It’s seven in the evening on a Tuesday and my wife is exhausted. She’s just gotten home from Southern Connecticut State University, where she works as an adjunct professor.
She’s spent the day helping freshmen learn essential skills and navigate the stresses of their first year of college. Although she’s already been on campus for 10 hours, she spends the evening grading and sending reassuring and supportive emails. She does it because she loves it, because she believes in preparing the next generation for an increasingly fraught and complex future. While she’s very good at her job, she has no idea if she’ll be doing this work in the coming semester.
Because she is an adjunct professor, she has no job stability. She receives work one semester’s contract at a time with no guarantee of renewal. This is an entirely foreign concept for me. As an engineer at Sikorsky in Stratford, my institutional knowledge and expertise is highly valued and management works hard to make sure that I don’t take my talents elsewhere. My wife, who spent 10 years getting her degrees and who has just as many years of teaching experience, has to constantly start from zero as she waits to be “rehired” — or not.
This is the case not just for her, but for over 50% of the faculty at Southern. It boggles the mind that Connecticut, a state that talks a big game about the importance of education, can’t seem to hire the highly qualified people they already have working as adjuncts for full professor positions. However, the least they could do is offer contracts to these adjuncts more than one semester at a time.
This lack of security for my wife and others has real impacts. My wife would love to devote all of her time to the success of her Southern students, but to make ends meet in our household, she holds four other part-time jobs in case courses don’t come through. I can’t tell you how devastating it is to watch her find out that the class she’s spent the last few months prepping to teach, developing a suite of activities designed to reach and challenge this new generation of learners, has been taken away.
And it greatly impacts our lives. Try making a budget for home repairs, medical bills, and groceries when you have no idea whether several grand will show up in your bank or not.
Why does she stay, especially if doing her job well on top of the other positions she holds means working 60-hour weeks, with no tangible appreciation from the institution that demands this of her?
She cares deeply about the well-being of the young people who sit in her classroom and she knows she has necessary knowledge and skills to impart. Her students know it, too — I’ve seen some of the messages they’ve sent her, semesters later, thanking her for setting them on the path to internships, grad school, and careers. One student has even just knitted her a hat. There are nights like this one, though, where she puts her head in her hands and says, “I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
There’s an easy solution. The contract for state employees in the Connecticut State University system doesn’t have adequate protections, but it could. It could require multi-semester appointments for adjunct faculty.
I think we can all agree that it’s in all of our best interest to make sure everyone in this state, especially our hard-working educators, has the job security they deserve. If this doesn’t happen, Southern may lose a very devoted and talented teacher, and she won’t be the last.
Tom Grimes lives in Milford.
