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said.
    The tension was broken. Dr. Ludlow pressed her palms to her mouth.
    â€œNineteen-hundred per course,” she said from under her hands.
    I wasn’t sure what to say. Normally, I would have assured her that the money seemed fine, or some crap like that, but since she thought the money an insult, I couldn’t very well contradict her. I didn’t want to seem insane (talk about queering the deal), so she and I just sort of hung our heads sadly.
    â€œI think it might get better,” she said.
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    I felt a little irked. This was my first exposure to the peculiar manner in which colleges do business. They consider themselves exempt from traditional market forces, and I suppose that if they think it, they are. Dr. Ludlow’s admission that I wouldn’t be paid enough for my trouble seemed not honest but smug. I found myself longing for the more traditional business approach, all hypocrisy, in which the capitalists pay nothing but aren’t quite so cheerful about it.
    Each course, Dr. Ludlow told me, would require 38 hours of instruction. I started doing the calculations in my head: $1,900 ÷ 38 = $50 per hour, which, as it turns out, didn’t sound all that bad. Ah, but I supposed I would have to grade papers as well. How long would that take? I added 7 hours to make it an even 45: $1,900 ÷ 45 came to exactly $42 per hour.
    Compared with Dr. Ludlow, I would be making a pittance. But I’ll say this: the pay wasn’t at all bad for part-time work.
    â€œWelcome,” said Dr. Ludlow. “And if you know anyone else interested in teaching, we’ll be happy to talk to them.”
    I was pleased with myself for getting the job, though I suppose Dr. Ludlow’s wondering in passing if I knew any other potential adjuncts was a tip-off that it’s not the greatest job on the planet. Do you suppose that when Barack Obama tapped Tim Geithner for Treasury, he asked him if he knew anyone else interesting in becoming a cabinet member?
    I took the textbooks with me, sent Dr. Ludlow an official copy of my MFA diploma, and, secure in my conviction that the laws and etiquette of business didn’t apply to colleges, blew off the thank-you note for the interview and hire.

    That is how I became an adjunct instructor—or, as they are sometimes known, a “contingent faculty member”—one of those reviled beings whose very existence seems to epitomize What’s Wrong With College Today. According to the Modern Language Association, here’s one sample yardstick for judging the quality of a school: the fewer adjuncts on the job, the better:
    The Modern Language Association believes that college students have a superior educational experience when they are taught by faculty members who have appropriate institutional support. As a rule, full-time faculty members, especially those holding tenured or tenure-track appointments, teach under conditions that provide clear educational advantages for their students. . . . Part-time faculty members, while they may be fully qualified scholars and teachers, are generally poorly paid, receive substandard office space and other support, and have tenuous institutional standing and little chance to advance professionally. An institution’s use of a critical mass of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members therefore provides a measure for judging the quality of undergraduate education. 1
    I was a member now of what academic theorists call the “instructorate,” as opposed to the “professoriate,” which enjoys health care and retirement benefits and where anybody with any sense would rather be. As Michael Murphy, director of college writing at the State University of New York at Oswego and a former adjunct himself, puts it, members of the instructorate “are widely regarded as the great academic unwashed, the grunts, pieceworkers subject to—and even produced by— the crass