Margaret Mary Vojtko passed away two years
ago today.
An adjunct professor of French at Duquesne
University, Vojtko became a symbol for the abuses and indignities, great and
small, experienced by part-time faculty.
Vojtko was 83 years old, sick with cancer,
and impoverished when she died. Duquesne
had reduced her course load to a single class per semester after twenty-five
years of service before dismissing her outright. She had been caught sleeping in her office because
she couldn’t afford to heat her home due to the costs of her cancer
treatment. She was fired and escorted
off campus by the police. No severance
pay, no retirement benefits. A clean
break, at least for Duquesne.
It wasn’t cancer that killed Vojtko, at least
not directly. A heart attack felled her
on an August morning after she had received a letter from Adult Protective
Services. APS had received an anonymous
tip which said Vojtko could not adequately care for herself. If she didn’t attend a mandatory meeting with
a social worker her case would be referred to a judge. She was found prostrate on her front
lawn. She died in hospital two weeks
later.
Obscure in life, Margaret Mary Vojtko became
a cause célèbre
after her death. Daniel Kovalic described Vojtko’s plight in an
article devoted to Vojtko titled “Death of an Adjunct.” The article was widely circulated in academic
circles and while there was much outrage expressed nothing has changed.
Adjuncts are a disenfranchised class, with little
control over work assignments or working conditions. It is mind-boggling that a woman who should
have retired with a pension and healthcare benefits years earlier was still
hustling for class assignments each semester and working nights in a restaurant
to make ends meet. Margaret Mary Vojtko
was erudite, fluent in five languages.
The only explanation for her perseverance is a love of craft.
An obituary noted she had begun a doctoral
program in medieval French literature but that she never completed her
dissertation. A PhD is no guarantee of
tenure-track employment, but it is a prerequisite even at community colleges
where faculty generally don’t engage in research. Vojtko plugged away semester after semester,
year after year until she finally gave out.
She surely never anticipated her fate.
I can see how easily such a thing can
happen. During my first semester of
graduate school a decade and a half ago, the professor leading one of my
seminars invited us students out for a drink one evening. The prof and I got into a discussion about
careers in academia. Being new I naively
assumed that there was a linear path from graduate school to teaching and
research. The professor, himself a
recent product of a prestigious graduate program, laughed cynically when I said
as much. He then told me what happened
to most doctoral students. He said most
end up as cheap academic labor whose fellowships are renewed each year for the
unstated purpose of ensuring the university has instructors for its lower
division courses. These graduate
students become bogged down in their programs, make slow or no progress, and they
eventually drop out or are dropped by their graduate advisors. The nonstarters then drift into contingent
faculty jobs at universities and community colleges if they stay in academia
at all.
Listening to this I nodded and laughed
inwardly and told myself I would never be one of those losers. And yet, that’s pretty much what happened
with me. Four years into a six-year
teaching fellowship I lost my funding due to budget cuts. Although I was progressing well in my program
I could not afford to pay my tuition out of pocket, so I abandoned graduate
school and with it any hope of a tenure track position. I enjoyed teaching so I stuck with it despite
the pitfalls of being an adjunct.
I wonder if this is really what happened with
Margaret Mary Vojtko. I shudder at the
thought of her end befalling anyone else.
It is as if we have come full circle to a postindustrial era of laissez-faire capitalism. For Vojtko, a staunch supporter of labor
unions whose father organized steelworkers in the 1930s, it
had become a matter of every individual for themselves against the immovable
object that is management. I’ve
experienced this myself but not for such desperate stakes.
The shame of it all is that the regrets came
only after the circumstances of Vojtko’s death became widely known. I cannot see that any of the lessons of her
case have been applied by higher education’s institutional leaders. Perhaps they are counting on the public’s
short memory. They know they can.
They can, that is, until the next Mary Margaret Vojtko
happens.
© 2015 The Unassuming Scholar
No comments:
Post a Comment