A colleague-adjunct who is following the FAC election wrote me today expressing general agreement with my program, but concern with my intent to raise the top limit for teaching loads. She is concerned that higher teaching loads will concentrate the shrinking number of courses on fewer and fewer adjuncts, leaving some out in the cold. I answered:

You make a good point. I have been in your position, although not that explicitly in that I am never quite sure why I sometimes get and sometimes don't get courses in particular terms. With the exception of a few rocky terms, the system has been good to me, I trust my director to be fair and I haven't felt the need to go begging for courses every term. If as FAC I start hearing complaints from others, however, I would represent those interests.

It is an interesting issue: Do we adjuncts who have been in the game for several years try to get higher teaching limits and seniority rights to shut the door on the constant stream of "younger" adjuncts knocking at the door? Or do we have solidarity with all who are adjuncts and move to share our shrinking job with a stable or perhaps even occasionally growing body of co-adjuncts? As one of those silly people trying to feed a family from within the "adjunct trap," I feel a pull in both directions. The short version is that I don't have an easy answer. Here are two ideas that speak obliquely to your concerns:

I think course limits should be loosened in principle because there are situations where the limit leads to problems: instead of giving some adjunct one more course, they have some other adjunct or collegiate driving endless distances for example, or they fly in some more expensive collegiate from the States for a year (here speaks my European perspective). The directors should have the flexibility to delegate more courses if there is a need.

What I have long wanted is some greater transparency in the system of how courses are delegated. That would make it clearer to everybody what is actually going on. There might be some kind of implicit seniority in place. There might be implicit variations in the course limits based on who is where. I have been hesitant to make a program point out of this, however, as it might end up backfiring on me personally or all of us collectively. If directors were bound by some rigid system or knew that all their decisions had to be publicly justified, some totally new animal might emerge that would not necessarily make us happier. We need dialogue amongst ourselves about what we really want before we can approach the administration with an alternative.

A third idea - effecting only those here in Germany, so it is a side issue for most of you - that is probably way outside anything I could do as a FAC representative, but which is something I have thought about for years, would be to get the SOFA changed. Long-term people abroad should be able to get collegiate positions without having to be hired from stateside. We would be cheaper for both the DoD and UMUC and we would feed money into the German system by paying German taxes and not having an ID card to spend our money on Doritos in the PX. Correct me if I am wrong, but my impression is that this would help everybody.

I would be very interested in getting more input on any of these ideas.