Diane Bezucha

When students at Kingsborough Community College sign up for Donna-lyn Washington’s English class, they generally do it for a reason. They specifically want to learn from a Black woman whose curriculum includes comic books and Afrofuturism.

But as an adjunct professor, Washington is often reassigned last-minute and there is no guarantee she will be teaching the class in which you enrolled.

“Then students show up on the first day of class to a white man,” said Washington. 

“That is problematic.”

The murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd this spring induced a racial reckoning that has touched nearly every corner of the country. 

At the nation’s colleges and universities, this has played out in the form of protests, strikes and lawsuits as students and faculty demand a stronger emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring and teaching practices.

And many institutions are listening.

“This semester there is a social justice push, and we are all being asked to do some kind of professional development,” said an adjunct professor at The New School who wished to remain anonymous after a rash of layoffs this year. 

But for part-time faculty, who make up the majority of instructional staff on most campuses, this work is unpaid, which calls into question just how much institutions actually value diversity, equity and inclusion.

Traditionally, the New School hosts a day-long, unpaid orientation for new staff, where only 90 minutes are set aside for a faculty-led session on diversity. 

This year, departments are being asked to do more, but school-wide mandates have been vague. 

Faculty in the instructor’s department were asked to write “a blurb about inclusiveness” on their syllabi, upload “inclusive materials” to a resource hub and to engage in some kind of diversity-related professional development on their own. 

But none of this extra work is paid. For full-time faculty, this might just feel like part of the job, but for adjuncts—who are only paid for their classroom teaching hours—it is unpaid labor that cuts into the time they use elsewhere to earn a living wage. 

“As an adjunct you have to manage your time on a tightrope,” said Washington.

While adjuncts may care about issues of diversity, they also have bills to pay. And so, in an effort to focus on inclusion, schools end up excluding more than half of their instructional staff.

This is even more problematic when you look at the racial makeup of faculty.

While 58% of CUNY’s undergraduate students are minorities, only 37.6% of its full-time faculty are minorities. At Kingsborough, where Washington teaches, this number is only 30.2%. 

“Most of the faculty of color are adjuncts,” said Washington. “We should be in the room.”

And the city’s public institutions face an additional hurdle.

A recent executive order from President Trump bans diversity-related training at institutions like CUNY that receive federal funding.

Still, diversity consultants are experiencing a surge in demand. 

Maya Beasley is the founder and president of The T10 Group, a consulting firm that helps clients develop and implement diversity and inclusion strategies. Her team has received a flood of requests for their services since Floyd’s murder.

“Lots of places will jump to the idea of a training,” said Beasley. “Well, what is your training tied to?” 

“We know the unconscious bias trainings are completely ineffective,” added Beasley. And the research backs her up. Still, she has clients that point to positive training evaluations as proof they have made progress.

“That’s not actually measuring efficacy. That’s measuring whether someone was willing to sit through something.”

Instead, Beasley prefers to work with clients for the long haul, starting with a campus climate survey.

“We can’t do anything until we have an actual understanding of what’s really going on.” 

The survey illuminates problem areas and Beasley works with clients on strategic improvement plans that can span months. This long-term approach, Beasley said, often weeds out organizations who just want to check a box from those who are truly committed to change.

Diversity, equity and inclusion “is one of the few places where people don’t check on the return in investment,” said Beasley. “If you spend money on short term things that don’t go anywhere, then you’re wasting it.”

But this time-consuming approach is what often precludes adjuncts from participating.

Beasley encourages employers to invest this money differently: by compensating staff for engaging in work that goes beyond taking a survey.

“What you’re asking them to do is weighty,” said Beasley. 

Compensation can mean reducing the course load of full-time faculty or paying adjuncts for extra hours. 

What’s important is “making sure that what they’re doing is being acknowledged as something that’s important and highly valued,” said Beasley.

For the New School professor, even a $50 stipend each semester to engage in this kind of professional development would be a good start.

“The gesture for me is so meaningful,” said the professor. “It values your work, your role and your commitment to the school. We are on the frontlines with the students.”

And it might show that an institution is taking diversity more seriously.

“Slapping a blurb onto a syllabus is not taking it seriously,” said the professor. “That’s branding.”