It’s a dog’s life for part-time lecturers slaving with no pay

Maseno University students demonstrate at the institution on February 1, 2017. (File, Standard)

They give body, soul and spirit into unwaged or underpaid labour, hazardously juggling a dawn to dusk teaching schedule. The knock on my office door was feeble. It was late, and well past normal working hours. But the near thankless remit of a head of department is a self-sacrificing vocation. It is a community service.

He opened the door. He had a boyish, youngish mien but looked 50. In our younger, care-free days we would call him kijana-mzee. He ambled slowly toward the empty chair across my desk, caressing its backrest slightly, unsure of whether to sit or stay rooted beside it.

Seeing my arms pointing toward the seat, he lowered himself onto it. All this while, his eyes were nervously riveted on me. A weird intensity lingered about him. He adjusted his sitting and moved closely.

“Omogambi!”, he began, deliberately using the shared vernacular address of authority to mount what was a proclamation of distress. “I am one of your lecturers,” he groaned, still not sure what he meant by “one of my lecturers”.

Donkey years

The department had a lean faculty of nine and he was obviously not one of them. “I am a part-time lecturer. I have been one for five years,” he added, ensuring I took note that he had been around longer than I had. I had been head of department for just a few months, and one of the things I was least prepared for was dealing with the welfare of part-time lecturers. It is a minefield.

“I have not been paid for two years,” he moaned, as he raised his gangly shoulders to redeem some composure. “I have dutifully taught, supervised, and graded students for donkey years, omogambi”. The man from Nyanturago was now developing moist in his eyes.

The solemnity of the moment was interrupted by a piercing shriek from his Motorola phone. He promptly silenced the contraption, looked up, then stretched his serpentine right hand to his left back, for a sustained, awkward scratching. Reaching out into a glossy brown bag, he whipped out what seemed like a corpus of payment claims.“We have hope that with you in office now, we will finally get paid.”

I nodded. Not because I could do anything, but some emotions flow spontaneously when faced with human suffering. It often baffled me the expectations placed on middle-level university managers like heads of departments. Apart from managing exams, the curriculum and allocating courses, the influence of the office is overrated. The truth was, I was as helpless as he was. I was a mere therapist.

The plight of part-time lecturers in universities, or adjunct faculty as some would call them, is one laden with misery. It was not always this way. Some years back, getting into a faculty position involved doing few months of part-time teaching. It was akin to having one’s foot in the tenure track. The not so lucky ones would fork in a couple of years. The pay was irregular, but worth the wait. It could come in drips. It could also come in torrents. The more ruthless part-time lecturers could easily flip-flop multiple campuses and earn a fairly decent, but stressed-out living.

They would risk exhaustion, high blood pressure and premature death, hazardously juggling a dawn to dusk teaching schedule. At the high-noon of the liberalisation boom, part-timing was not too bad of a side-hustle. It had a sneaky nobility, and an aspirational oomph to the real thing. It was a marker of intention. And sometimes an enabler of social status.

Universities drew the bulk of their part-time lecturers from secondary school teachers, the disillusioned cadres of the civil service, the private sector and an endless army of starry-eyed graduate students. The few and increasingly far between-episodes of successful faculty appointments fired up an assured supply of cheap university labour. Universities ravenously ground their mills on part-time lecturers, minting billions.

Cheap labour

But looking at my distraught guest across the desk, I could tell things had changed. Part-time teaching had evolved into slaving. Universities were extracting labour from desperate, jobless academics, with the slimmest chance of ever paying for it.

The ruse was simple. Make the process of hiring adjunct labour effortless but suffocate the process of seeking payment in a labyrinth of paperwork, punishing procedures and dense bureaucracy. Thus, the part-time lecturer continues giving body, soul and spirit into unwaged or underpaid labour, with a lingering hope that the next process in a dysfunctional bureaucracy will deliver payment. Meanwhile, weeks run into months, then years. Then wasted lives. The man from Nyanturago was bound by this hypnotising, distant hope. Inhabiting an asymmetrical power structure where he would always end up short-changed. If he asked for his dues a little too assertively, he risked being casually relived of his duties, as one does a house maid. With a text message. Or worse, by finding out from the sympathetic secretary that one is no longer on the semester’s timetable.

If it came to that, the chances to be fully tenured if a vacancy occurs, vanish. All the goodwill and toil carefully layered from offering free labour for years are kaput. All the credit invested in political correctness, avoiding succulent office gossip, and playing neutral in vindictive ‘academic’ power games, collapse in a heap. And, another jobless Kenyan academic would be too willing to take the position. And the cycle would go on.

On the other hand, if he or she did not ask for payment, or make attempts at follow up, no one else will. It is a brutal set up. When pushed, even to the extremes, a part-time lecturer cannot agitate. He must possess or feign loyalty. In most cases, this liminal, disempowering space only nourishes and facilitates more extraction. It is a relationship built and sustained on abuse. The Kenyan academe is still poorly designed to reward adjunct academic labour.

My gaze turned back to my guest. His collar shirt showed signs of patching and over-stitching. The last time I saw a stitched-up collar, Kenya as an independent state was in her late 20s. The ndururu was still in circulation. He told me he had travelled overnight. For six hours.

He had missed teaching for three weeks because he could barely afford bus-fare to show up for lectures. It presented a huge moral dilemma on many fronts, certainly too much for a head of department. It is possible for public universities to use part-time lecturers and still reward their labour. The task of procuring and managing part-time lecturers should be a human resource function, not one at the sole discretion of academic units.

To maintain the dignity of the academe, adjuncts should be on regular monthly pay-however modest-and their appointment should be against established budgetary allocations. Part time lecturers deserve better.

The man from Nyanturago went back to the city, and a little further. He turned his back on the academe. He took to raising backyard chickens and growing red onions in the black soil of Kitengela. “I have recovered seven times,” he later told me, in pious tones, “what the enemy had stolen from me, omogambi!”

- The writer works for the Social Science Research Council, Brooklyn (New York) [email protected]