Transforming conflict into art is what artists do, and adjunct faculty at California College of the Arts (CCA) have embarked upon a project that combines the disciplines of memoir, visual arts and bookbinding to create a powerful statement about the precarious nature of their profession.

Adjunct, or non-tenured, faculty at CCA make up 78 percent of the educators there. But they work semester-to-semester without job security, benefits or a livable wage. Working with organizers from SEIU Local 1021’s Faculty Forward campaign, CCA adjuncts collected stories of precarity for a chapbook (a small, paperbound, handmade literary pamphlet). Told in the unmistakable cadence of academics, these stories bring home the stark reality of being highly-educated and working for near poverty wages:

“There are also semesters when none of the schools hire me, and so on the rare occasion when I am offered a full load at more than one school, I have to take on everything at once, since I never know how long I’ll have to make my paychecks last.

Job insecurity means that no matter how long I have taught at CCA, or how well I teach, or how much work I publish, how many meetings I attend, how many committees, reviews, panels, or other sorts of service I do for CCA, no matter how hard or well I work, in any year for any reason (or no reason at all) I could lose my job.

Every summer I spend months preparing my courses for the year without any commitment from the college that I will actually be teaching those courses.”

On October 6, the CCA adjuncts held a “bind-in” on campus, with skilled practitioners of Book Arts mentoring other faculty and students to put the stories of the chapbook together with a visually-striking cover. The result is a multi-disciplinary work that displays the skills CCA adjunct faculty possess to do the jobs they love, but also expresses the deep fear and insecurity doing the job causes them.