Terrible real estate photographs
This article about the terrible end of an adjunct at Duquesne University is going viral. Interesting discussion on Metafilter about it. Should Catholic colleges be more ethical than other types of colleges? Related. There were 124 jobs nation-wide in American government last year. I would guess that there were about 30 jobs per sub-sub-field. There are probably 200 adjuncts (at least) in American government just in New York City. It is not mathematically possible for all of them to get tenure track jobs some day.
The Atlantic has a big cover story on high school sports tomorrow. Looking forward to reading it.
Apt. 11d 
That was a very disingenuous piece about the elderly adjunct in a variety of different ways.
1. Note that the author’s involvement in her situation (as he reports it) was to tell social services not to help her. She was 83 years old and living in a house she could not afford or maintain that was “literally falling in on itself” and had been reported to Adult Protective Services, and the author told them not to bother her. With friends like these…
2. It’s hard to come up with a complete list of the dissimilarities between Duquesne and Georgetown. Let’s just say that the only similarity between them is that they are both Catholic. Otherwise, Georgetown is an elite institution in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the US capital. It trains future diplomats and the US political elite and has the most glittering speakers list imaginable and various luminaries teach courses there. It also has a billion dollar endowment. Duquesne, meanwhile, is located in a shady area of a rustbelt city. Its endowment is $171 million (that’s 1/200th of Harvard’s endowment, by the way). Furthermore, Duquesne is one of those private schools that Laura is always decrying that is nowhere near academically strong enough to justify the tuition. Few people outside of Pennsylvania (and perhaps not even outside of Pittsburgh) know that Duquesne is a university, let alone how to pronounce it. Frankly, Duquesne is lucky to even still have its doors open, given the profound difficulties of their situation, being a no-name rustbelt private school in a town with very stiff competition from stronger institutions. Furthermore, Georgetown’s adjuncts just voted to unionize a few months ago, so there’s very little track record to see how well that’s going to go.
3. Medicare? I thought Medicare was AMAZING. Why, if it’s so amazing, did this 83-year-old lady struggle so much with medical bills.
4. Medicaid nursing home?
5. Social security?
6. Language teaching is a younger woman’s game. I have a very hard time believing that an 83-year-old woman who was likely not a native speaker was doing a good job teaching French for the last decade or so of her employment. Foreign language pedagogy has changed profoundly over the past 30 years. It seems very likely to me that she was being kept on out of pity for a long stretch of her employment. Was Duquesne really morally obligated to employ her for her entire natural life?
There may be more to Vojtko’s story than Kovalik shares. For instance, if Vojto was a former nun, certain parts of her story become more explicable (she might not have paid in to Social Security in her early years of unemployment). However, her story as shared by Kovalik doesn’t make a lot of sense.
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Yeah, I don’t really understand this story. An 83-year-old should be eligible for Medicare and Social Security, and should not be facing either huge medical bills or dire poverty. Of course, it is unexplained what the Prof. Vojtko did for the first 58 years of her life, but I have a hard time agreeing that employers owe continued employment or subsidized medical care to 83-year-olds. It seems like there is something fishy here.
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Yes, Duquesne hired her at more or less retirement age. I don’t know what the rules were 20 years ago, but even today, you can start collecting SS at 62, i.e. 21 years ago for Vojtko. As I’ve mentioned a million times, I have two close relatives who are long term CC adjuncts in their 60s, and they’ll be doing very well if they are allowed to keep adjuncting until 70. (My dad doesn’t need the money, but my auntie had an unexpected divorce around 50, and she needs the teaching badly in order to have some sort of retirement.)
There’s probably a lot more to Vojtko’s story–maybe a divorce or leaving a religious order late in life and having to start over. If it’s the latter, that would be a very interesting Catholic story, but of less general application. Also, I’d be interested to know if her property taxes played a role in her financial problems. Depending on where her house is, it might be either 1) extremely valuable or 2) totally worthless.
Or maybe it is what it looks like: a proud, hardworking old lady who got frail, wasn’t able to take care of the house she loved or herself, and couldn’t be talked into leaving the house voluntarily. There’s one of those on practically every block.
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For one thing, Medicare doesn’t cover everything. I do think this woman needed help, but she was afraid of losing her autonomy. Could someone have helped her into a subsidized apartment? She probably feared a Medicaid nursing home. I would too.
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“Could someone have helped her into a subsidized apartment?”
An apartment sounds like it would have been more her speed. My mind boggles at the idea of being an 83-year-old woman with health problems and limited means and attempting to take care of a single family house and yard by myself. There was a terrible mismatch between her living situation and her physical and financial means. I continue to wonder 1) what her property taxes were and 2) if her house was worth anything at all. Also, did she have any children? The only relative I saw mentioned was a nephew.
It’s awfully hard to help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped. Years ago, my husband and I visited a frail elderly relative of his in Poland. She was living in an absolutely filthy apartment with barely functional plumbing in the bathroom. She didn’t want household help, as she was afraid of being stolen from (this was the relative who, it turned out after her death, had currency and gold stashed around her apartment–a bunch of the currency being stuff that was no longer legal tender). We were concerned about her using her gas stove, as her vision was very poor, and we didn’t think she could possibly use it safely. We hit upon the idea of buying her an electric teapot so she could safely make tea (she didn’t cook). We mentioned the idea to the frail elderly relative. She said no–she was a fidgety sort of person and it was obvious that the idea of having one more thing in her home stressed her out. She figured she was going to die soon anyway, so the teapot would be just one more thing to dispose of eventually.
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In retrospect, I really wish we’d done something about the plumbing situation, but we didn’t have a lot of time and I’m not sure that it would have been possible to get her to let a plumber in. If I had it to do over again, though, that’s what I’d try to do.
By the way, one of the things that rubs me the wrong way about Kovalik’s article is that it’s all about how Duquesne could have done things differently. There’s nothing there about how he himself could have been a better friend and counselor to Vojtko, or whether Vojtko’s relatives and friends tried to help her materially, and with what results.
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