On Aug. 16, 83-year-old Margaret Mary Vojtko was found unconscious in the yard of her dilapidated home in Pittsburg, Penn. She would never awaken and was dead two weeks later. Voitko had experienced a heart attack after learning that someone had referred her to Adult Protective Services, telling the agency that Vojtko could no longer take care of herself.
Until May, however, Vojtko was still working as an adjunct professor of French at Duquesne University and receiving excellent student evaluations. She was well-liked by co-workers and helped full-time faculty proofread their manuscripts. Vojtko had published respected pieces on the history of Pennsylvania, and she had been teaching at the university for 25 years, but was never offered any benefits because she was an adjunct professor, an instructor hired on a semester-by-semester, class-by-class basis.
Until the fall semester of 2012, Vojtko taught three classes a semester at Duquesne, the standard teaching load for full time, tenured faculty. Even then, however, she earned only about $20,000 annually with no benefits or pension. When one considers the amount of time adjuncts spend preparing for class and grading papers, they are paid below the federal minimum wage per hours worked. The average salary for tenured faculty is $120,000 a year. The Dean of Duquesne, who does no actual educating, makes $700,000 a year.
Although adjuncts have the same qualifications as full time faculty, usually a Master’s or Ph.D., they are considered part-time employees. Not only are adjuncts not considered for the professional protections associated with tenure, most have no job protection beyond the current semester. Even if an adjunct has a contract for the next semester, the class could be canceled if too few students enroll.
Nonetheless, in most states, adjuncts are not eligible for unemployment if the contract is not renewed or if the class is canceled. Most such instructors must work a non-academic job in case they lose classes. This writer lectured on film history as an adjunct, teaching at one school in Boston and another in Fairfield, Conn., almost 200 miles apart and had to work a night job in a pharmaceutical plant just to pay for gas.
Universities dodging Affordable Care Act obligations
Universities across the country have begun cutting courses for adjuncts, hiring yet more part time educators to only teach one class each, in response to the Affordable Care Act. The Act, better known as Obamacare, will penalize employers with more than 50 part time workers if the employer does not pay for health care for part time workers working at least 30 hours per week. If each adjunct only teaches one class, the universities can avoid paying both for health coverage and the penalty. Last fall, Vojtko’s schedule was reduced to one class per semester, reducing her income to less than ten thousand a year.
At about the same time, Vojtko started expensive treatments for ovarian cancer. She could no longer afford to pay the electricity bill, making her home uninhabitable during the harsh Pennsylvania winter. She took a job at an all night fast food restaurant, both for extra money and so she would have a warm place to stay at night. She slept in her office after class. When university administrators discovered her sleeping at her desk, they had campus police throw her off the grounds.
In April, Daniel Kovalik, Senior Associate General Counsel of the United Steelworkers, led an effort to unionize the 125 adjuncts at Duquesne. Unionization would not solve all the problems faced by adjuncts; adjuncts in New Hampshire are unionized, but have not been able to successfully negotiate for improved conditions. Unionization would at least, however, provide a mediating force, and protection from the kind of abusive treatment visited on Vojtko.
While the part-time faculty voted to join the union, Duquesne claimed that the National Labor Relations Board has no jurisdiction over it because it is a Catholic school, and that Duquesne could thereby refuse unionization to its part-time faculty.
It was at about this time that Duquesne informed Vojtko that her contract would not be renewed for the following semester. She pleaded with Kovalik for help in saving her job. Kovalik wrote the school repeatedly, explaining Vojtko’s difficult circumstances, but never heard back from school administrators. He also tried to explain to Adult Protective Services that Vojtko’s home was in disrepair not because she was incapable of taking care of it, but because she had no income with which to maintain it. After Vojtko’s death, Kovalik wrote an editorial in the Sept. 18 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette shedding light on the university’s treatment of the veteran teacher. The piece has since gone viral and has started an on-line debate on the struggle of adjuncts.
On Sept. 19 Duquesne’s Reverend Daniel Walsh responded with his own editorial and argued that the university had treated Vojtko well because the priests at the school had visited her.
Growing use of adjuncts in US
Through the 1960s, about 70 percent of university educators held tenure track positions, and even more held full-time positions. Adjuncts were used sparingly, and were primarily of instructors with non-academic training. For instance, a business owner might teach a single course on marketing, providing a “real world” outlook to students. By 1975, 43 percent of university educators were working outside of tenured positions, and by 1995 it was 58 percent. As of 2011, only 30 percent of university educators had any hope of tenure, and the majority of teaching is now done by adjuncts. Fields such as the humanities have been almost completely gutted of full-time positions, making the study of the social sciences extremely unpractical for all except the independently wealthy.
The expansion of adjunct teachers in American universities benefits the capitalist class for a number of reasons. First, as in all fields, the move to part-time, low-paid labor cuts costs for the wealthy capitalists that control privately owned institutions of higher learning. It results in lower standards of living for all professors. Even those lucky enough to get full-time positions must accept lower pay and reduced benefits in exchange for job security.
But the expansion of part-time positions in higher education benefits the capitalist state in another way. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities became hotbeds of radical thought. Full-time tenured professors enjoyed the freedom to discuss leftist politics. Classrooms devoted to the humanities and social sciences could openly engage students in discussions of feminism, Black and Latino nationalism, and Marxism. The higher education system was instrumental in fomenting the rebellions of the 1960s and ’70s, particularly among the young white people who began to feel solidarity with oppressed communities. Such unity helped bring about the unfinished revolution of the Civil Rights Movement.
This story of the death of a beloved 83-year-old French teacher is sad and it illustrates some of the worst aspects of the capitalist system. While Voitko may have loved teaching, she unable to retire with dignity. When she became ill with cancer, she had to choose between paying for treatment or maintaining her home. Her employer, claiming religious freedom, attempted to deny her the right to organize and fight for a better standard of living. Under a socialism, a job with a living wage would be a right, as would be healthcare, decent housing and the right to retire after a lifetime of work.
