by Chris Cumo

Anyone who teaches part-time knows the restless, transient quality of the work. One is a cerebral version of George Milton and Lennie Small, Steinbeck’s ar- chetypes of men forever on the go, never rooted to the soil or a job. Adjuncts are the temporary laborers in the academic vineyard. But Jacqueline May, adjunct professor of English at San Antonio College and Austin Community College in Texas, scoffs at the notion that she is temporary, insisting that no college or university could exist without adjuncts and that this dependence makes them a permanent feature of the academic landscape.

“We are not temporary, we are the lifeblood of a campus today,” she said. “Without us at our ridiculously low pay the college couldn’t function.”

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