Opinion: Invisible but Essential: The Struggles of Adjunct Faculty and the Power of Collective Action
Name Withheld at Author’s Request
Identity, institutional affiliation, and conflicts of interest have been verified by the editors.
The lives of adjunct professors in American universities often read like a contradiction. These are men and women who have spent years earning advanced degrees, who devote themselves to the craft of teaching, and who play an indispensable role in the intellectual lives of their students. Yet for all that, they exist in a twilight zone of higher education, where their labor is essential but their presence is treated as peripheral. They are the backbone of the system, but one that administrators seem determined to pretend doesn’t exist. In a country that insists on the value of education, it’s hard not to notice that the people doing much of the educating are asked to work under conditions that border on absurd.
The absurdity begins with pay. For a single course - an entire semester of lectures, office hours, grading, student emails at two in the morning - an adjunct might receive three or four thousand dollars. The math is merciless: divide that figure by the hours spent preparing, teaching, and marking papers, and it comes out to less than the wage of a barista, without the health insurance that sometimes comes with a coffee-shop job. To make ends meet, many adjuncts stack class upon class, racing from one campus to another, juggling syllabi, and learning the quickest bus routes between institutions. Their days become an endless loop of lectures and commutes, their nights consumed by grading stacks of essays at the kitchen table. Summers, of course, bring no salary at all.
Instability is the constant undertone of this life. Adjuncts rarely know whether they’ll be teaching next semester until the last minute, and even then, courses can be canceled without warning if student enrollment dips. Imagine building a household budget around contracts that appear only weeks before the term begins, and vanish just as quickly. One canceled course can mean the loss of rent money. One low-enrollment semester can erase months of planning. In such a system, the notion of a career becomes elusive; instead, adjuncts piece together something closer to academic gig work, where continuity and stability are luxuries reserved for someone else.
What makes all this even more remarkable is the absence of benefits. Health insurance, parental leave, retirement contributions - these are simply off the table for most adjuncts. A professor may be responsible for teaching hundreds of undergraduates each year, shaping their futures and mentoring them through crises, but if she herself gets sick, she may be on her own. This creates a quiet desperation, a sense that the university values its faculty only so long as they remain healthy, compliant, and cheap. If a professor falls ill, or dares to need a break, the university can simply slot another into the position, as easily as if they were changing batteries in a machine.
Then there’s the matter of recognition - or rather, the lack of it. Adjuncts are often excluded from faculty meetings, given no say in shaping curricula, and left out of the decision-making processes that define the intellectual culture of the institution. Some don’t even get offices, or else must share them with half a dozen others. It is not unusual to find an adjunct holding office hours in a hallway, an empty classroom, or the corner of a student café. The message is clear: the work matters, but the worker does not. The invisibility is not incidental; it’s built into the system.
The human cost is harder to quantify, but no less real. Many adjuncts enter the profession with an almost romantic faith in teaching, eager to devote their lives to the exchange of ideas. Yet the grind of poverty wages, instability, and exclusion wears that faith thin. They find themselves pretending to a kind of professional dignity in front of their students while privately worrying about groceries or rent. It is a peculiar kind of humiliation, one that is both invisible to the outside world and omnipresent in the adjunct’s own mind. The paradox is cruel: they are trusted to shape the minds of the next generation, but not trusted with a living wage.
If the situation sounds unsustainable, that’s because it is. And yet universities continue to operate this way precisely because adjuncts have managed, year after year, to sustain it. Their willingness to endure hardship, born of commitment to their students and hope for something better, has allowed administrations to treat their labor as inexhaustible. But there are limits to endurance, and increasingly adjuncts are finding them.
The alternatives begin, as they so often do, with connection. For a group of workers whose professional lives are marked by isolation - teaching one class here, another across town - simply gathering, even digitally, can feel like a revelation. Sharing stories turns private shame into collective recognition, and recognition into the beginnings of solidarity. Visibility is another step: when students realize that the instructors guiding them through Shakespeare or microbiology are paid like temp workers, their indignation often transforms into support. No institution likes to explain to parents why tuition dollars are spent on lavish administrative salaries while the teachers are living in near-poverty.
But the most powerful changes have come when adjuncts organize formally. Across the country, groups of contingent faculty have unionized, securing contracts that guarantee higher pay, multi-year appointments, and even benefits. Universities fight these efforts, of course, but victories have piled up nonetheless, proving that what once seemed impossible is within reach. Unionization is not only a practical tool but a symbolic one: it transforms adjuncts from a scattered group of individuals into a collective with power, one that administrations must finally treat as equals.
The story of adjuncts is, in some ways, the story of higher education itself. Universities that market themselves as beacons of learning rely on the quiet exploitation of those who do the teaching. The question is not whether adjuncts deserve better - they clearly do - but whether they will continue to be invisible. If they choose otherwise, if they build networks, demand recognition, and organize, they may not only change their own conditions but alter the very shape of the modern university. What they ask for is not extravagant: a wage that reflects their work, stability enough to plan for a future, and a measure of respect equal to the responsibility they carry. What they offer, in return, is the possibility of a university that practices the values it preaches.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Academic Observer or its affiliates.