Low-wage professors battle ‘adjunctivitis’

PHILADELPHIA — In a narrow waiting room at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Melissa Degezelle shimmies a plastic bin holding the stranger’s placenta into her Thermos tote. A new mother has just delivered the bloody, membranous mass, and Degezelle, today a placenta cook, will prepare it for the woman’s consumption — to “help stave off postpartum depression,” she says.

Degezelle is a 5-foot-2-inch wisp of a woman with a nonchalant bearing and Amélie haircut. She’s a poet by training but a professional dabbler by necessity: a sometime doula, women’s health counselor, medical model, placenta preparer — and an adjunct professor. For three and a half hours the previous night, she submitted to a series of pelvic exams performed by nine would-be doctors at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. At least one “had never been near a vagina,” she recalls. Her pay: $30 per medical student, for a total of $270 that evening.

Back in South Philadelphia, Degezelle washes the fresh placenta before making it into a lemon-cured ceviche and putting it through a food dehydrator, like “beef jerky,” she says. Another placenta — this one steamed, dried and ground into sand-colored capsules — is already packed into a Chinese-food takeout container for a new mom in the Germantown neighborhood. Degezelle will charge $200 for pickup, processing and delivery.

This income is crucial, particularly over the summer, when her pay as an adjunct professor dwindles. Though Degezelle’s occupational pastiche is more idiosyncratic than most, she is very much an adjunct poster child. Like three-quarters of instructors in higher education, she has none of the benefits of traditional full-time employment or even a steady income, let alone tenure, though she was recently awarded a prize for “excellence in teaching and service.” She was lucky in the spring, landing two courses at Temple and three at Philadelphia University for about $3,600 each, and staffing a women’s health clinic and doing “placentas and vagina modeling” on the side. With all her jobs combined, Degezelle, a single mother, typically earns about $35,000 per year — too little to pay off her student loans or purchase health insurance. 

The idea of organizing adjuncts — a broad term for part-time and full-time nontenured instructors — isn’t new. In historic union towns such as New York and Chicago, adjuncts at public community colleges and universities have been organized alongside tenure-track professors for decades. (A 1980 court ruling bars tenured professors at private colleges from unionizing.) But recent adjunct campaigns have targeted those at private schools across the country and reflect distinctly post-Occupy sentiments: that academia has been corporatized yet has failed to deliver “market” results; and that no one, not even a middle-class Ph.D., can escape the temporary, low-wage labor pool.

In media accounts of "adjunctivitis" since the financial crisis, the nontenured professor has played tragic heroine and miner’s canary. The adjunct on food stamps; the unemployed Ph.D.; the French-language scholar who died in penury. When homeless adjunct Mary-Faith Cerasoli was featured in The New York Times this March, Twitter exploded with a rush of “We are all Mary-Faith…” selfies. 

“This is a long-term trend,” said William Deresiewicz, a higher-education critic and former Yale professor. “It has nothing to do with a bad economy. There was a deliberate decision in the ’70s — a huge overbuilding of institutions plus a neoliberal decision to treat students as customers. Then, at the same time, cut, cut, cut.”

Since 1975, tenured professorships have dwindled from 45 to 24 percent of college teaching jobs, and administrators have privileged posh architecture and creature comforts over learning. Tuition was mostly nominal in the 1940s and ’50s but is now the source of $1 trillion in loan debt. At the four-year public universities responsible for educating 75 percent of U.S. students, tuition has gone up 159 percent over the past 30 years, and following the 2008 recession, states cut their per-student, public-college spending by an average of 28 percent.

On the private side, New York’s Cooper Union, a tuition-free school for budding architects, artists and engineers (where I was once an adjunct instructor), offers a case in point. Following a 2013 decision by Cooper’s board of trustees to begin charging undergraduates, a coalition of students, faculty and alumni filed a lawsuit alleging years of financial mismanagement, bloated executive compensation and the misguided construction of an “extravagant new building.”

Meanwhile, “in the universities, cheap, vulnerable labor means adjuncts and graduate students,” said Professor Noam Chomsky, a critic of the academic “business model.” He sees adjuncts as the equivalent of industry temps or Walmart associates: low-wage workers reading Derrida. 

When SEIU organizer Anne McLeer was working a part-time clerical job at George Washington University in the late ’90s, she had “access to a health plan, retirement contribution and disability. The minute I gave that up and started teaching [as an adjunct], I lost my benefits. That was a red flag.”

Her union colleague Malini Cadambi Daniel agrees. At a labor panel in April, she said that on U.S. campuses, “the faculty are looking at the [unionized] food service workers [and saying], ‘You’re making good wages, you have a contract, you know you’re going to come back next semester, you’ve got health care.’”