ABSTRACT
Part-Time Faculty («par|t »«t ˆ ¤m «fak\lte¤) We had originally planned not to write a separate entry for part-time faculty. After all, as we argue throughout the book, part-timers and temporary teachers increasingly are the faculty. They teach about half the college and university courses in the country. Graduate student employees teach still more. Traditional tenure-track faculty now only do about a third of the teaching. But we wanted to set aside a special place to tell some of their stories in greater detail and to draw some conclusions from them. We’d like to start by letting one part-timer tell her story in her own words and then summarize our interviews with several others:
It may be useful to lay out exact income figures for this sort of life. In 1996, a beltway flyer in Washington, D.C., was piecing together a living of sorts teaching composition at four different institutions. At the bottom of the pay scale was Charles County Community College, twenty minutes from Washington, which paid him $940 to teach one course. Prince George’s Community College was a little better at $1,150. Montgomery Community College, the best-paying two-year institution in the area, offered $1,500. And he was lucky to top off his service to higher educa-
tion with a prestige course: composition at Catholic University paid a full $2,000. He could not obtain a second class at any of them, so his total income for the semester was $5,590. None of the schools offered access to health insurance, but he was young and healthy and decided to take his chances. Suffice it to say that turned out to be a bad idea.
