There is a tremendous sense of outrage over the tragic death of Margaret Mary Vojtko. Perhaps it was her life, or at the least the last few years of it, that was more tragic than her death. I don't know.
If you haven't read the article already, you should. Vojtko's death, in the most appalling way possible, highlights the effects of university administrators' willful disregard for the human beings they employ at pay levels per class that sometimes are less than or equal to what a work-study student can earn in a semester. Trying to earn a living as an adjunct is precarious, at best. Trying to earn a living as an adjunct in a country without universal health care is, obviously, worse. When you add to that an attempt at providing health care for everyone, but that attempt backfires as administrators prove they lack any milk of human kindness and cut adjuncts' class loads to avoid providing health care for those of us in the trenches, doing the majority of the teaching, teaching the classes full time faculty don't want, in the time frames they don't want, what you have is not a recipe for disaster. It is a guarantee of disaster.
The refusal of administrators to pay a living wage, to provide health insurance, to treat adjuncts as human beings deserve to be treated, will have lasting repercussions. I could go on and on about the unfairness of the situation to the students. Hell, I have. But you know what? There's been enough talk about the students. I don't care about students right now. For once, it's not about them. It's about me. It's about me and all the other adjuncts who, despite working tirelessly for wages that can do nothing but trap us into a cycle of what is basically mental torture when your insufficient income is unreliable, sporadic, and likely to change with the briefest of notice. It's about the desperation created by a system that will kick you out of the door after years of abuse and not even give thought to the destruction of your life and all that you have worked for, a destruction that they have helped cause. It's about the hope that this will end, that Vojtko's treatment - that the fact that she worked for a Catholic university for 25 years and yet was buried in a cardboard casket - will help bring an end to such a system.
Because you know what? Change the religious affiliation of the school and that could easily be me in the cardboard casket in forty years.
Because you know what? Change the religious affiliation of the school and that could easily be me in the cardboard casket in forty years.
Evocative and thought-making post. My best friend in grad school referred to the condition as academented. Then there is Beckett's cacademia.
ReplyDeleteI find myself wanting to know Mary Margaret Vojtko the person better. I asked Robin Sowards, the Pittsburgh adjunct on the board, although he teaches at a different Catholic university. Googling, I learn she was a devout Catholic but wrote a short history of the Homestead PA First Reformed Hungarian Church, a Protestant denomination tracing its origins to early the Reformation, was acknowledged for her help in a book about Borges.
Her story is also the trigger for yet more stories and reflections.
Thankk you for sharing
ReplyDeleteThanks great blog poost
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