By Sandra Baringer
A journalistic formula has taken shape around the issue of the non-tenure-track academic underclass.  The "plight scenario" goes like this: freeway flyer Adam Adjunct starts his day at 8 in the morning teaching a class at Ivy College.  Then he drives 30 miles to teach another class at Hallowed Halls University before lunch.  And so on. And on and on.  After describing the weekly schedule of this particular freeway flyer, the reporter then discusses Adam Adjunct's personal economic matters, and ends the article by addressing the broader concerns of academic integrity and academic budgets.

There are drawbacks to this sort of publicity, and it may not be too soon to start considering the baggage that comes with "plight" rhetoric: the plight of the farmer, the plight of the homeless, the plight of the freeway flyer or "roads scholar."  Who is helped by plight-of-the-adjunct narratives? Are these narratives a call to action?  Or a way for others to feel better about themselves in comparison?  Indeed, what might be the visceral response of outsiders to them?   As prison writer Paul St. John asks, "frankly, who wants to hear about loneliness, hopelessness, despair, loss of autonomy, harassment, contempt, or civil death, except to feel real good that things aren't as bad out in the world?  Please don't think that I  will allow myself to be used as consolation for a civilian audience" (Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing: p.121). 

Well, no one wants to be pitied, so how do we want ourselves to be represented? Just as victims are not heard until they become either martyrs or survivors, exploited non-tenure track faculty will not be taken seriously until we move beyond the "pity the poor adjunct" narrative.  Who listens to homeless people?  To rape and incest victims?  The public recoils from listening unless the stories are sufficiently picturesque, sufficiently distanced, or sufficiently past tense. 

So far I see three or four alternatives to Pity-Poor-Me stories.  One is to "do the numbers." Presenting just the facts, however (e.g., non-tenure track faculty comprised about 20% of higher education instruction in 1970 and currently are closer to 50%), lacks drama, and writers must take into account the public's low tolerance for complexity, such as reading statistical analyses.

 Another way, an ongoing Performance Of The Absurd, began here in California during last Spring's A2K (Action 2000 Coalition).  We invented a Freeway Flyer costume, an actual academic gown with wings (the better to fly over California traffic gridlock), and whoever dons it for the day becomes the poster-child for part-time faculty equity.  At least--at last?--we are speaking for ourselves, which is the first step in resisting the rhetoric of victimization.

But the narrative technique that I will call "Survivors of Adjunctivitis" is the one that needs to be pursued--not only because it seizes the first person voice but also because it disavows victimhood.  One example, "Road Scholar" (Ms. Feb.-Mar 2000: pp. 43-46), begins by the author, Barbara Croft, stating, "It took me a long time to give up teaching.  Even now, I miss it.  Of course, I was never a real teacher, despite years in the classroom.  Like many other female academics, I was an adjunct…." Another such piece appeared on the "My Turn" page in Newsweek (May 15, 2000: p.10), this one by Michelle Scarff, a former composition adjunct who went back to school to get a high school teaching credential.

The survivor narrative is told best by those who performed their own labor walkout by abandoning the teaching profession. We need more survivors speaking out in the media. Let us find those who already have sought other jobs and get them to speak about why they left the academy: write articles about them, bring them to meetings frequented by upper level college administrators, and let them speak with the disdain and contempt for their former exploited situations that we are still constrained from expressing in such venues.   

Meanwhile, we must neither romanticize ourselves nor allow ourselves to be constructed as martyrs. When you are asked why you continue to teach under such conditions, beware of answering, "because I love to teach."  We are not masochists who love to teach so much that we will continue to do it under any circumstances.  We continue to teach because we are trained for it, we are scholars, we can do it better than anybody else, and we are afraid of what might happen to our children and grandchildren if we turn their education over to the philistines.

Thus, we shift media focus from the plight of the adjunct to the plight of the students.  Student lack of access to adjuncts outside of class now is just the tip of the iceberg.  What about twenty years from now?  What will higher education faculty look like? Most of those who started teaching in the seventies and the eighties, as the silent conversion to non-tenure track was taking place, will be retired.  Will not most of their replacements be part-time, non-tenure track, temporary faculty? What of student access then?
Higher education cannot continue to work this way indefinitely. Now is the time to start gathering evidence about who is leaving the profession and what has been lost.  Neither politicians nor college chancellors and presidents can save us from our fate because they are apparently blind to it. We come not to burn down the academy, but to save it--as only non-victims can.