Staff editorial: Adjunct abuse

It was rhetoric only a racist or a radical could love.

When Towson adjunct art professor Allen Zaruba told one of his classes he was like a "n----- on a corporate plantation" in his position at the university, he made a stupid, insensitive and brutish remark making the ridiculous comparison of himself to a slave. Later the same day, Towson administrators fired him over the phone.

Obviously, there should be negative consequences for making incredibly offensive remarks that have no place on a college campus. We don't condone what Zaruba said.

But Zaruba's treatment actually proves the point he was trying to make. As an adjunct, he has zero job security, is paid at a rate much lower than his tenure-track peers and has virtually no chance of joining them. Zaruba was fired without any type of hearing or review by his peers.

Zaruba directed this racial slur at no specific student nor at black people in general, but used it in reference to himself. And he apologized for his word choice at the start of the next class — before this firestorm erupted — and has apologized since then as well. But administrators at Towson University took an unfortunate situation and made it worse, creating a double standard for how free speech is treated in the classroom that could influence other schools, including this one, in the state university system.

If a tenured professor made a similar comment, student complaints would have been the same, since students don't care about a professor's tenure status, even if they are aware of it. But the professor would undoubtedly still have his job, and if the university tried to fire him, all sorts of national organizations would rush to his cause. Adjuncts enjoy no such freedom and have no such backing. They are the first to be impacted by budget cuts and are often viewed as disposable, interchangeable parts.

Tenure is designed to protect academic freedom — the right of an academic to, as long as they remain productive, research and say what they want to. But tenure is awarded based not on how controversial a professor's work is, but on how much work the professor has completed. That standard is somewhat arbitrary — how many papers does a professor need to write before he has academic freedom?

What professors are allowed to say in the classroom can directly impact how students learn. Professors need to have the freedom to voice their thoughts and pose questions that may be awkward, uncomfortable or politically inflammatory in order to advance students' education. We strongly doubt what Zaruba said falls into this category, but his situation could be easily replicated with a less controversial statement.

There have long been attempts to unionize adjunct professors in order to help secure them a real seat at the table with protections, and Zaruba's firing only strengthens this argument. While adjuncts may receive far less pay than tenured professors, they are still an integral part of the university. In some cases, they are superior teachers than tenured professors. For them to hold no protections in the classroom presents opportunities for their academic freedom to be abused much as this case demonstrates.

If adjuncts continue to be held to a double standard, then they should unionize. The classroom is a place to exchange ideas, not punish those who say something unpopular. Political correctness has its place, but shouldn't be perverted so that it compromises freedom of speech or makes mistakes intolerable. A classroom based on that philosophy is not a classroom at all, but a sanitized environment with no room for growth.