Running on Fumes: One Snapshot of Adjunct Life and Commuting

For the first 8.5 years of our marriage, my husband spent his life as some combination of grad student/grad teacher/dissertation writer or adjunct professor. He worked nearly constantly—writing his dissertation, doing course prep, grading, writing articles, applying for jobs, and driving. We lived on the border of Washington, DC, with its high cost of living, to be close to his school. Fortunately, I found work along the nearest metro line and eventually began my own graduate program.

Three years out, we still carry a lot of emotional weight and exhaustion we’re still getting past. We’re in a far better spot now. We love the beauty of Central PA. We benefit from the lower cost of living. He has fulfilling work teaching outside academia and I’m on the Penn State Libraries faculty. But I don’t know how long it’s going to take to recover from the years of precarity and overwork, the strain they caused on our marriage, and the general exhaustion.

There’s a lot about those times I don’t like to think about. There’s a lot that I can’t express, define, or quantify about it. I have no idea how much time he spent grading and doing class prep. I have no idea how many evenings I entertained myself because he was writing his dissertation.¹ But at times I get the urge to quantify or describe the experience.

For example, for the 4.5 years after he got his PhD, my husband taught at a total of 6 institutions around the greater DC area and out into Maryland. This work required the regular use of our only car and sometimes it felt as though the time on the road and cost of gas getting from one place to another was hardly worth the effort (see Spring 2015). I found myself wondering how many miles he really drove. What the gas cost. How the wear and tear on the car compared to the paychecks he received. this is something I might get my head around.

Courses, Miles, and GSA Rates

Using his syllabuses from the last 3 years of teaching, I put together a picture of what the commuting aspects of his work looked like. I included his gross income per semester. I’m sharing it because it’s one picture of what this kind of life looks like. Others have had it worse. Having read those stories and talked to those people, I see so many ways in which this could’ve been harder. And yet, we lived in an expensive area. His student loans from undergrad, master’s, and PhD programs came in at over $100,000. These gigs expected him to have a PhD. And it took almost all of his waking time. As I said above, there’s so much I can’t quantify. But here’s one snapshot.

(see below for how I developed the numbers.)

I included both estimated % of pre-tax wage and real $s (although pre-tax) because the % demonstrates how much of the wage was being eaten up by gas, insurance, repairs, etc.² And the real $ is what got used toward DC area rents, food, and also student loan repayment on over $100,000. Fall 2015 shows what a fairly healthy percentae would look like. And for two semesters, it’s about 1/3 (and realistically, more, because we still got taxed) of wages going to just the commute.

Schedule in Practice

While digging through old syllabus documents and emails, I found the following schedule which he’d assembled so I knew when he’d be where. This schedule does not include office hours, which happened after/before classes at the two schools. It’s one example of what this looked like, and how he might drive 450 miles in a week for just 3 days of work.

Monday:
8:20AM: Leave for work.
10:20AM - 11:20AM: Logic @ School 1
11:30AM - 12:30PM: Philosophy of Music @ School 1
3:00 PM - 3:50 PM: Classical Philosophy @ School 2
5:00 PM - 6:15 PM: Classical Philosophy @ School 2
8:15PM: Home from work.

Wednesday:
8:20AM: Leave for work.
10:20AM - 11:20AM: Logic @ School 1
11:30AM - 12:30PM: Philosophy of Music @ School 1
3:00 PM - 3:50 PM: Classical Philosophy @ School 2
5:00 PM - 6:15 PM: Classical Philosophy @ School 2
8:15PM: Home from work.

Friday:
8:20AM: Leave for work.
10:20AM - 11:20AM: Logic @ School 1
11:30AM - 12:30PM: Philosophy of Music @ School 1
3:00 PM - 3:50 PM: Classical Philosophy @ School 2
5:50PM: Home from work.

That left Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays to do prep for 3 different classes and grading for 4. For those who haven’t taught, that’s only barely enough time. Not only did Tuesday/Thursday classes leave more time for prep, they cost far less in gas/miles. On the other hand, teaching 4 longer TR classes is even more draining than 4 classes on MWF. He didn’t do that during these 3 years, so he got paid less on those semesters.

Reflections

Visceral memories of the feast or famine nature of adjuncting came back to me as I went through these numbers. While I was tempted to leave out Fall 2015 as an aberration, I included it for several reasons. For context, my husband was invited as a Visiting Assistant Professor (at an institution where he’d never taught before) to teach two honors classes and cover a maternity leave. This paid $9,000/class. By contrast, other institutions’ pay per class ranged from $3300 to $5000.

You’ll note he taught 3 additional classes during this period, a teaching load which was not necessary given that those two classes. $9,000 per class, $18,000 from one institution for that semester, was far more than any other semester. It was almost 3x his lowest-paid full semester. However, adjuncting forces one to develop a mindset of scarcity and accomodation. He could teach other classes. This opportunity was a one-off. If he didn’t teach at the other two schools which provided him regular classes, would they move on? The two-class $6,600 gross income semester before that exemplifies his fear. Both of those semesters were hell on us, for different reasons.

What he did not know at the time was that in December of 2015, I would take a job in Indiana, we would move, and he would give up adjuncting. It hasn’t always been smooth since. The transition to find a new career included periods of unemployment and positions which were a terrible fit. But after 5 years of grad student teaching and 4.5 post-doctorate years like the above, it was good for both of us that this stopped.

I wish these numbers felt worse to me than they do. We were living in the DC area, where everything costs more. He had a PhD, for Pete’s sake. It came with a substantial debt load which we’re still far from paying off. Yet—we survived. We never had to go on public assistance, which makes us better off than many adjuncts.³ Hell, we stayed married.

During this process, I encountered my 2013 W2 and was reminded I hadn’t earned substantially more ($27,805.02 pre-tax) after 4+ years at my 40-hour a week job as a library paraprofessional at GW Law. It offered insurance, though, which was a life-saver and biggest reason I stayed there during my whole time in grad school, vs. seeking out more advantageous term-limited opportunities. Unlike the feast/famine of adjuncting, I knew exactly how much we could/couldn’t afford on my salary. We couldn’t afford both being precarious.

How I Developed the Numbers

My husband provided me with all his syllabuses from this timeframe, which I went over in detail. During this period he taught at 4 distinct schools ranging from a 12 mile round-trip from our apartment to a 172 mile round-trip on days that travel included a drive to School 1, School 2, School 1, and home again. In summer 2014, we moved apartments to be a little closer to my new place of employment. It put us closer to the beltway and improved his travel time.

I calculated round-trip distances from each apartment using Google maps. I then carefully worked out which classes would’ve been part of a combined trip, which would’ve been standalone trips.⁴ This process and counting classes (generally with side-by-side-by-side syllabuses) was the most time intensive of the process, to get the exact days/trips right. I ran the results by my husband to see if the weekly schedules sounded right. We will have missed the occasional snow closure.

I initially calculated the costs as just gas, but doing some travel paperwork for my own job made me decide to redo them using historical GSA rates for privately-owned vehicles. These rates represent gas as well as historical wear and tear on the car.

Thanks to my husband for reading and signing off on this before I published it on my blog. When writing about something which was a tough period in both our lives and focusing on his work experiences, I wanted to get his buy-in. On that note, I didn’t name specific employers or which one paid which amount. It wasn’t really that important, since it happens to so many others at so many other schools.

Footnotes