Where are adjuncts in “The Chair”?
By Fatema Baldiwala
I sat down with excitement to watch the Netflix mini-series that everyone in the English department was talking about, “The Chair.” The issues discussed were real and relatable, except for ONE glaring omission. Where were the adjunct faculty? There was nary a mention of adjuncts anywhere in the series.
I should be furious because I hate it when I see inequality, but I wasn’t angry. The disparity in the series only mirrors what I see in English departments and other divisions on campus: adjuncts are not only not seen, but also ignored if their presence is felt.
At division meetings, we are the white elephants in the room that no one wants to talk about. If we bring up issues, these are tiptoed and skirted over, skillfully sidelined for another day, because adjuncts have no real power on a campus. We collectively have only one vote for choosing our department chair, so our voices do not really count in any matters of importance.
The disparity in the series only mirrors what I see in English departments and other divisions on campus.
Nonetheless, adjunct professors do the grunt work of teaching. On some campuses, adjuncts make up 80 percent of the faculty. Yet, they do not have job stability, are hired on a contingency basis, and have no healthcare (though the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, has proposed spending $200 million for adjunct healthcare) or have partial healthcare dependent on the number of classes we teach. Yet we are the first point of contact for most students.
I wasn’t furious because a part of me had come to accept the inevitable, and I just sighed with disappointment.
Every semester, when I introduce myself on the first day of school, I make it a point to introduce myself as an adjunct. Students have never heard the word. Instead, I hear words like “a junk professor?,” and that’s when I walk to the board and, in big letters, write the word adjunct, and I tell them that their first research assignment is to look the term up.
Students have never heard the word adjunct. Instead, I hear words like “a junk professor?”
I then tell them that I am a “career adjunct,” though that term is an oxymoron like social distance, the famous term of our time. Since rhetoric is what I primarily teach, I follow that with statistics and case studies about career adjuncts. Being a woman of color and an immigrant, I am the norm in this profession. I tell them there aren’t enough full-time job openings to give all adjuncts a full-time position, however dedicated they may be to their profession and however educated they may be.
One of the issues predominant in the series “The Chair” is the hemorrhaging of students from the humanities and traditional English literature classes. Having been in this profession for over a decade, I have seen firsthand historic low enrollment affecting us, the adjuncts, first. We feel the pain of this low enrollment: Whether we get a class to teach at all depends on student enrollment.
People have told me class enrollments peak and dip, that it depends on the economy. Whatever the reason, we are losing our students. It makes me wonder: If we were only kinder and more equitable toward our adjuncts, would we have this situation in the first place?
Eventually, most adjuncts get tired of the Cinderella-like treatment meted out to them, and the best minds leave to pursue other professions. No one likes being in a profession with no recognition. For my fellow career adjuncts who have continued to cling on to their classes, as if this was the last log on a turbulent sea, which for some it very well is, teaching is a profession we cherish and not a part-time job we do.
Though admittedly there are a few among us who view their teaching as a part-time gig, for the majority of us this is a serious profession to which we have dedicated numerous hours — unseen, unpaid hours in professional development, student grading and in-house committee work, with no expectations or rewards.
In the series, Sandra Oh, who beautifully plays the role of the English department chair, argues, “Teaching is not a pastime, it is a profession.” Some people view teaching as what one does when all else fails, but for most career adjuncts it is not something we do when all else fails; it is what we LIVE for, it is that thing we do that defines who we are. This imbalance of unseen adjunct professors vs. full-time tenured professors is only compounded when a popular TV show decides not to mention or depict the reality of an English division where 80 percent of faculty are adjuncts and not full-time tenured professors.
Eventually, most adjuncts get tired of the Cinderella-like treatment meted out to them and the best minds leave to peruse other professions.
If Netflix wishes to show the reality of a college campus, and a popular division like English, it needs to counter “The Chair” with a mini-series about adjuncts. Scott Andrews, a professor of American and American Indian literature at California State University, Northridge, has a pitch for Netflix. The title of his show is “The Adjuncts,” and this show is about four part-time faculty members who share an office at a public college.
Young and idealistic, older and burned out, desperate for money and health insurance or married to a wealthy spouse and teaching for “fun,” the characters have one thing in common: The tenured faculty do not know their names. I challenge Netflix to take up this project because there would be a much vaster audience interested in such a series: We, the adjuncts, are a majority in every college. Briefly, I fantasized such a project could come to fruition, until reality set in.
I shall not hold my breath, but in the meantime, I urge every adjunct to introduce themselves as who they are on campus, so that gradually we are seen for who we are.
Fatema Baldiwala is an adjunct faculty member who teaches English and entrepreneurship in the Los Angeles Community College District. She is a member of AFT Local 1521, the Los Angeles College Faculty Guild. She is also a curriculum entrepreneur, poet, speaker, writer and activist. This was originally posted on Local 1521’s website.
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