On March 14, the Virginia General Assembly voted to give over half a million public sector workers collective bargaining rights. But not me. I'm an adjunct faculty member who was just left behind by those in power, left to endure the exploitation of higher education.
I’ve been teaching in the arts as an adjunct faculty member for 5 years. I piece together semester-based contracts, along with other work, to stay afloat financially. Throughout my interdisciplinary career, I’ve had to navigate the harm of institutional trauma. Higher ed is one of those institutions that inflict harm.
I spend hours preparing lessons. I spend months researching material to provide my students with meaningful and beneficial engagement. I attend professional development workshops to grow as an educator and student advocate. At the same time, I’m managing the pain and anxiety of uncertainty, not knowing if my teaching contract will be cancelled just days before the semester begins.
Not sure whether my Tetris budget model will suffice.
Not knowing if I’ll be able to contribute meaningfully to my household’s financial plan.
I am not an outlier. I am the pattern. It’s exhausting.
Black women in academia are disproportionately concentrated in contingent, non-tenure-track positions. Our white male counterparts are more likely to hold stable, tenure-track appointments. This is documented. This is known. And yet institutions continue to build their operating model on our labor while directing resources elsewhere.
I’ve spent more than 20 years at the intersection of Arts, Social Justice, and Education. Unjust labor practices are a normalized specter I’m constantly fighting off. I work smart and hard. I contribute to the communities where I live and teach. But without legal leverage, I’m a sitting duck for institutions that profit from my expertise while refusing to invest in my stability.
Let me be specific.
At George Mason University, where adjunct faculty like me carry full teaching loads, a former Vice President of the United States — Mike Pence — was paid $150,000 to teach one course per year, with the option to co-teach rather than teach it alone. I teach four courses a year, with no co-instructors, for $17,500.
I’m not saying celebrity hires don’t happen or that they don’t add value for students. I’m saying the money exists. The question is where it flows — and why it doesn’t flow to the people doing the everyday teaching that keeps the place running.
When I’m told the university doesn’t have the funds to provide fair salaries and benefits for adjunct faculty, what I hear is: you don’t care about my basic needs. You want me to retain students. You want me to generate revenue. You just don’t want that revenue to reach me.
That is extraction, and it has a demographic signature.
Collective bargaining is one of the few tools I have — alongside my colleagues — to change this. It is not the end-all, be-all, but it is a proven way to build power and demand fair treatment. Where adjunct faculty have organized — at CUNY, SUNY, Rutgers, and the University of Illinois — they have won longer contracts, cancellation pay, and a real seat at the governance table. Not because institutions offered it out of kindness, but because faculty had legal leverage and used it.
I don’t have that leverage now.
With collective bargaining, I can push for long-term contracts instead of the per semester uncertainty that keeps me perpetually on edge. I can push for financial safeguards when classes are canceled days before the semester begins — compensation for the months of preparation that occurred regardless. I can push for voting power in faculty governance so adjunct needs are represented, not treated as disposable.
Institutional leaders: Listen up. Stop exploiting my mind. Stop building your institution on labor you refuse to fairly compensate. If you say you care about equity, prove it in your payroll. I’m human just like you. Do you want to be exploited?
Legislators: Listen up. You made a grievous error excluding the thousands of higher ed workers—faculty and graduate students—in Virginia whose current working conditions are inequitable and lack the kinds of job protections only collective bargaining can remedy.
Now I turn to the Governor: Please correct course and amend the bill, adding us back in. Establish collective bargaining as the law for ALL public sector employees. That includes me—an adjunct faculty member, knowledgeable and engaged, with a multi-faceted career, earning recognition nationally and internationally, caring for my community, building bridges, helping future generations do the same. Give us the law. Let us negotiate.
We all deserve better.
janet e. dandridge is a mother, Interdisciplinary Artivist, Arts & Activism Educator, Social Justice Organizer, Empathy Sustainer. She is a 2026 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant recipient, 2025 graduate of Emerge Signature Training politics program, a 2023 Arts and Humanities Fellow for the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts & Humanities and is the co-host of Re – Flect / Calibrate, the podcast on The Genealogy of Artivism.
