Adjuncting

On my first day of adjuncting at a community college, I had students explain to me that they were majoring in gunsmithing and firefighting. It was a culture shock, to say the least.

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 adjunct's job into jeopardy.