The Chronicle published a piece this week by Douglas W. Texter,
"No Tenure? No
Problem." Part-timers, it goes, can now make a pile of money (in the
neighborhood of $100k annually) by stacking teaching gigs at a couple of
different institutions. Texter offers ten principles useful for adjusting
one’s thinking while taking the plunge into the pot of gold that is
"entrepreneurial adjuncting." Among the guiding tenets: care, assume a
mercenary attitude, change what you read, change the company you keep, watch
Risky Business, and so on.

I learned about the column not because I pay all that much attention to
CHE but because it drifted across
WPA-L,
a listserv I am subscribed to, albeit in digest mode. Texter’s column
stirred a fair amount of discussion, something like 32 list messages on the day
it appeared. And without pointing too directly at any of the comments or
naming names, the responses included variations of:

• CHE is link-baiting (flashing a glimpse of the shocking and
  grotesque, tabloid-style);
• it can’t be done: no multi-part-timers are making $100,000;
• skepticism followed by mathematical improbabilities (viz., it would take
  98 bowls of Captain Crunch to get the nutritional value in one bowl of
  Total);
• $100,000 isn’t all that much money, especially considering benefits are
  nowhere a part of the picture;
• Texter’s column is satire (or the obverse: no it’s not);
• What could possibly be CHE‘s motive in publishing this?;
• irrelevant;
• inside word has it that D. W. Texter is seeking a tenure-track position
  now that he has made his great fortune.

Sure, I’m having a little bit of fun with these characterizations, but I mean
to capture the spirit of the dialogue more in the interest of marking it for a
future return rather than summing it perfectly for those who didn’t watch as it
unfolded. Clearly there is a lot of interest in the proposition that
part-timers, especially online part-timers, can make a load of dough simply by
teaching several moderate loads. The perennial problem of mileage is, in
the 100K part-part-part-timer model, solved by an internet connection. And I
don’t mean "solved" with respect to professional-ethical considerations; I mean
"solved" in the sense that online, a body can be linked in with many different
institutional scenes as there are tabs open in Firefox. So, this happens, and
yet we don’t understand it all that well because it is only partially visible
from any single institutional perspective (i.e., it doesn’t happen at any one
place).

For the past couple of years, I’ve had a hand in mentoring new online
instructors at another university, checking in every week or so by email or
phone with those who are teaching an online course for the first time.
While in this role, I’ve had the chance to meet a couple of entrepreneurial
types who are doing a heckuva lot of teaching online for multiple institutions
(note: many are teaching in fields other than Composition or even English
Studies). Are some making 100k? I imagine so. Okay, maybe 90k.
And collecting income by working at, say, three institutions without ever
leaving their in-home offices. Once I called a new instructor I’d talked
to a couple of times before and heard, "Now which university are you with?" And
more recently, a part-timer told me about teaching experiences with
Axia,
Heald, and Baker before mentioning that
the most s.he’d ever taught was 18 sections in one semester–all FYC at four
different institutions (none of this was online, btw). We didn’t talk gross
income. But that’s less my point. Instead, I’ve been thinking about
how this sort of load passes unnoticed because it is distributed, decentralized.
There is no large-scale accounting system in place that would give anyone
insights into just how prevalent a practice this is, although it wouldn’t
surprise me at all to see institutions and accrediting bodies coordinate some
means of calling these practices into check, perhaps by creating some sort of
regional clearinghouse or something. I’m not all that well versed in how
accrediting bodies address contingent labor in higher ed (or, for that matter,
how those involved in accreditation audits come and go, how they become familiar
with the interests they serve, and so on), but I continue to have an interest in
the growing tension between part-time labor as it is typically conceived and how
these new work categories that fall outside prevalent mythologies. I’m curious
whether and to what degree these new work categories will change the shape of
ongoing conversations about part-time labor, for better or worse, in the next
five or ten or fifty years.