Final Thoughts:

As an adjunct English instructor of more than four years, much of Con Job resonates with me on both a professional and personal level. Low pay, problematic access to health care, being obliged to work on multiple campuses in order to make ends meet: these are all issues that I have struggled with. Even as I type this sentence, I am currently enrolled in a new Master’s program (my second). This time I’m getting an MA in Rhetoric and Writing, hoping beyond hope that my current efforts will help me gain access to a PhD program and, years later, that Adjunct Holy Grail: a tenure-track professorship.

While it would likely be naïve to call my professional outlook rosy, it is comforting to see these faces and hear these voices that talk to me from the screen as I watch Fulwiler and Marlow’s film. It is important to remember that the obstacles I face on a daily basis are not mine alone, but shared by a vast body of college instructors who are just as passionate about their work as I am, human beings who suffer as I do because they have to overcome so many bureaucratic hurdles just to do the job they love to do.

Early in the film, Julie Demers, an Adjunct of English observes that “[a] lot of people don't know what an adjunct is.” Taken as a whole, Con Job offers the world a new definition of adjunct that I believe most part-time faculty can agree upon.

Adjunct: a person with an advanced degree who loves their field and loves teaching so much that they do the work of full-time faculty for less pay, less benefits and less respect

Let’s not stop there, though. Con Job helps us to reimagine another often-used word.

Contingent: cannot do without, as in, “The success of higher education is contingent upon valuing the labor of its faculty, all of them.”