Fifteen minutes into my office hours on a Wednesday, I finally gave up on checking my emails. I had spent the previous twenty minutes trying (and failing) to sign out of my Quinnipiac account and into the one at Southern Connecticut State University. Unfortunately, both use the same program for email and grading. Blackboard, in particular, insisted on redirecting me to the Quinnipiac account every time I tried to sign on to the account for Southern.

At the time, I worked as an adjunct at both places, cobbling together a more-than-full-time job but without the benefits or stability. And it was driving me up the wall.

I eventually figured out a work-around where I used an incognito browser window for one set of log-ins and the default browser settings for the other university. Another colleague told me that she used a combination of Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari for the same workaround. 

But honestly? Signing in was the least of my worries as an adjunct professor.

Every university where I’ve taught first year writing has wanted something at least a little different. Quinnipiac is all about the revision process. Southern is more about analyzing arguments. Simmons University cared more about literature and relating reading to the students’ lives. Merrimack College wanted me to teach research methods, literary analysis, personal narrative, formal research papers, and informal modern communication (yes, all in one semester).

It can be mind-melting to develop reading lists that allow me to teach each of these different courses at the same time. Readings that work for Week 5 of each very different course are hard to find, but doing that is the only way I can avoid collapsing under the weight of each week of prep.

CSU-AAUP, the union for full and part-time faculty at the four Connecticut State Universities, is currently in a contract battle that has already been drawn out comically long. The Central Office took over a year to agree to meeting dates.

But now, they are finally willing to talk to us about the problems faced by part-time faculty at our next bargaining session on Nov. 4.

Hopefully, they will listen to tales of the stress that low pay, non-guaranteed class schedules, and absolutely no safety net for personal life events cause for us part-time faculty. Even when we’re not sick, or having babies, or wondering whether our classes will be cut at the last moment, the ordinary mental load of working at multiple universities is exhausting.

And it’s making me worse at my job.

I’m an excellent teacher. I work beyond my hours to be one. I have fabulous evaluations to show for it and, more importantly, students who have made real progress over the course of a single semester. I also have glowing evaluations from peers and supervisors.

But being an adjunct means there are things I can’t and even shouldn’t do to help my students. Little things, but they add up. 

For example, I can’t advise students on campus policies or give academic advice for students’ schedules. There is no way I could advise students on English department requirements or even the process for using the Testing Center/Writing Center. Not without giving students bad advice at some point, as all the different policies and practices from multiple campuses get jumbled together in my brain.

It would be irresponsible for me to try to keep it all straight and offer advice, knowing I would inevitably get something confused.

I also can’t accommodate times outside my office hours or guarantee that I’ll have the ability to answer emails every day of the week. If I was on a different campus, even my incognito browser sometimes insisted on sticking to Quinnipiac servers. One week, I had to wait until my next physical trip to Southern, because Blackboard wouldn’t let me sign in remotely at all.

This is a waste of my time, of course. Unpaid labor, bureaucratic inefficiencies, all being passed down to those with less power. It also means that I can’t be the force for retention that the Board of Regents claims they want. 

Keeping students beyond the first year of college has become an urgent goal for not just the CSU system, but almost every institution of higher education. And the data is in: it’s not flashy initiatives, fancy dorms, or endless theme mixers that move the needle. It’s faculty.

A survey study published in the Journal of the International Society for Teacher Education found that faculty “is the #1 predictor for student return, retention, and graduation, above and beyond all other factors, including systemic infrastructure, counseling center access, academic success center, scholarship, alcohol, work-study program, on-campus housing” – programs, I should note, that the Board of Regents often seems more interested in funding than payment structures that would ensure faculty retention.

Besides risking some of its best part-time faculty to burnout and the kind of bone-deep frustration that comes with being consistently undervalued, taking advantage of contingent adjuncts has a cost in these retention-forward tactics. Things that move the needle, like learning student names early on, meeting with students outside of class, frequent assessments, and offering students flexibility (care of Inside Higher Ed) are harder for faculty that have to juggle multiple campuses, course structures, bureaucracies, and student bodies.

I keep office hours and mentor students who can show up at those times. I do my best with names and have gotten better over the years. But a full-time lecturer, even outside of the tenure track, could do more. A full-timer can keep track of the questions that freshmen always need answered. A full-timer can give confident advice for the single campus that they know well. A full-timer can be more reliably available.

A full-timer can help students feel like they belong. 

But if I don’t belong to one campus, then there’s a limit to how much I can ever make a student feel like they do.

Katy Mulvaney is a part-time professor at Southern Connecticut State University in the English department and a member of CSU-AAUP, the faculty union.