Adjunct Precarity
or, pleasure & hilarity in poetry
Susan M. Schultz, “Elf Out of Season”
Joanna Fuhrman
Are We Having Fun Yet?
Years ago, the poet David Shapiro told me a story about his friend, a painter who was going up for tenure. The artist, when he was in front of the tenure review committee, cracked a joke about the whole process being like a game of three-card monte where all the cards are blank. He mimed the action of dealing the cards and threw up his hands. The chair looked at him, confused and annoyed.
This wasn’t a time for jokes, I guess. But even though I was “just” an adjunct at the time, I understood how David’s friend must have felt. There’s something inherently uncomfortable for most creative people about the way art is valued in the academy. This is true if you are hired on a tenure track, or if you are part of the precarious mass of worker bees that does most of the academy’s heavy-lifting. I imagine the artist felt that there was something inherently absurd, if not painful, about the capricious nature of the process.
A few days later, I was at the American Writers’ and Publisher’s Association Conference in Denver, CO. And the high-altitude as well as other poets’ anxiety about who was on or not on “the market” made me feel as if I was at the bottom of a well. I had a dream that night, amid the Denver mountain clouds, about a tenure review committee meeting, in which instead of talking about a candidate’s dossier, they were discussing a pear made of black ash.
I wrote the following poem about it. It is called “The Letter,” which I would later publish in The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2016):
You asked me to write you a letter for tenure.
I handed over a fossilized pear.
Better than words, I thought
until you left the conference room,
inchoate bunny rabbits falling from your eyes.
As in most meetings, I was eating
a marshmallow shaped like myself
which meant time was a little slower
and space, a little bigger than you’d think.
I knew I needed to start over.
Something had gone wrong
when we started calling our
undulating nexus of winding ideations
and spastic limbs an “institution”
instead of a school, but what else
could we say after the donors replaced
the windows with reproduction X-rays
of their children’s rebooted brains.
I should have known the pear
would fall to ash if touched.
I should have known the pear
was too beautiful to be a symbol
or argument for anything but
itself, its own dry peariness.
All afternoon the committee
circled the black fruit, gossiping.
I wanted them to embrace its bare
fragility, its dry delicate matter.
I wanted them to see the pear’s darkness,
not just with their bulging eyes,
but with every atom, every mercurial
cell of their alien and ailing flesh.
Like the speaker in the poem, I long to express my thoughts not in the language of argument, rational thinking and research but in an embodied reality. I suppose it’s a strange poem for an “adjunct” to write. After all, I wasn’t ever going to be up for tenure review. And I know that having one’s work valued for its status is better than having one’s work considered irrelevant to one’s job. In the former, at least your institution values your work monetarily and acknowledges its benefit to the campus and the larger world. At the same time, when your work is valued by the tenure review process, it’s not your actual work; it’s the level of perceived prestige your audience has. While this may be a better subject position to be in, I think it reflects the flip side of a system that allows so many people to be exploited.
I want to believe that another system altogether is possible.
Instead of being nostalgic for the university of the past, in which there may have been less austerity but academic life was just as hierarchal, I would like to imagine a less status-obsessed structure, a fairer structure, one in which everyone makes enough to afford to pay the rent, to eat, to get ill occasionally. In order for this structure to evolve, we all have to learn how to value justice instead of self-interest.
When I first became full-time (I am now a non-tenure track professor), I attended a union meeting of the full-time faculty. I felt physically sick because the main topic members wanted to talk about was lobbying to switch sabbatical pay from eighty to one-hundred percent. I couldn’t believe we were talking about this subject when part-time lecturers (who were the vast majority of the creative writing faculty—my beloved peers—) had no access to affordable health insurance and were receiving poverty wages for their teaching work. Since then, as the university has used the pandemic as an excuse for austerity, the focus of the full-time faculty union has changed, and I have to say I have been heartened by that, at least. Even though our raises were suspended, I have noticed the full-time faculty de-emphasizing our own status and our own raises, instead focusing more on trying to protect part-timers and staff members from budget cuts. Our union recently has been working on a plan to furlough full-time employees (in a way that their income could be supplemented by unemployment insurance) in an effort to help adjuncts and staff—especially low-income custodial staff. It’s the first time in my university’s history when all nineteen unions have been working together.
While it’s been frustrating to watch the administration stonewall and the dean ignore the faculty’s resolutions, I find myself encouraged by the faculty union’s vision. I have also been impressed with a few of the tenure-track literature department faculty members who I see working hard, spear-heading resolutions, and directly advocating for the part-time faculty.
The poems in the videos I am presenting here arise from my experiences as a part-time lecturer for many years, and currently as a non-tenure-track faculty member. The first poetry video I wrote and produced is called The Adjunct Commuter—as you may know, I stole the title of this poem from the name of a magazine, The Adjunct Commuter Weekly, edited and published by Dushko Petrovic. A press release has described it as “the first magazine devoted to the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic.”
Laughing at the hilarity of this magazine description, I have written three poems with this same title. Before I wrote the first “Adjunct Commuter” poem, I used to have dreams every night about buses. Sometimes the buses would be driving to protest marches or to work for political candidates; or sometimes the buses would be driving to far-flung part-time teaching jobs, ones that either I had in real life, or in the life of my dreams.
After writing a draft of my first “Adjunct Commuter” poem (just published in my book To a New Era, by Hanging Loose Press), I started to see the life of the bus rider as a metaphor for being an adjunct college instructor. Like the bus rider, an adjunct instructor has to be able to find the joy, value, and possible humor in the process itself in order to survive. The poem starts, “I’m waiting for the bus and imagine the street is made/of money, but it’s not the type of money/accepted on this planet or any planet.”
And the poem ends:
….One day I am waiting
so long for the bus that I forget that I am waiting for a bus, and find
myself inventing music, dairy-free béchamel and urban tetherball.
They crown me the biggest shark in the biggest city of the universe,
and I am on every TV channel, big toothed grinning like I’m the host
or something, but nobody watches TV anymore. Everyone would
rather be writing post-linguistic poetry or studying artisanal
adzuki bean canning. If a woman smiles on a TV set and nobody
watches yadda yadda, you know. So, I go back to my bus stop,
remember I should have been waiting for the bus. I enjoy waiting
for busses. I’m a bus waiter. There’s beauty in waiting for the bus.
In this “Adjunct Commuter” sequel, which I turned into a poetry video, I imagine myself not as a bus rider, but as the bus itself:
The second video I present here is from a poem I wrote as a full-timer during a time when, because of a bureaucratic mess-up, I was unsure if I was going to remain full-time or have to go back to being an adjunct teacher at my institution. Albert Mobilio asked me to create a piece for his “Double-Take” series at Apex Art on the theme of “fun.” I decided to write a sestina, in which all the end words would have the word “fun” embedded within them. Of course, the fear of encroaching austerity weaseled its way into the poem. I would say that this poem, like “The Adjunct Commuter,” is not primarily a poem generating a social critique, but is instead about trying to figure out how to find pleasure and even fun while we live under the constraints of capitalism. The personal struggle not to feel alienated, in an alienating system, is at the heart of almost all of my work
I want to end with a quote from Fred Moten, in conversation with co-author Stefano Harney at the end of their collaborative piece, The Undercommons: “Everybody is pissed off and feels bad, but seldom do you enter into a conversation where people are going, ‘Why is it that this doesn’t feel good to us?’” He goes on to critique the academy’s distrust of pleasure: “Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely at the fucked up-face of things….”
I want to echo Moten’s demand for what he calls “refusal of the academy of misery.” I hope we can confront the systemic injustice, as well as organize and protest and fight and critique—but also have fun. For me, pleasure is at the heart of why one should read and write poetry—and, of course, teach poetry. I loved what David Grundy said in his talk at our March colloquy on “Poetics & the University in Crisis,” that “poetry has a negativity that can absorb hurt yet finger the wound.”[2] For me, the way that poetry can “absorb the hurt” without claiming to heal it is by embracing playfulness, fun, humor, and imagination.
And so, with that, I present to you my video Are We Having Fun Yet?
[1] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013),
[2] See David Grundy’s revised talk as the essay printed here in this issue of Chant de la Sirene, entitled, “A Voice from the U.K.: Poetry, the Student Movement, and Defeat” on this page.