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We have a kickoff meeting for adjunct faculty every fall. Every semester, I give the same five-minute talk. I invite my colleagues to steal from my notes below.
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I’ve worked at places where adjunct faculty were rehired, or not, based on pass rates. Fail too many students and you don’t get hired back. We don’t do that. I’m proud that the deans and I have never ranked adjuncts based on their pass rates and that we don’t assume that all student complaints are equally valid.
The college lives and dies by the success of students who graduate and move to other places. For transfer students, that means how well they do at their subsequent four-year schools. If our graduates routinely crash and burn at destination colleges, pretty soon those colleges won’t take our students anymore, and we lose our reason to exist. With programs that lead directly to employment, if employers report back that our grads are dangerously incompetent, they’ll stop hiring our grads, and we lose our reason to exist. Standards matter.
I’m not asking you to be sadistic, or to channel your Professor Kingsfield fantasies from The Paper Chase. I’m telling you that if you do what you legitimately can to help a student, and the student still fails, we have your back. In the classroom, your academic judgment is as valid as a full-time professor’s. Our job, as administration, is to ensure the quality of the academic program. Customers may always be right, but students aren’t.
And sometimes education requires learning that you aren’t very good at something. It can be that signal from the universe that you’re on the wrong path. Most people aren’t going to be very good at something they hate, and we all have different inclinations and talents. Letting a student know that a given path isn’t for them can be an act of kindness, done in the right spirit.
Students have certain rights. For example, they have a right to due process, so we have a grade-appeal process that a student can use if they believe that a grade is unjust. But the criteria applied to those appeals were determined by faculty, through our shared governance process, and they’re pretty specific: either a data entry/computation error, or disparate treatment. That’s it.
In the classroom, you are the authority figure, just as much as a tenured professor. We trust you to use that authority wisely; that’s why we hired you. We check in to make sure that things are going well, but if they aren’t, we’re here to help you get them back on track. The whole point of the enterprise is to provide students terrific instruction.
I started my career as an adjunct, driving my hatchback from gig to gig, cobbling together a living. I won’t pretend that the pay is great. But I, and we, can offer you professional respect.
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You’d think all of that would go without saying. It’s worth saying anyway.
