In fact, an Internet search reveals that she spent five full years–after receiving her Ph.D. Would you want to live like this? I wouldn’t-and I’m about to complete a doctoral program myself. During summers when she wasn’t teaching, she had three job options: proofreading, office temping, and tending bar.
#2002 mazda protege car shaking at 50 mph plus
Speaking of which, there are the $46,000 in student loans Tracy racked up while at Trinity, plus $10,000 in credit-card debt, over such contingencies as getting her car fixed. Then let’s throw in the fact that as a part-timer Tracy got no health insurance, no paid vacations, no real office even though she was expected to keep office hours (her best office deal involved sharing a windowless room at Mary Washington, her worst, poaching in a full-timer’s office for a couple of hours a week), and no time to do the scholarly research that her six years at Trinity, Dublin, had trained her to do. So let’s say Tracy earned $38,000 per academic year for teaching a nearly inhuman load of eleven courses over two semesters-twice the load of a full-time assistant professor enjoying full benefits on the tenure track. Adjuncts are typically paid about $3,500 a course (sometimes as little as $2,000 at a cheap state university, sometimes as much as $5,000 at expensive private universities on the order of Georgetown). It’s hard to figure how exactly much money Tracy made from all this, counting as costs the 110 or so daily miles she spent on the road, adding up to three hours per day of commuting at well above the legal speed limit. Then she grades more papers until midnight. Back in the car before the meter expires and head home. Class on Shakespeare and film from 3:15 p.m. Grade papers and prepare for class while eating lunch. Another English class from 10 until 10:50 a.m. Tracy’s itinerary today has the precision of a train schedule: English 101 at Mary Washington from 8 a.m. And those are just some of the six classes she’s teaching this fall term, double the normal load of a college professor. The clock doesn’t stop ticking after that: She’ll teach four classes at three different colleges today. She needs to pass her first marker, the Quantico Marine Base, by 7:30–otherwise, she’ll be late for her first English composition class at Mary Washington College. She pushes hard on the accelerator and begins eating her toast. It’s 7 o’clock as her black Mazda Protege slides into the fast lane at 80 mph.
“On this chilly October morning she’s merging onto Interstate 395, near her Shirlington apartment, and heading south on her daily 50-mile trek to Fredericksburg. How would you like to be a full-time adjunct professor? Here’s a snapshot of the life, excerpted from a Washington Postmagazine profile, published in 2002, of Larissa Tracy, a 28-eight-year-old woman with a doctorate in English literature from Trinity University in Dublin teaching five or six courses a semester on a part-time, non-tenure basis at three different Washington, D.C.-area colleges:
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