I first published this post in May, but left it up only for a few hours. I am posting it again today because I feel the topic is still relevant, and it deserves an honest treatment.

I’ve been teaching at California College of the Arts in San Francisco since 2001. At the time I began teaching there, I was awaiting the publication of my first book; now, I have a third book to my name. Like many of the part-time faculty in the MFA program in creative writing at California College of the Arts (CCA), I have years of teaching experience at the graduate and undergraduate level, including two stints as Distinguished Visiting Writer. Also like most, I have the usual array of awards and literary magazine publications on my c.v.. And like everyone else from CCA who recently applied for an assistant professorship–the first tenure track job in fiction that has come open in the MFA program in many years–I was not granted an in-person interview.

When I applied for the position, I knew that, due to the enormous number of applicants, the competition would be fierce. But I did think I had a good chance of becoming a finalist, and I had high hopes that one of my colleagues, someone else who had given years to CCA, would win out. After all, the part-time faculty is made up of many well-published, award-winning authors and teachers. There were hundreds of applicants. Twenty-four of us were interviewed by telephone. Three–none of whom had taught at CCA before–made it to the final round and had the traditional campus visits. Only one of the three had published a book at the time–odd considering that, almost without exception, the students who enroll in an MFA program in creative writing do so with the hopes of publishing books in the future.

The woman who was ultimately selected wrote a well-received collection of short stories and has a fine teaching record. I’m sure she will make an excellent addition to the faculty. Nonetheless, many of us were left wondering why we had committed so much of our time to an institution that seems reluctant to recognize our contributions in a tangible way. It also seemed strange that the current faculty’s publication records did not appear to be taken into account when it came to filling the position.

The most obvious answer to why we teach is this: we love the students, and we have a passion for literature and writing. I have immensely enjoyed my students. It has been a pleasure to read their writing and to share their enthusiasm for literature and to watch their talent develop. I have also considered myself fortunate to count my colleagues among my friends.

Certainly, one cannot make much of an argument for adjunct teaching based on economics. In a city where the mortgage and property taxes on a very small house in an average neighborhood easily run to $5,000.00 or more per month, the salary for a semester-long class hardly makes a dent in the bills. Adjuncts rarely complain openly about the dilemma, because, naturally, we are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us–the irony being that it hardly feeds us at all. It can, in fact, actually cost money to teach. Teaching takes time away from writing, and when one is under contract for a book, teaching is actually an expensive way to spend one’s time. It also happens to be a fact of life in the city that, as soon as you have a child, the pay for adjunct teaching is unlikely to cover the babysitting costs that you incur in order to prepare for and teach the class, which means that one is, quite literally, paying to teach.

One of the wonderful things about San Francisco is that it is teeming with writers–the famous and the not-so-famous, the well-heeled and those living below the poverty line. A downside of this density of writers, however, is that most of the MFA programs here are made up overwhelmingly of part-time faculty. Despite the fact that MFA candidates at CCA pay more than $50,000 in tuition alone for the two-year program, the institution has little incentive to maintain a foundation of tenure-track faculty when the competition for even part-time teaching work is so fierce. Tenure-track jobs come up rarely in San Francisco, and when they do, dozens upon dozens of well-published, award-winning, highly qualified writers apply. In this atmosphere, one does not expect to come by a job easily. But it is a demoralizing moment indeed when so many of us see the college to which we have devoted our best efforts simply turn away from us when the rare position does come open.

Unfortunately, the best interests of the students are sometimes overlooked in the politically charged atmosphere of academic hiring. Let’s not forget, without the students there would be no MFA programs at all. In the not-so-distant past, when I was pursuing my own MFA, the majority of programs were fully funded. It would never have occurred to me to pay for a degree in creative writing, knowing how bleak the job market would likely be once I had the degree in hand. I went to the best program I could find that would fully fund my tuition and provide a living stipend with a reasonable work load. The professors at my program, all of whom were tenure track faculty, had a vested interest in making the program work. This was the mid-nineties, when the universities that sponsored such programs largely recognized the significance of fostering talent in the arts. But in the past decade, MFA programs in writing at private institutions have increasingly become a cash cow. (This appears to be far less of a dilemma at public universities; even those that do not provide funding are generally inexpensive.) One wonders where the enormous tuition payments go, when it is clear that attracting and maintaining a loyal and happy base of full-time faculty is not a priority.

The fact is that I love my students, and I derive joy and satisfaction from working with them. But I sincerely wish that the institutions of higher learning in urban areas like San Francisco would take it upon themselves to pay their faculty fairly and to reward loyalty, experience, and publication records with secure employment at a living wage. Considering the large amounts of money part-time faculty bring to a school, that hardly seems like an outlandish request.