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Ghosts in the Classroom : Stories of College Adjunct Faculty--and the Price We All Pay

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Editor Michael Dubson has gathered an impressive collection of essays from adjunct college instructors across America. Those essays reveal a system in which half the teachers work for half the money that the other teachers receive. However, they do as much or more work, receive no benefits, and have no job security beyond the current semester. Colleges and universities routinely exclude these adjuncts from the privilege, protection, advancement, and recognition that their better-paid colleagues receive.

Aside from these conditions, the adjuncts also face bizarre situations, such as students who will bring law suits when caught cheating, or such as incomes created by piecing together teaching assignments from two-six different institutions at a time!

All the writers here illustrate how the current policies toward adjuncts hurt the students, the educational system, and America in general, as much as they hurt the adjuncts themselves. These teachers continue out of love for their students and their subject, but the current system works against such love. Not surprisingly, the book concludes with an essay titled "Farewell to Teaching."

This book is a collection of essays by those who have experienced the appalling form of indentured servitude known as part-time teaching. It is an indictment of teaching in colleges and universities as well as of the complacency and self-service of the full-time faculty and of the administration. One is overwhelmingly left with the impression that there is little point in paying for or even wasting time on a college education, particularly in the so-called community colleges, which are obviously neither communal nor deserving of the title of college. You will either be taught by a lazy and smug tenured faculty member who is so fundamentally intellectually dishonest and so casually indifferent to the suffering required to fund his perquisites that he cannot possibly have credibility, or by a viciously mistreated, overworked and marginalized academic bracero.

The book would have been improved by essays from instructors in the sciences and mathematics, and from instructors who acknowledge the lack of quality inherent in part-time teaching. (Horribly that lack of quality also exists, with far less justification, among the tenured faculty). Only one writer, under the pseudonym "Andrew Guy" is honest enough to admit that when you carry two to three times the load of the full time faculty, when you commute fifteen hours a week and when you are constantly subjected to insult and denigration, you end up dropping your standards just to survive physically and psychologically. Amazingly, the introduction alludes to the presence of "villains," among the writers, as though Guy is evil for putting his own survival ahead of the quality of the educational experience of his students. Every single other writer claimed to maintain high standards (of course!) and work feverishly without regard to his own welfare to give students the best possible learning experience. Each was apparently rewarded by adoring students and high praise on teaching reviews. It's all too unbelievable. These aren't the part-time instructors I knew. The part-time instructors I knew definitely got good reviews and had adoring students. The reason wasn't difficult to see - they talked a great line about high standards, but gave all As and Bs. To do otherwise was to court termination. Again, full-time faculty did the same, often crudely boasting that such superb grades were proof of their own teaching prowess rather than of their utter failure to prepare their students for further studies or work.

It's a great book nonetheless. I wish it was more diverse in outlook and specialty. Next time perhaps the editor can put an advertisement in Science or Nature and get some different perspectives.