A Slave in the Paper Mines: The Diary of a Contract Professor

Perhaps because my career is drawing to a close, and I’ve persisted in an industry while many of my compatriots have long since abandoned their studies or left for the private sector, I am re-examining what has inadvertently become a career. I never intended to be a permanent contract professor, any more than a child expects mortgages or dental work. But the joy of teaching, the students’ interests and needs, as well as a life-long academic curiosity kept me in a field which has not always welcomed me or my kind.
In some ways this is a familiar conversation about precarious labour in a university system which led many of my colleagues to niche instructional work with international students, adult learners, or non-governmental organizations. Upon pondering academic privilege, the privation of contract labour, and the myriad ways that venerable institutions work to install, sanction, and capitalize on long-standing class boundaries, however, it occurs to me that I have my own story to tell.
While many academics immediately slam the door on the new arrivals once they have found a seat at the table—unless the supplicant is appropriately deferential or useful—I have always thought of myself as someone who crept in when the door was left ajar. Therefore, I have spent my career prying that door open so that others might follow me. The profound benefits of the university experience are difficult to define, but I am certainly not the same person who first attended the University of New Brunswick in 1984 and I would like my students to enjoy that transformative opportunity as well.
This book intends to examine those benefits even while it describes the pitfalls of working inside the two-tiered professorial system. Contract work is increasingly how instruction happens in the North American university, and for a cog in that vast machine, this is how the gears grind against a person’s self-esteem, how often grease is applied and to whom, and ultimately what maintenance looks like when wear draws attention to the mechanism.