The subject of this book is the role — many of its contributors would say the plight — of what are called adjunct teachers in the humanities departments of universities, in Taiwan and elsewhere. Adjuncts teach students while enjoying none of the privileges of their secure, tenured colleagues — in fact many of the adjuncts writing here don’t feel they’re considered as colleagues at all by their more highly placed co-workers. Despite frequently having gained PhDs, they labor away at the lower levels of student instruction, often with low pay and always with minimal job security. They don’t, as often as not, have the time or energy to publish learned books and articles, and as the years go by they come to feel increasingly trapped in a subordinate academic category, tricked by a system that overproduces PhDs into a permanent limbo.
What is therefore exceptionally surprising is that this book, largely though not entirely written by people still enduring such employment, reads with enormous freshness and power. There’s no sense of tiredness here, but more the feeling of a rebellious energy, long bottled up, finally exploding into incandescent and angry prose.
The two editors first encountered each other in the Foreign Language and Literature Department at Kaohsiung’s Sun Yat-sen University (中山大學). Rudolphus Teeuwen, originally from the Netherlands, is still there, whereas Steffen Hantke, originally from Germany, is now an associate professor in South Korea. Neither position is surprising because, as Teeuwen explains in his introductory essay, there are only three things you can do when confronted by the adjunct’s situation — grin and bear it, get out of university teaching altogether, or, if you’re lucky, exchange adjunct status at home for the delights of professorships in the Middle East or East Asia.
The pleasures of this book come from several different sources. When I reviewed Teeuwen’s previous essay collection Crossings [Taipei Times, Sept. 1, 2002] I said that the dank odor of publications produced by academics for their career advancement was totally missing. And so it is again. There’s no poststructuralist gobbledygook here, in any of the essays, but instead accounts of working in cramped and ill-equipped offices (one evoked was formerly a book cupboard), descriptions of choking back tears at the news of terminated contracts, mixed with a considerable amount of defiance, protest and even sometimes rage.
There’s also a wealth of true literary erudition. Taking a couple of pages almost at random, you find Teeuwen himself making comparisons with an Italian neorealist film of the 1940s, Voltaire and a Shakespeare sonnet. William Morris, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Johnson and Lytton Strachey also appear as casual pendants to an already learned and well-argued text. Early 19th-century authors such as Hazlitt and Coleridge used to include quotations in their essays as a form of adornment, whereas today’s professional academics would shrink in horror from such a practice. Teeuwen has far more in common with the former than the latter, you feel.
He’s also entertaining on the changed condition of adjuncts in Kaohsiung. When he arrived there in 1995, he says, they were mainly “characters,” robust Westerners, mostly male and often single, who were more like gung-ho adventurers than the sleek young professionals, often Taiwanese and female, who are replacing them. They may not have been paid very well, but they knew they were favored foreigners compared to the Thais, Indonesians, Vietnamese and Filipinos employed, at really disgraceful rates of pay, as construction workers or domestic helpers.
Furthermore, they thought and felt locally, and were the happier for it. Even so, these people were, and are, “gypsy scholars” rather than visiting ones. “Visiting scholars to universities in out-of-the-way countries get to meet their consul or ambassador for wine and canapes,” Teeuwen writes. “Gypsy scholars there deal with visa problems at the Foreign Police.”
These people were adjuncts who, because they were using their role as a way to live abroad, usually enjoyed the experience, and chose to ignore their at best ambiguous status. But there are full-scale success stories of another kind in this book as well, tales of people who managed to scramble out of academia’s second tier into proud, tenured employment. One writer relates how she did it by working up chapters from her thesis into articles that were accepted by learned journals, and then marrying a tenured professor, after which they proposed jointly-taught courses that gave her the leg-up into what is called in the trade “tenure-track” employment.
But bad experiences predominate. In one impassioned piece, Kathleen K. Thornton describes how, after 16 years of teaching, the three-year renewal term on her employment papers was “whited out” and a one-year period inserted by hand. The university authorities explained eventually that they needed “fiscal flexibility in these troubled economic times.”
And a contributor from Australia recounts some bizarre events — a housemate’s sister being murdered by a serial killer, a colleague charged with the production of child pornography. He quit and took up a temporary job with an insurance company.
Two contributors testify to something that will be familiar to all foreign teachers in Taiwan — being valued largely as a mascot by their employers, a foreign face that will attract students. Terry Caesar is one, and his description of teaching at a university in Japan, simultaneously laconic and farcical, is worth the price of the book in itself, while Christopher J. O’Brien, a PhD candidate in Kaohsiung, points to aspects of Chinese history that led to today’s intellectual passivity among many students. He ends with a rousing call to teachers to lead their charges into freeing themselves from the chains of habit, and entering into a genuinely adult world of intellectual independence and freedom.
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