"But this is definitely better: I get health care and retirement," the West Philly native told me cheerfully.
Though he'd get that, plus a lot more cash, teaching high school English in suburban Philadelphia.
The fees from one or two college students, per class, covers what an adjunct gets for teaching that class for a whole semester.
Where does the money from the rest of the students go - the federal loans, work studies, dad's salary, mom's wages, and all?
It helps support the modern university, grown way beyond its ancient teaching function, with all its administrators, marketers, researchers, and maintenance workers, on city-size campuses.
Two-thirds of America's college teachers are now paid as Kudera was, as "adjuncts" or "contingents" or otherwise outside the old tenure track, the American Association of University Professors reports.
I've been an adjunct prof, like many of my Inquirer colleagues. It's fun. But it's not a living, by itself.
To supplement his college pay, Kudera turned his Philly years into a comic novel, Fight for Your Long Day (from publisher Atticus Books), which grinds around town on SEPTA, school to class, bill to check, potential disaster to actual embarrassment.
It's Philly fiction: Liberty Tech, with its ambitious administrators, resembles expansion-minded Drexel; Ivy Green University, with its driven, confident even when clueless students, recalls Penn; Urban State, with its sullen "baseball cap-wearing white boys" and "Afrocentric" shouters and earnest veterans in over their heads, caricatures Temple.
Kudera's sloppy hero, Clyde Duffelman, believes, against evidence, that "teaching as an adjunct is better than working at a factory."
