Ohio filmmaker has adjuncts' concerns in focus

Academe, May/Jun 2000 by Johnson, Hans P

EVEN FROM BEHIND THE CAMERA, Cincinnati filmmaker Barbara Wolf has become a player in the story of efforts by part-time faculty members to secure better jobs. Although Wolf says her involvement in the cause came about by accident, her documentary, Degrees of Shame: Part-Time Faculty, Migrant Workers of the Information Economy, is now a staple in the drive among adjuncts for professional recognition and respect.

"I guess it all started when I heard that a professor at the University of Cincinnati was applying for his own job," says Wolf, retracing her learning curve on the concerns of part-time faculty. "He'd been doing the work for a decade, and I thought he had the position. But then I heard he was 'just an adjunct,' and I asked what that meant."

Wolf proceeded to consult acquaintances and soon learned about the low wages, lack of health care, and long commutes that constitute the underside of many part-time appointments. "People I'd known for a long time would admit to me that they were adjuncts with no benefits. At first, I thought they had to be kidding," Wolf explains. One friend told Wolf about driving over two hundred miles three times a week while shuttling between teaching jobs on several campuses.

Then Wolf found out that her acquaintance at the University of Cincinnati was denied the full-time job he had filled so long on an interim basis. "They took someone right out of graduate school because they said they wanted a young Turk," notes Wolf ruefully. Realizing that many others shared her ignorance about the conditions facing adjunct professors, she began working to raise awareness using the medium that she knew best.

Operating out of a makeshift studio in a former school converted to a community center, Wolf gathered footage in Cincinnati and New Jersey and pieced together a thirty-minute video. Degrees of Shame draws its title from the 1960 Edward R. Murrow documentary called Harvest of Shame, which dramatized the plight of migrant farm workers. Wolf felt the allusion was appropriate because of the itinerant status of many adjuncts. Her title also captures the sense of embarrassment that some part-time faculty members experience at the contortions they perform to piece together an academic livelihood.

At least 350 copies of the documentary are now in circulation, says Wolf. And she has begun work on another documentary in which she plans to examine the details of organizing adjuncts-at the campus, state, and regional levels-in greater detail. Wolf notes that she has enjoyed collaborating with AAUP staff member Richard Moser. During on. visit to Boston to discuss adjuncts' concerns, she recalls Moser's handing a pamphlet to a passing tour bus. The bus driver said not to expect any support from his riders, since they were tourists from the United Kingdom. But, says Wolf, upon reading the leaflet, one man sprang up to inform Moser that adjunct professors in Britain were having the same problems. "I just hope I got that on film," says Wolf.