The Adjunct

She has a PhD. Took seven years. Four hundred pages about something so specific that maybe twelve people in the world understood it. She refers to those seven years as “the work” and the twenty years since as “everything else.”

Everything else: four classes at three universities. Two are forty-minute drives apart. Total compensation across all three: thirty-one thousand dollars. No benefits. No office. No parking pass at two of the three. She holds office hours in her car because the adjunct office has six desks and eleven adjuncts.

The universities call her “part-time faculty.” She works fifty-five hours a week. Part-time is a legal classification, not a description. It means they don’t owe her health insurance, retirement, or the courtesy of knowing whether she’ll have classes next semester until three weeks before it starts.

She is not the exception. Seventy-three percent of college instructors in the United States are off the tenure track. The university built a system that runs on people like her. It doesn’t work despite adjuncts getting exploited. It works because they do.

The administration put it in the strategic plan: “leveraging flexible instructional resources to maintain financial sustainability.” That’s her. She’s the flexible instructional resource.

She could leave. People say that like it’s a solution. The PhD is a decade of specialization that qualifies her for exactly this job and nothing the market considers equivalent.

So she stays. Watches the university build a new athletics facility. Tries not to do the math on what the football coach makes per hour versus what she makes per hour.

The han isn’t that she’s underpaid. The han is that the system she believed in was designed to run on her willingness to accept less. And it does. Every semester.