THE ADJUNCT
MARIA ADELMANN
The Adjunct is an extremely well-written, multifaceted novel about academia, the gig economy, and what it takes to survive them both. Higher education employs fewer and fewer tenure-track teachers and an abundance of temporary workers, variously called adjuncts, visiting professors, assistant professors, lecturers, and other synonyms that describe jobs that are harshly demanding, intellectually straining, and absurdly low-paying.
This book asks the reader to sympathize with well-educated, mostly white young adults in their late 20s and 30s who have reached the pinnacle of success in their chosen academic discipline. Most readers, at first glance, would have none of it, turning their head away perhaps in envy, knowing that they themselves could not achieve the academic success that others have. And that is the irony, there is academic success, but there is very little hope once outside of the artificial environment of campuses, private and public, big and small. These campuses are a microcosm of life within and life outside, when salaries, work comp, health insurance, and retirement benefits rule the day. The well-educated professor is shut out of the labor market. And as the book eloquently illustrates, students, teachers, and staff are all subject to the deficiencies of a system that worships economics instead of academics. The book illustrates how students, especially grad students, get taken advantage of both sexually and intellectually, yet the bad actors, usually ones with more cachet, seem to avoid negative repercussions. Employment searches in vain, and in this particular novel, a scandal about a professor who may or may not have violated all that the Me Too movement has achieved.
The Adjunct is much more than a flip story of a teacher searching for employment and security; it is a story about how life can promise a glittering end if one works hard enough. And unfortunately, many times that glittering end is the headlight of the train bearing down on your academic, social, and sexual wishes and desires.
