Gleaning the Fields of Higher Education: Exercises of an Adjunct Self and Instructional Precaritization

Abstract

The use of adjunct faculty in higher education has become a widely discussed labor practice. The voices of adjuncts are largely absent in this inquiry and advocacy, an absence which wrongly suggests adjuncts a lack voice or of agency. In the first part of this piece, I argue that adjuncts should contribute to their field of inquiry to destabilize the notions of contingent instructional workers as mere classroom proctors, in need of others’ advocacy. In the second part, I relate episodes of adjuncts disregarded and embraced on their campuses. Stemming from years of teaching in higher education and adjunct organizing, this piece is written from an adjunct perspective, exploring the disregard and embrace adjuncts encounter in their institutional lives. Following Foucault's exercises of the self as part of a philosophical life, I call the academic productions of adjuncts “gleaning,” an exercise taken on by professors that enacts a philosophical project in the face of de-professionalization and precaritization. This critical and ethical intervention counterbalances managerial practices that dismiss adjunct labor and normalize the process of dismissal. Adjunct gleaning, I conclude, may never transform the two-tiered instructional system, though their cultural and intellectual production will hamper efforts to dismiss adjuncts’ presence and catalog them as agents of precarious survival.