I’ve been a teacher in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Writing Program for the past 14 years. A few weeks ago, while driving from a department meeting to teach a class, I received a text from the program director saying, “Check your email.” I pulled off the road and learned that this would be the last semester that I and 37 of my adjunct lecturer colleagues would be teaching in the Writing Program.
Rutgers has been an exceptional place to work. Before landing there I was an itinerant adjunct, teaching at various schools up and down the New Jersey Turnpike, trying to piece together a living. I quit working at those other jobs after various insults and injuries of the kind that adjuncts routinely suffer. But I found a home teaching in New Brunswick, a uniquely collegial environment, where my adjunct status was irrelevant. We were all “one faculty,” sincerely dedicated to providing the best education to our students. I am — err, was — proud to teach there.
That’s in the past tense now because the new Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, or SAS, figured she could increase “instructional efficiency” by eliminating three dozen upper-level writing classes. She also seems to have figured that the “invisible hand of the market” would magically funnel students displaced by her plan to under-enrolled courses elsewhere in the university that also meet the core writing requirement. That these courses don’t teach students how to write doesn’t seem to have figured in her calculations. Meanwhile, by raising the number of students in every remaining writing class to 24, she could further reduce the number of classes—and fire “instructionally inefficient” lecturers. The extensive research showing that the maximum number of students in a writing class should never exceed 20 apparently wasn’t a consideration.
Many people know that so-called “contingent faculty” like me are seriously underpaid and lack benefits and job security. But last spring, we at Rutgers began to turn that around by going on strike and winning significant salary increases and a modicum of security. Now that we are earning near-living wages, we must have become too expensive, because our assignments are being reduced or eliminated (and not only in the Writing Program). It is no coincidence that we are losing our jobs right now before our job security gains kick in this coming fall.
My colleagues and I did not passively accept these measures. We put up a pretty good fight: Nearly every Writing Program instructor signed a petition that we then taped to the door of the dean’s office; at Rutgers Day in New Brunswick, we set up a “graveyard” of hundreds of pencils — each pencil representing one semester taught by a laid-off lecturer; we organized a campaign to ask our students, colleagues, and the public to send thousands of emails protesting the cuts to the university president, the New Brunswick chancellor, and the SAS dean. Over two hundred people showed up at the annual all-faculty SAS meeting to challenge the dean for an unrelenting hour. This show of support for us laid-off adjuncts culminated in a resolution demanding the cuts be rolled back, which was approved by 90% of the SAS faculty who voted.
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But despite our efforts, it’s clear that the bean counters have won this round. I’ll miss my work at Rutgers and definitely the income. But I also think about the effect on students, who will have fewer courses to choose from and larger class sizes to endure. The dean has managed to shatter our special community of educators passionate about Rutgers’s mission. These past 14 years, I have taught and counseled hundreds of students and written scores of letters of recommendation for grad school, internships, and employment. But in three months’ time, all those connections will be severed when my Rutgers email address is retired. I will also lose all access to a decade and a half of student writing — and my students will lose all access to me. What possible justification can there be to wreak this kind of havoc? Rutgers has the money for their favored projects; apparently teaching students how to write is not one of them.
Howie Swerdloff is Secretary of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, AAUP/AFT, and a 14-year instructor in the New Brunswick Writing Program.
This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Is teaching students how to write still a Rutgers priority?
