Life at Large College

Alternate title 1: Why I've been absent from my blog/stressed/breaking out/on the verge of going postal
Alternate title 2: Some academics just don't realize how good they have it*
Alternate title 3: Yo! I'm back!

Just about everyone in higher ed can agree that adjuncting is a shitty job - the pay is terrible, the benefits are few, and the expectations are high. On the other end of the spectrum is the coveted tenure-track job at an R1 or SLAC (whatever your heart desires) - with it comes job security, benefits, professional development funds, course waivers, and eventually, peace of mind. In the middle, you have those random positions - the lecturer, the one-year renewable/non tenure-track, the visiting assistantship, etc. There's also a little understood and rarely discussed position... the non tenure-track, but full-time/permanent, one step above adjuncting, but nowhere to ever advance because you're actually at the highest possible level the school offers & already have the responsibilities of someone who is a tenured professor at an equivalent school.

I am one of the lucky ones who ended up in such a position.

Before I get into some of the recent changes that have taken life at Large College from unpleasant to hellish, let me first give you an idea of what it's like to be an instructor there...

• LC is a year-round school (it's a three-year accelerated B.A. granting school). There are five terms in a year, each lasting nine weeks (this includes midterms & finals). There are break days between the terms, but they're not consistent - some term breaks can last up to six days, while others (the majority) consist of 1-3 days. A typical schedule will involve classes ending on a Thursday (final grades due on Friday) and the new term beginning the following Monday or Tuesday. All full-time faculty are required to teach all year/every term. That means we are in the classroom 45 weeks per year.
  
• Full-time faculty are required to teach five classes per term (classes are 3.5 credit hours), which means we're in the classroom approximately 26 hours over four days. We teach at least 25 classes per year - each of which have 15-30 students. Those of us who teach freshman composition classes usually have close to 30 in each class, which means we usually grade somewhere in the neighborhood of 250-ish papers during a nine-week period (25 students/5 classes/2 papers per term) or 1200-ish per year.
  
• We're expected to be on campus and available to students at least eight hours per day for each of the four days (our contracts state that we have eight hours of off-campus administrative/prep time per week). Seeing as how on most days we're in classes 6-8 hours, that whole "available to students" concept is a wee bit impossible. Oh, wait, we do have that half an hour lunch break between classes... what a perfect time to meet with students!
  
• There are twelve full-time instructors and a little over fifty adjunct instructors (yes, approximately 80% of our staff is part-time!). We have no tenure process, nor do we have any unions or year-to-year contracts (just a general employment contract detailing your job description & duties that you sign when you're first hired). Basically, there's zero protection and the admins at LC use that to their advantage. The administration's attitude is along the lines of if you don't like being screwed over, then feel free to leave as there are plenty of adjuncts waiting to take your place. There was a group of full-timers at a sister campus who discussed unionizing... let's just say they they're no longer employed at Sister LC.
  
• LC also cultivates an a toxic "us against them" environment - adjuncts vs. full-timers. There are very few f-t positions and the only time one opens up is if someone leaves (they have created one new position during the five years I've been there). The admins actively remind the full-timers that there is a long line of adjuncts just waiting to replace us and will freely mention to the adjuncts that if they want f-t positions, one of the current full-timers has to leave. Of course, this leads to a lot of sneaky underhanded BS - there are always adjuncts working to get your job (some work harder at job seeking than they do at teaching) and will actively go out of their way to try to make you look bad.
  
• LC will do whatever it takes to avoid having to pay the full-time faculty more (a salary that is actually commiserate with the position). HLC reviewed our duties and determined that we are grossly underpaid and said that in order for LC to receive accreditation, they would have to adjust the salary range. They recommended a $10,000 increase to put us in line with equivalent colleges in the Chicago area. HA! LC gave us a $1,000 raise, increased our course load, and ended up pulling out of the HLC process a month later. Um...
  
• Full-time faculty do not earn vacation days - our time off is the few days we have between terms. We do have sick days; however, you must find a sub to cover your classes if you're out. If you don't have a sub, you're required to make up the class... and you're still docked sick time. Seems slightly illegal, right? Also, you can't miss more than two days in a row without a doctor's note. So, let's say that you have something like the flu or a reoccurring medical issue that wouldn't send you to the doctor, but necessitates you miss three days. Um, don't even think about returning without that note - if you do, your check will be docked. Oh, and you better hope there are no family deaths that will lead to you to missing more than your two allotted bereavement days because you don't have any personal time and you're not allowed to use those sick days for non health-related emergencies. This was reinforced a few terms ago when an instructor's newborn baby died - he used his two bereavement days and then was docked the remainder of the two weeks he was off. Lovely, huh?
  
• As with every college, f-t faculty are expected to hold office hours, advise students, serve as advisers to clubs, etc. You're also expected to complete four in-services per year and at least three professional development activities outside of LC. Additionally, they would like you to publish once a year, but that's not an absolute (it's "highly encouraged" at this point). The problem with this is that you do not receive any course releases, nor is there any money to complete the PD activities (well, there supposedly was money, but it was mysteriously all used by February). This term I have 60 advisees, 5 courses, and 2 clubs (and this is a light term)... exactly when am I supposed to complete the PD activities or even think about writing something remotely worthy of publishing? Oh, that's right... I have those 8 hours per week of admin time. I mean it's not like I have five classes to prep for or a crapload of sucky papers to grade. And then there's the professional development activities... not only are you expected to pay your own way, but also you'll have your pay docked if you miss more than two days.

Now that you have an idea of the culture of LC, let's take a look at what has been happening over the last couple of months (i.e. why I've been so freakin' stressed and unhappy)...

• We have a new! shiny! president! ... whose main goal seems to be to make life hell for the faculty. Prior to LC, she served as the VP at Sister LC's campus; she now spends an inordinate amount of time questioning why the instructors at our campus aren't doing things exactly like at her old campus (she has a special venom for the writing faculty). Well, maybe because we serve a different population, have a larger percentage of students who are academically not ready for college, we're in an urban area & Sister LC is in a rural area... oh, and just maybe because we're not all faculty robots programmed to act the exact same way. Sigh. It's amazing how she spends so much time complaining about how the writing faculty at our campus sucks compared to Sister LC, but the faculty I know at Sister LC said that she was a horrible VP and tried to have all of the writing faculty fired because she was astounded and ashamed when she saw some sample student papers (during a plagiarism hearing).
  
• An idea that was batted around, all thanks to our new president: adjuncts should pick their classes first since the full-time faculty have to be on campus all day anyway. Sigh. Yes, let's let the adjuncts pick first, which will guarantee the full-timers will be on campus from 7:00AM to 10:00PM every friggin' day - because those early morning classes and the late ones are the classes people tend to avoid. All full-timers should work 15 hours a day. What's wrong with that?
  
• A horrible meeting my my colleague, C (other full-timer English instructor), and I recently had with the with dean. After the dean sent an inflammatory email to all faculty about how we're not putting enough time into tutoring students who aren't in our classes (more on this later), C and I went to him to discuss the schedule & to attempt to find a solution to the tutoring issue. The meeting was complete crap - it started on a low note, quickly moved into the disheartening range, and ended with a well-worded "fuck you" from the dean. During the meeting, he actually said to us "You're only in classes for six hours a day. I don't understand what you're doing for the rest of your time. By my calculations, you have eight hours of unaccounted for time." Are you fucking kidding me?!? Because obviously being an instructor is 100% limited to the classroom time, right? I mean we don't have to prep for class, grade papers, meet with advisees, attend meetings, do committee work, tutor the students currently enrolled in our classes, sit through pointless and insulting meeting with the dean, etc. Ugh!! Not only was it a slap in the face, but it also brought to light how very little the dean knows about teaching. He was a faculty member for one damn year before he became a dean (yes, ONE). Apparently, he has blocked out that year and decided that instructors do nothing but lecture the entire day (because there's no way we could be giving assignments, as we don't do any grading).
  
• The tutoring situation: in an effort to save money, the new! shiny! president! decided to fire the professional tutors and force the full-time faculty to cover tutoring duties. Yes, that is a fantastic idea, right? I mean it's not like students would possibly want/need to see a tutor during those 6-8 hours per day that we're in classes... and it's not as though there are 700ish students and only two full-time writing instructors... and it's not like we're already completely overloaded. Nooooo, the full-timers can handle it! As you can imagine, just about every student who requests tutoring is looking for help with writing or math. Two writing instructors and one math instructor... for the entire school. Oh, but if we can't meet with the student and his/her preferred time, the session will be offered to an adjunct (as a very last resort). Again, we're back to that issue of having to pay people for their time/work - new! shiny! president! is very unhappy with the amount of money that has been shelled out to adjuncts for tutoring (Why aren't the full-timers tutoring more students? The faculty at Sister LC campus have the time to teach 50 classes a day and tutor all 2,000 students!). Hence, the offensive email and disheartening meeting with the dean.
  
• Our campus moved. The move happened during midterm week (last term). I don't think I need to go into how stressful it is to move a campus, especially while classes are in session (and are not allowed to be canceled). It's even worse when there is a lack of realistic planning involved and a very poorly executed move. Faculty and students were stressed, pissed off, and completely out of sorts for weeks at each end of the move. Unfortunately, the stress didn't end after everyone was finally settled - it became substantially worse, thanks to more brilliant money-saving ideas from new! shiny! president! In a moment of brilliance pre-move, it was decided that the full-timers are unworthy because they don't do shit it is unnecessary for the full-time instructors to have offices. Now, it's not as though we had private offices to begin with - I shared with C and the math instructor. Well, new! shiny! president! decided that the small amount of privacy we had was an unnecessary luxury and in order to save money (more like save space so that her office could be bigger), faculty offices were not built into the design of the new campus. After over five years at LC, I lost my office. I now sit in a big, but not nearly big enough room, in a telemarketing station cubicle with not only all of the full-time faculty, but also all of the adjuncts. It is a ridiculously chaotic clusterfuck and I (along with the other f-t faculty) absolutely hate it. What type of college puts their full-time faculty in tiny cubes and saddles them with a crazy course load, tutoring expectations, and advising list? Needless to say, but I get zero grading done there. It is a fucking mess. Plus, we all feel like we were demoted, which is great for morale.
  
• New! shiny! president! also decided that it was unnecessary for faculty & staff to have separate restrooms. Awesome. Now we all share one bathroom (well, the men have one & the women have one). There are approximately 200 women on campus at any given time and we all share one restroom with eight stalls. Not only is the restroom disgusting (I am horrified by what some of the students do/leave in there), it has also created an uncomfortable situation. I'm sorry, but I'm in here to change my tampon, not to chat with you about why you failed my class... oh, and person in the next stall, please stop talking on your phone about how you cheated on your exam and got away with it. Sigh. It seems like such a small thing, but the restroom situation is so out of control that several instructors have taken to actually leaving the campus and visiting Macy's (across the street) to use the public restrooms. It's sad to say, but the restrooms there are cleaner... and there are no students.

On top of it all, of the twelve full-time instructors, ten of us have a second job. All ten of us adjunct at other schools (on the sly of course because neither the new! shiny! president! nor the dean would not be happy about that situation) - this solely because the pay at LC is so crappy. Several of the instructors teach online, while others, like me, teach at local community colleges (I still adjunct at Small College, where I was hired fresh out of grad school in '04). Again, at what type of college do you find the majority of the full-time faculty teaching elsewhere? Sigh. Don't answer that. For the next nine weeks, I am teaching seven writing classes (five at LC and two more at SC). Yes, that's right. Seven writing classes. Shoot me now.

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*Let me say that this post is not meant to trivialize anyone's complaints about their schools because I know no matter how good things are, no place is 100% perfect (especially considering that just one a-hole can easily make a pleasant environment hellish). However, I don't think a lot of academics know just how good they have it. There are great schools, good schools, and crappy schools... and then there are the ones of which nightmares are made (i.e. Large College).