PhillyDeals: Should college teaching be a full-time job?

Originally published January 30, 2011

Should teaching college be a full-time, high-paid job?

Or is it so easy that we should let the market maintain today's low prices for casual professorial labor?

Alexander Kudera says he spent 10 years shuttling on the Broad Street subway and the subway-surface trolley, between Drexel and Temple, teaching four or five writing classes a term.

Kudera, with his master's degree, was paid the way thousands of faculty gypsies are these days: as an "adjunct" professor, on a per-class basis.

In his best year, 2007, he says he earned $30,000, which is a little more than he now earns teaching full time at Clemson University in South Carolina.

"But this is definitely better: I get health care and retirement," the West Philly native told me cheerfully.

Though he'd get that, plus a lot more cash, teaching high school English in suburban Philadelphia.

The fees from one or two college students, per class, covers what an adjunct gets for teaching that class for a whole semester.

Where does the money from the rest of the students go - the federal loans, work studies, dad's salary, mom's wages, and all?

It helps support the modern university, grown way beyond its ancient teaching function, with all its administrators, marketers, researchers, and maintenance workers, on city-size campuses.

Two-thirds of America's college teachers are now paid as Kudera was, as "adjuncts" or "contingents" or otherwise outside the old tenure track, the American Association of University Professors reports.

I've been an adjunct prof, like many of my Inquirer colleagues. It's fun. But it's not a living, by itself.

To supplement his college pay, Kudera turned his Philly years into a comic novel, Fight for Your Long Day (from publisher Atticus Books), which grinds around town on SEPTA, school to class, bill to check, potential disaster to actual embarrassment.

It's Philly fiction: Liberty Tech, with its ambitious administrators, resembles expansion-minded Drexel; Ivy Green University, with its driven, confident even when clueless students, recalls Penn; Urban State, with its sullen "baseball cap-wearing white boys" and "Afrocentric" shouters and earnest veterans in over their heads, caricatures Temple.

Kudera's sloppy hero, Cyrus Duffleman, believes, against evidence, that "teaching as an adjunct is better than working at a factory."

Duffelman tells his students to "read and write until you have piercing headaches," promises in return "an education just slightly obsolete" for today's tech-heavy job market, and hopes they'll not turn into mediocre higher-ed victims whose "inability to pay educational loans is the only sign of ever having attended college."

Kudera's style is more Saul Bellow subway sociology than John O'Hara tribal realism; his Philadelphia is told, as in Steve Lopez's wordy Philly novels, rather than shown, Pete Dexter-style.

He punctuates all the head talk with over-the-top action: There's a political killing (an accident, sort of); a politically incorrect seduction, which misfires; students who posture, press, disappoint, and, at times, beat expectations.

Duffelman's faith in the humanities never wavers. His sense of history and exposition rejects both the "Age of Information" utopia and the "Age of Terror" dystopia our "televised leaders" pitch the nation.

Kudera knows high-level humanities programs survive on private-college charity, but he tells me the failure of "soft professional" college majors in today's weak job market will drive more students back to basic literature and writing - to think, to evaluate ideas and the people who project them.

He even sees hope in Pennsylvania's expensive campaign to move the Barnes art collection to a new Parkway home: "Politics aside, it's a sign that politicians recognize culture, as much as a casino, can be a moneymaker for Philly."

Kudera also insists real teaching is being done by underpaid adjuncts. I hope so. That would explain why colleges seem in no hurry to boost their pay, or replace them with tenured full-timers.