Gordon was in her 50s. She made $4,000 a course as an adjunct professor teaching English classes at RPI. She had no health insurance, no guarantee of employment beyond the end of the semester. There were long hours, and frequent snubs from the full-time faculty. Calculating her hourly rate of pay was an awful math equation, because it equalled $10 an hour. She said adjuncts can feel like scabs crossing a picket line when their ranks swell at universities as full-time faculty decline. As the size of her RPI writing classes grew, she worried the pace of grading, student meetings and course preparation was costing her health, which she didn’t have insurance to cover.
“It was like being a volunteer serving the community because the pay was so low,” she said.
That’s why Gordon stopped teaching at RPI, which pays its adjuncts more than most universities. She has since found work teaching online courses for a university in Pennsylvania and lives in Cohoes, where the rent is cheap.
Here’s today’s Campus Notebook. It will be the final one from me.