I've always heard the rumors that adjunct professors are treated like garbage in academia – but now I have some first hand experience. I had just finished by PhD from a good school in a STEM field, and had decided to look for work outside academia. In the meantime, though, I still needed some cash – so I applied for and got an Adjunct position at XXX University. For context, I taught an online course for them the year prior so they already knew me.
The pay isn't stellar, and it is a small private university (that honestly is more of a cash-grab than a real institution) – but the big perk is this was an online course-load. This gives me some flexibility but also gives me money to tide me over while I apply to non-science work.
Three weeks into the course, all is going swimmingly. Roughly 40 students online, correspond regularly through email and the in-course chat feature, have Zoom sessions throughout the week to talk face-to-face, etc. On Friday of the third week, I get an email from the University asking me to turn in some administrative paperwork regarding class participation and my roster. I miss this email, as I have already cut off for the weekend.
The catch is, the form was due the following Monday – and I had taken a long weekend (student's were informed ahead of time that I wouldn't be back until Tuesday). [One and only perk of academia is the flexibility]. I log in Tuesday to find my course is gone? What? Odd… so I log into the university email only to find:
“We have repeatedly tried to contact you regarding your roster form. Your contract is effectively terminated. We hope you are okay”.
Fuck. That escalated quickly. I try calling the department and admin but get no response. I look over my weekend emails and only find one email from them on Monday reminding me to turn in my roster form. No phone calls, no texts, no emails to my primary email. Just one email to my university account. And we are 4 weeks in to a 8 week class??
I have no idea if the students are just fucked, or if someone else was found to teach it. But by the time I went to bed that night they had already closed my Okta account linked to my email and workday. I'm still stunned and at a loss for the absolute disregard I was shown.
P.S. Some dirt on XXX University. This was a basic Earth Science kind of class – and the first year I taught it – there was some weeiirrrd shit in the curriculum. For example: “Why can't we trust the consensus of experts that climate change is caused by humans?”, or “Explain everything wrong with radiocarbon dating?”. I pushed the department on this and they just said they “purchase” the curriculum – but that they will look into changing it in the future. Pretty infuriating as someone who is an expert in this area…. and I can't “edit” the course content (don't have admin privileges) – so I just wrote new questions that actually related to the text and emailed them to students.
I have so much to say about the way academics are treated – and the toxic culture therein – but that is another post lol