I want to tell you a story about my last semester of teaching at an American institution of Higher Education. I want to name names, to give details. I want to expose.

But I also want to keep working. I also want to earn a living.

I have the necessary qualifications. I have 98% positive overall student evaluations. Every semester. Every class. For the past 15 years. I use innovative teaching methods. I hold office hours even when I do not have an office. I respond to emails. I design my own lectures.

Adjuncts Have No Job Security Or Rights

And yet, as an adjunct, I live, and work, in constant terror. I am hired by the class, for the semester, and that's that. No more. No security. No sure thing that I will be able to pay bills, have food, use my skills from one semester to the next. No benefits. No dental. No vision. No doctor's visits. No therapy.

As an adjunct, I am a whim on a whim.

And this last semester was an upsetting example of that. I was hired to teach a class that the Chair of the Sociology Department practically begged me to teach. I had taken on other courses from another school but the limit they allow us in our regional university system is three courses, or 9 credits. This is to ensure we don't qualify for health care benefits or get paid too much. So I turned down an intro course for this upper level one. This course was one that I had taught online. It was a course that the department was phasing out. It was a course that was in so many ways, designed to fail.

I had to use the Chair's old lectures, and her favorite textbook. This course was her baby. Her pride and joy. Somehow, I had to make a failed online course into a functional and successful face-to-face course. And, I had to be utterly perfect in executing a course that was being canceled forever after this semester.

And I failed. Or rather, what was going to happen happened, but I was the one who got to take the fall, be the scapegoat, pay the price.

Dead-Course Walking

See, the course was a dead-course-walking, and I am an adjunct. I am expendable. The blame could go to me when the lectures were boring, the book was boring, the assignments confusing, the students not interested. I did not create any of these materials, but I had to use them. See?

I tried to innovate or change it up, to make the course actually work — for example, I created a lot of group work and peer review for assignments to build community, create engagement, and to breathe life into the major purpose of the course: to write a Sociological research proposal.

Yet, innovation is not welcome or rewarded for adjuncts. Mixing methods, finding creative ways to use group work, using relevant current materials, and in any way having a student-centered and student-led classroom is not something adjuncts get to do.

I am innovative. I am passionate. And I have seen that this is something that is not welcome coming from the likes of me, just another lowly adjunct cog in the machine.

The course was a mess. And I am not re-hired. I had 98% excellent evaluations. I had students who told me they wrote letters to the department saying they really loved my way of teaching, and that I made them want to major in Sociology. But, oh well. I will not be getting my $500 a month next semester. I am a casualty of the gig economy, of the Walmart of Higher Education.

And I have NO recourse. Adjuncts have very little rights. Very little voice. And very little power. We are expected to be perfectly perfect in every way every day of every semester, and if we aren't, if we make mistakes, or try new things, or have a bad day, — we are gone. We are done.

Tenured Faculty Enjoy Freedom and Rights

Meanwhile, tenured faculty have the luxury of being bad teachers, being boring, using horrible books, assigning confusing work, getting negative evaluations, and just having an off moment, — but they can continue on. They can experiment, innovate, or not, but always be fine, always have work, always have power.

This chair took a lot of issues out on me. This course was of her design and she would not let me change an inch of it. When I tried and it was going well, she intervened to say she was concerned about how it might go. So I had to stop my attempts at originality and passion. I had to fall in line. And when it did not work, I was let go. Without even a word. Just a glance at the next semester schedule and not seeing me on it.

Hope for Adjuncts? Or are we to remain the "Dirty Little Secrets" of Higher Ed?

Adjunct unions are a thing. They are a start. Even The Chronicle of Higher Education took the time to talk about us for this one thing. But by and large, we are ignored by institutions, by tenured faculty, and by the publications and organizations of Higher Education and of our respective disciplines.

We do not have a place. It is like we are the dirty secret of Higher Education. And we are supposed to stay silent about it.

We are the largest percentage of all college faculty. We do the most work, for the least pay, with no benefits. We are expected to do the work of secure and safe faculty but with the constant fear and disdainful treatment of being second-class employees. As an article in the Washington Post notes, being an adjunct "keeps you nice and disposable."

This is unjust. I never thought I would find it in a Sociology department, but I have. Sociology is not always about doing what it teaches, — it creates and recreates and benefits from the systems it knows are oppressive, it knows are unfair, and that it spends lip service on in many classrooms. But that's an article for another day.

I know I have touched a lot of hearts and minds as a teacher at this place of Higher Education, but, I am not welcome back. Because a class that was dying died and it died because it was set up to fail.

And now it is back to business as usual for that University, while I, and many other fellow adjuncts, set out to try and try and try in this gig economy that devalues us at every turn.

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Jenny Justice is a mom, Sociology instructor, and writer. You can follow her on Medium and at Jenny Justice, Writer. She has been recognized as a Top Writer on Medium in Poetry, Parenting, Reading, Education, Racism, and Climate Change, so far.