from VCCA Journal, Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 1990, 54-55
© Copyright 1990 VCCA Journal
While a young woman was telling of a bad experience with a man, an "adjunct" friend of mine blurted, "Kill the SOB. Turn him into an adjunct."
The word suggests a stumpy appendage like a third arm stuck on between the shoulder blades. It functions as an arm, to be sure, but it feels out of place, and the other arms aren't quite sure what to make of it.
My same friend startled me last Friday when she said, "I've been teaching here almost three years now, and today is the first time I really feel like faculty." Of course we talked.
She said she's always felt welcome at the college. Faculty and staff are cordial and accommodating. The atmosphere seems inviting and warm. We show respect and appreciation for her work. She likes the college and feels privileged to teach here.
Her feeling of not being faculty, then--where does it come from?
Our relationship as colleagues and friends began several years ago when she phoned me from the university nearby, saying she was interested in community college teaching and wanted to gain experience while completing her master's. She served a year with me as a teaching intern.
Since then, she's taught developmental writing, college writing, American literature, and British literature. She knows the material extremely well and relates to diverse students with a compelling combination of invitation, challenge, and nurture. Her students respect and appreciate her. She earns their praise.
Despite teaching three courses per semester, to get by she works two other jobs--as an editor for a blind novelist and as a landscape gardener. She loves teaching and is willing, as all teachers must be, to work very hard and effectively for much less than she and the job are worth.
She even takes time for professional collegiality. On campus she interacts readily with faculty and staff. Off campus she meets periodically with colleagues to discuss teaching and related professional matters. Teaching one another fosters excellence.
Last evening I went with her and other friends to see Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," a one-time performance in an oriental rug store. She'd invited me because she thought I'd appreciate it. I did, partly because she knows the play and Beckett better than I.
Even so, she has not felt like faculty.
Her feeling of apartness has something to do with transience and uncertainty. She never knows from semester to semester whether she'll have courses to teach or get bumped by a full-timer whose section doesn't make. She knows full-time jobs rarely come open here, and when a job does open, over a hundred teachers will apply. She'd like to plan her life, but . . .
Some will ask her, "Why don't you get a real job?" She will, just as she'll get her Ph.D. She's begun a very distinguished career. She's also a wonderful story teller. What might we have done-- besides calling her other than "adjunct"--so years hence her "adjunct" stories sound less like graphic recollections of an army physical?
Dick Harrington, who teaches English at Piedmont Virginia Community College, served as the first President of the Virginia Community Colleges Association.