TEXT ANALYSIS

Oh Adjunct! My Adjunct! (by Carmen Mara Machado)

I spent half of my undergraduate career figuring out what I didnt want to do. I started off in the
journalism program, switched to literature, was undecided for a few panicked, free-floating
months, and studied photography for a time. But the spring of my sophomore year, I enrolled in
a fiction-writing workshop with an instructor named Harvey Grossinger.Harvey was a tall, broad
man with a trim gray beard. He was gruff but kind to his students, without coddling them. He
insisted that we sit at a round table. My stories would come back to me with his notes crammed
between lines and creeping up the margins. His comments on my prose and on the psychology
of charactershis particular specialtieswere unfailingly astute...
One story of mine ended with the protagonist speaking about a fuzzy photograph of a girl hed
known. Her face is a blur, Id written, and he doesnt know why. Yes, Harvey scrawled
beneath. He does. And you do, too. I did. Stapled to the top of every returned draft was a
piece of colored stationeryteal, gold, redfilled from beginning to end with single-spaced
narrative comments. He signed every letter HLG.
These critiques treated my stories as serious things, as pieces of art worthy of real criticism. I
took the class once, twice, a third time as an independent study. Eventually, I couldnt fit it into
my schedule anymore. I graduatedjust in time for the recessionand moved to California.
What I didnt know at the timeand what I wouldnt figure out for the better part of the next
decadewas that Harvey was an adjunct. He didnt tell us, and I didnt know to ask. As an
undergraduate, I never heard the term. Adjuncts are generally hired on semester-to-semester
contracts, given no health insurance or retirement benefits, no office, no professional
development, and few university resources. Compensation per courseincluding not just
classroom hours but grading, reading, responding to student e-mails, and office hoursvaries,
but the median pay, according to a recent report, is twenty-seven hundred dollars. Many
adjuncts teach at multiple universities, commuting between two or three schools in order to
make ends meet, and are often unable to pursue their own academic or artistic work because of
their schedules. In the past four decades, tenured and tenure-track positions have plummeted
and adjunct instructor jobs have soared, second only in growth to administrators. Adjuncts have
always had roles to play: filling in for a last-minute class, covering for a professor on sabbatical,
providing outside expertise for a one-off, specialized course. But the position was not designed
to provide nearly half of a schools faculty or the majority of a persons income. Its estimated
that adjuncts constitute more than forty per cent of all instructors at American colleges and
universities...
The first National Adjunct Walkout Day was held late last month, reportedly prompted by a
proposal from an anonymous adjunct instructor at San Jose State. Some teachers went on oneday strikes; others talked to their classes about what the walkout was meant to demonstrate.
Around the same time, the magazine Pacific Standard published an essay called Are Adjunct
Professors the New Fast-Food Workers? It generated so many responses that they have just
followed it up with a special issue devoted to the topic. The uptick in adjunct advocacy can be
traced in part to the 2013 death of Margaret Mary Vojtko, who taught for twenty-five years at
Duquesne; Vojtkos full story is a complicated one, but her death highlighted how little
universities are providing for the kind of teachers they increasingly depend on.
Harveys collection of stories, The Quarry, won the Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction
in 1997, among other prizes. He had an M.F.A. from my alma mater, and taught there as a

teaching assistant for a few years before receiving a full-time position. That position had a fiveyear term, and after that ended he became an adjunct, splitting his time between two local
schoolsadvising thesis students and teaching classesuntil that work dried up, too. By his
count, he has sent more than thirty students to graduate schools, including Julia Fierro, whose
first novel, Cutting Teeth, came out last year, and Josh Rolnick, whose debut short-story
collection, Pulp and Paper, won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award in 2011.
In California, I found a job that I hated but that I thought would be temporary. Two years later, I
was still there and miserable. I hated the Bay Area and its mercurial, damp weather and skyhigh rent and new-age judgment that clung to everything. My boyfriend and I broke up. I read
and wrote and watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I decided to apply to M.F.A.
programs. A lot of them, all over the country, anything to get me out of California.
I e-mailed Harvey for advice. Hed mentioned M.F.A. programs a few times in passing, and I
thought that he might be able to write me a letter of recommendation.
But he did more than write letters. He asked me to send him what I was working on, and
returned stories Id e-mailed him by postin thick, heavy envelopesannotated the same way
theyd been in school. When I got closer to deadlines, I sent him draft after draft, half a dozen in
a week. He encouraged me to apply to as many funded programs as I could, and wrote letters
for all of them. When I thanked him, hed just tell me to keep going.
After I got the acceptance call Id been waiting for, the one Id dreamed about, Harvey was the
first person I called.
I got in, I said, my voice cracking.
Of course you did, he said.
I cant believe it.
I can, he responded, then chuckled. Im knelling right now.
What does that mean? I asked.
Its like youre my child, he said, and youre onstage and dancing beautifully, and Im so, so
proud.
When I got to graduate school and began investigating post-graduate work, I finally learned
what it meant to be an adjunct, and what such positions entailed. When it occurred to me that
this was the job Harvey had, I was embarrassed by my navet, and angry that the school had
never spelled this out for me, had never made it clear that so much of the work that Harvey did
for his students was essentially uncompensated.
We like to rhapsodize about the influential teacher who changes lives and hearts, and makes
students stand on their desks in academic ecstasy. But this doesnt translate in the
contemporary world of higher education.
There is a complicated culture of silence that surrounds adjuncting. Schools have no incentive
to draw attention to how many adjuncts most institutions now rely on, and as for the adjuncts
themselves, addressing the subject raises awkward questions, and might even put their jobs at

risk: in her essay The Teaching Class, Rachel Riederer recounts how merely explaining how
adjuncting worked to a group of students outside of class threw one adjuncts job into jeopardy.
There also can be an element of shame, or reservations about discussing financial matters, or a
reluctance to complain. Harvey tells me he didnt think of it as a secret; it just never occurred to
him to bring it up. I wouldve told anyone whod asked, he said...
But then the students often dont know to ask. If more of them learned how many of their
classes are taught by poorly paid, unsupported teachers, even as their tuition rises, how would
they react? Would they question the value of their education? Call for reform? Or would they do
what I suspect I would have done if Id known Harvey, the most valuable teacher in my
undergraduate career, was an adjunct: burned with embarrassment, and never reached out to
him after the semester closed, because Id already received too much?
I am an adjunct myself nowadays. I am luckier than most: I have a partner who works full-time,
a steady stream of outside freelance work, a high level of control over my classes. I also have
no kids to feed or mortgage to paynot yet, anyway. Working for so little is frustrating, but not
fatal. Someday, though, I want to save money, have children, and buy a house, and it would be
impossible to do this on an adjuncts pay. The idea of giving up teaching, though, is agonizing.
Harvey and his family made it work. Being an adjunct sometimes made him feel invisible, he
admitted to me, and making so little money was difficult. But his wife worked full time, and he
was at home with their daughters. He says that having good students was my great luck, and
that it made all the difference in the world. He took great joy in seeing our successes and
knowing his part in them. And its true that there are profound pleasures in teaching: seeing your
students figuring things out, and flourishing, is like nothing else Ive experienced.
Before class on the first day of my first adjuncting job, I put my name on the whiteboard, and on
a lark wrote Prof. before it. I even took a photo. Then I lost my nerve, erasing the letters with
the heel of my hand, leaving behind a gray smear. Now, when students address me as
professor in e-mailseven though Ive told them to call me by my first nameit strikes an odd
note, a plunk of mislaid fingers on a piano. Im not a professor. If I disappeared at the end of the
semester, the school would replace me without much trouble, having invested nothing at all in
my career. This sensationa great responsibility, precariously heldis also like nothing else
Ive experienced...
I dont want to give away my expertise for so little. But I dont want to stop teaching, and I dont
want my students to be afraid to reach out to me after we part, eitherI dont want them to do
what I would have done. I thrive on their news: theyre heading to graduate school, or theyre
submitting work to be published, or are publishing, or have a new project. I dont only want to
teach; I want teaching to be a career, something that I can afford to keep doing.
The irony of this setup has not escaped me: the adjuncts who teach well despite the low pay
and the lack of professional support may inspire in their students a similar passionprompting
them to be financially taken advantage of in turn. It strikes me as a grim perversion of the power
of teaching. A key lesson in higher education is that few things matter more than good questions
and, if we dont speak up, students will never know what to ask.
Carmen Maria Machados first book, Her Body and Other Parties, is forthcoming from
Graywolf Press.
March 25th, 2015 The New Yorker

1.-WRITE a commentary on this text. INCLUDE the following items.

a) Text type and genre.
b) Linguistic functions.
c) Coherence, theme, thesis and structure (ideas and arguments).
d) Cohesion, syntactic, semantic and literary figures.

2.- The title of the text evokes evident cultural and literary references. EXPLAIN them.
3.- GIVE A DEFINITION of the following words.
a) Sophomore
b) Professor
c) Mortgage
d) Commuting
e) Reluctance

4.- EXPLAIN the meaning of the following paragraph in your own words. AVOID repetition:
"...In the past 4 decades, tenured and tenure-track positions have plummeted and adjunct
instructor jobs have soared, second only in growth to administrators."

5.-ANALYZE the following words (morphologically and syntactically) and WRITE the phonetic
transcription.
a) Journalism
b) Unfailingly
c) Navet
d) Uncompensated
e) Reluctance

6.- FIND an hyperbole in the and EXPLAIN it.

1.-WRITE a commentary on this text. INCLUDE the following items.

a) Text type and genre.
b) Linguistic functions.
c) Coherence, theme, thesis and structure (ideas and arguments).
d) Cohesion, syntactic, semantic and literary figures.

2.- The title of the text evokes evident cultural and literary references. EXPLAIN them.
The title of the piece, "O Adjunct! My Adjunct!" is a nod to Walt Whitman and also perhaps the
movie "Dead Poets Society," with its celebration of creative instruction.
Ms. Machado affectionately discusses one of her most influential and inspiring teachers, an
instructor named Harvey Grossinger: "What I didnt know at the timeand what I wouldnt figure
out for the better part of the next decadewas that Harvey was an adjunct. He didnt tell us,
and I didnt know to ask. As an undergraduate, I never heard the term."
We must be honest as well and note that our students may be fuzzy on the precise definition of
"adjunct." The word doesn't come up much.
There are many ways students could figure out whether their teacher is a part-timer, such as the
person's title on the college Website, the sharedor non-existentoffice space, or absence at
college events such as commencement. Another dead giveaway would be a large brief case or
backpack filled with everything needed for class. A harried demeanor might also be a clue, but
full-timers are hardly immune from this trait.
But generally, students don't know unless the instructor tells them. Even then they don't care,
and why should they? They DO know and care about instruction, grading, class policies, and
such.
In fact it is a tribute to the quality of adjunct teaching if students can't tell the difference. Student
evaluations certainly don't seem to show any distinction. But this very lack of knowledge,
unfortunately, also signals the long road ahead for part-timers in terms of pay and benefits. It is
no wonder that college leaders generally see no problem with the proliferation of adjunct
instruction in recent years.

3.- GIVE A DEFINITION of the following words.

a) Sophomore: a student in the second year at a high school, college, or university.

FRESHMAN / SOPHOMORE / JUNIOR / SENIOR

b) Professor: a college or university teacher of the highest academic rank in a particular

branch of learning.
c) Mortgage: an amount of money loaned to buy a house

d) Commuting: to travel regularly over some distance, as from a suburb into a city and

back again:
e) Reluctance: unwilling, not inclined to do something:

4.- EXPLAIN the meaning of the following paragraph in your own words. AVOID repetition:
"...In the past 4 decades, tenured and tenure-track positions have plummeted and adjunct
instructor jobs have soared, second only in growth to administrators."
There job vacancies for adjuncts are increasing like administration jobs, whereas permanent
teaching positions have dropped for 40 years.
5.-ANALYZE the following words (morphologically and syntactically) and WRITE the phonetic
transcription.
a) Journalism /nlzm/
common, noncount, abstract noun derived from the noun- journal (lexeme) and the
derivational denominal suffix -ism which means current of thought.
b) Unfailingly /nfelli/
adverb derived from the participal adjective failing ,the negative prefix -un and the suffix -ly
(adjunt??)
c) Navet /nivte/

common, noncount,abstract noun derived from the adjective -nave (lexeme) and
the derivational suffix -et of French origin.
d) Uncompensated /nkmpnsetd/
participal adjective derived from the verb compensate (lexeme), the negative prefix -un and
the inflectional suffix -ed. it is stative, and it's function within the sentence is attributive.
e) Reluctance /rlktns/
Common, noncount abstract noun derived from the verb (lexeme) reluct and the derivational
deverbal suffix -ance meaning the action or process of doing something.

6.- FIND an hyperbole in the and EXPLAIN it.