It was just before dawn when Donna-lyn Washington watched her Brooklyn apartment—her home of 40 years—go up in flames. Without renters insurance, the cost of recovery was daunting, especially for an adjunct professor who lives on unpredictable, short-term contracts.

“I’m perpetually having to deal with not having a safety net,” said Washington, 47, a part-time adjunct lecturer at Kingsborough College.

Luckily for Washington, the cause of the fire turned out to be faulty wiring and her landlord will cover damages, but thousands of other New Yorkers share the same precarious employment status as adjunct faculty at the city’s colleges and universities. In most cases they are overworked, underpaid and constantly living on the brink of survival, leaving them vulnerable to emergencies. Or global pandemics.

This already vulnerable class of workers has borne the brunt of COVID’s impact in higher education. Now, adjuncts lucky enough to retain their jobs face larger classes and heavier workloads, plus more uncertainty than ever about each coming semester, putting this already vulnerable class of worker in an even less secure position. That affects quality of life for these instructors and quality of education for the students they teach.

According to a recent report from the American Federation of Teachers, nearly 25% of members rely on some form of public assistance and 40% struggle to cover basic expenses. These are college-educated professionals, most of whom hold advanced degrees.

And while it may be tempting to blame COVID, the truth is that this storm has been brewing for years as higher education institutions have increasingly relied on part-time labor.

At CUNY, the city’s largest university system, part-time adjuncts account for about half of the instructional staff, but teach more than half of the undergraduate courses. At some colleges—York, Staten Island, Queens and Hunter—this number is closer to two-thirds, and at John Jay, part-time faculty teach nearly 75% of the undergraduate courses.

"They hold up the university," said Francis Clark, a spokesperson for the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s faculty and staff union.

In most institutions courses are assigned to full-time faculty first. Part-time adjuncts generally teach the remaining courses. As enrollment and course offerings fluctuate, so too does an adjunct’s job, pay and benefits. While union contracts can provide a measure of stability in terms of hourly pay, part-time workers are not always guaranteed work each semester.

“Adjunct faculty don’t really know what will happen on a semester to semester basis and that’s an incredible amount of stress,” said Andrés Cerpa, 30, an adjunct associate professor at the College of Staten Island.  

Rather than pulling a consistent annual salary like full-time faculty, adjuncts are paid hourly for the classes they teach—about $3,500 for a 3-credit, semester-long course. And CUNY limits adjuncts to only nine credits per semester on any one campus, plus one additional course on another CUNY campus.

Losing one course can significantly impact pay and, in some cases, might disqualify an adjunct from receiving health insurance.

This leads to “a restless, endless search for money to survive,” said Jillian Abbott, 62, an adjunct professor at York College who wrote about her experience in the Daily News. 

Many adjuncts end up stitching together teaching gigs at different universities, or supplementing their income with non-teaching work. Last year Abbott took on a full-time fellowship with the city’s Department of Small Business Services, in addition to teaching, working 18-hour days, seven days a week, just to make ends meet.

The variable nature of adjunct work makes long-term investments like vacations, leases and mortgages bigger risks.

“There’s no income security for adjuncts,” said an adjunct professor at the New School, where part-timers make up 70% of faculty, according to Cate Fallon, President of UAW Local 7902, the union representing part-time faculty and student workers at the New School and NYU.

The instructor spoke on condition of anonymity due to a recent rash of layoffs. “It’s a very hard life unless you don’t need the money.”

And an already precarious situation has only gotten worse with COVID. In June, 2,900 CUNY adjuncts were not assigned courses—a number that has only grown with declining enrollment.

Cerpa dropped from a full-time instructor to a part-time adjunct. Now he teaches two courses at CUNY and two at Pace, but earns far less. As a full-time instructor, he earned about $68,000 annually, teaching three to four classes a semester. Now, teaching four courses across two schools he will earn $26,000 for the year ($13,000 each semester). Cerpa is making up the difference by working full-time for the U.S. Census.

But for Cerpa and many other adjuncts, the biggest issue is losing health insurance. In a recent video, Cerpa explains how a contract technicality left him without health insurance despite five years of service at the College of Staten Island. After months of advocacy on the part of his department head, the university made an exception. Many others were not as lucky. 

422 people lost health insurance after COVID, according to data from the Professional Staff Congress.

“In a pandemic, that’s more or less a death sentence,” said Abbott, who is dependent on her health insurance.

But even for adjuncts who made it through the gauntlet of layoffs and pay cuts, things are not the same. They have had to take on much more work, whether because of the transition to online courses, last-minute course assignments, or having more students in every class. 

"I would say I'm working like three times as much," said another adjunct professor from the New School, where enrollment is down by much as 25% in some departments. This instructor also requested to remain anonymous, citing fear of layoffs. While she was assigned her usual load of three courses, she found out just days before school started, leaving her scrambling to prepare. In addition, her classes have gotten much larger and as a writing teacher, this means more grading, on top of the time she spends adapting her content each week for remote learning, none of which she is paid for.

"If you look at it that way, I'm getting paid much less." 

And the experience is the same for other teachers, who are working harder to keep students engaged.

“You don’t know if they’re engaged in class unless they’re interacting with you,” said Abbott.

But most teachers have found that remote instruction is not conducive to meaningful interactions.

“I can’t even fit all my students on the screen,” said Cerpa.

Instead, Cerpa runs asynchronous classes and spends more of his time working with students one-on-one. But without regular class discussions, he has to give more writing assignments to engage students, which means more grading. He estimates that his workload has doubled with remote instruction. But it’s time Cerpa is willing to put in because, like most teachers, he cares about his students.

Having taught at the same school for five years, Cerpa has built relationships with students, watched them graduate. Some have asked for him to be their thesis advisor but he has had to say no because he needs that time to make money elsewhere.

“The structure of adjunct teaching fails the students,” said Abbott. “We are subhuman units of labor.”

Still, their role is vital—they teach the majority of classes, most of which are required courses that help students build foundational skills. Throughout the pandemic they have carried heavier workloads and more students without additional compensation.

But rather than a reckoning, COVID could be a scapegoat for a system that depends on part-time labor as a cost-saving measure.

“COVID could easily take the blame for a situation that CUNY has been running under for a long time,” said Cerpa

Then again, perhaps financial collapse is a chance to rebuild.

“We need to have an overhaul,” said Washington. “If you have more people actually working full-time you wouldn’t have to keep continually using this bandaid.”