for the college as Dean, etc.. All told, its probably about half a dozen fewer faculty, though a number of the actual sections will be covered by paid overloads of other faculty, and probably there are several doing voluntary overloads.

[dr_codex]

As I mentioned on another thread, our Fall numbers are so far below our targets that the schedule for everyone is shaky. Until that firms up, or we start cutting sections, nobody will be hired to teach on contract.

[mahagonny]

About the same amount available for me at two schools as far as I can tell so far. But nothing's for sure until it happens.

[jerseyjay]

Starting in Fall 2020, my school cut the number of sections significantly because of budgetary issues. In my department, no adjunct was denied a section, but except in special cases, no one has more than one section a semester, which for some is a cut in their income by a third or half per semester. I have heard that in some departments, there was a struggle to find enough sections for full-time professors to make load, so there were fewer adjuncts. Many course-releases for full-timers were also cancelled so there was less need for part-timers more broadly.

This upcoming semester is hard to measure because of the continuing budget issues combined with the fact that we have no real idea what final enrollment will be. Again, my department has not had to "let go" any adjunct, but none has been offered more than one section.

[AmLitHist]

I tried to dump my 2-student lit class this week by having my chair give it to an adjunct.  (Admin is not cancelling any sections this fall, using CARES money to pay the difference between tuition paid and load.) However, he can't do it--we're down to just a few older adjuncts, all with full schedules.  I guess the pandemic might have led some/most of these younger instructors to abandon teaching entirely. I can't blame them, but several of them were really good, and would have been good candidates to go FT with us in more normal times.

[mahagonny]

Before this thread fades into obscurity...
Though women are the majority of adjuncts the article has zero mention of adjunct faculty. If you care about the prospects of women in academia, one obvious logical thing to do would be to improve the quality of adjunct positions, because women are going to continue to have babies, which affects career choices and odds of successfully switching off the adjunct railroad tie (goes nowhere) to the tenure track. Unless you were to simply give up on making adjunct positions decent, and then never mention the situation, because you need to be seen as fervently dedicated to helping women. 'Look over there!'

But true to form, academia loves its identity politics so much it often shows its blind spot to what's actually happening in people's lives.
One person here, McCoy, even claims we've had two pandemics. COVID-19 and a racism pandemic. At the the risk of being insolent...where?
There's been no racism pandemic. There's been a hysteria about racism pandemic.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-pandemic-hit-female-academics-hardest

Ever heard of Donald Earl Collins? How about Cornel West?

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/30/the-real-second-class-citizens-of-academia

[RatGuy]

We offered many of our PT instructors 1y FT contracts for 21-22. In the last three weeks, we've had a request from the Dean's Office to open up a lot of new gen-ed sections. Apparently enrollment is exceeding expectations.

[Charlotte]

I've been asked by several schools (where I've been an adjunct before) to teach this fall. I took some, declined others, and apparently they are having difficulty finding people to take the classes I declined.

[mahagonny]

But even an adjunct with a full year contract will not be eligible for maternity leave, I suspect.

If you don't care about  Yertle the Turtle, you don't care about the ones who are piled on top of him, because you love turtles.

ETA: Italics, not directed at the fora, just a general statement.

[dr_codex]

I would love it if the current labour market in the US results in people refusing adjunct wages, en masse, just as restaurant workers are doing.

Update: Having refused to hire adjuncts, my Dean is now finding that we are short. That bodes well for our overall registration, which is good news, but it means that other parts of our schedule are still up in the air.

[Caracal]

I would love it if the current labour market in the US results in people refusing adjunct wages, en masse, just as restaurant workers are doing.

The problem is that few adjuncts are doing it because they really don't have other options. On the margins, a good job market and stimulus checks might make a difference for some people. If you were ABD, for example, the stimulus money could easily make you decide that you can devote yourself full time to finishing rather than taking on adjunct sections. If you're a recent phd recipient who was trying to get a tenure track job and adjuncting in the meantime, the availability of jobs with higher pay might tip someone who is considering leaving academia into going ahead and taking some job while they figure out longer term career plans.

However, most people who adjunct are probably doing it because they want to teach and they want to be in the profession. The places in the economy where there's a demand for workers are not a great match for the kind of things that most people who are adjuncting want to be doing.

Its hard to figure out what the adjunct pool actually looks like, so maybe there are enough people in the earlier marginal Caterogies to really make a difference and result in schools being unable to fill adjunct positions, but I doubt it...