Death of a Professor
By L.V. Anderson
On Friday, Aug. 16, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct French professor who’d recently lost her job at Duquesne University at the age of 83, suffered a heart attack on a street corner in Homestead, Pa. Vojtko collapsed yards from the house where she had lived almost her entire life. She was rushed to the hospital, but she never regained consciousness. Vojtko died on Sunday, Sept. 1.
Two and a half weeks later, Vojtko’s lawyer, Daniel Kovalik, published an op-ed about Vojtko called “Death of an Adjunct” in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Kovalik wrote that “unlike a well-paid tenured professor, Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits, and with a salary of $3,000 to $3,500 per three-credit course.” (In fact, for many years, she’d earned less—only $2,556 per course.) She’d been receiving cancer treatment, he said, and she’d become essentially homeless over the winter because she couldn’t afford to maintain and heat her house. Then, in the spring, she’d been told that her contract wouldn’t be extended after the current semester. A social worker from a local government agency had been tipped off that she might need help taking care of herself, which horrified Vojtko—“For a proud professional like Margaret Mary, this was the last straw,” according to the op-ed.
Kovalik, the senior associate general counsel at the United Steelworkers, faulted Duquesne for failing to do more to help Vojtko and for refusing to recognize a union, formed by its adjunct professors with his help, which would have fought for better pay, benefits, and job security. Kovalik’s not-so-subtle implication was that if Duquesne had negotiated, Vojtko might not have died the way she did.
Sites like the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Huffington Post, and Gawker quickly picked up the story, and Kovalik’s op-ed racked up more than 438,000 page views and 69,000 Facebook likes. Vojtko’s death especially struck a nerve with academics and graduate students, who saw shades of their own futures in her apparent abandonment. They took to Twitter with the hashtag #IamMargaretMary. “So many of us are walking into academic careers destined to be haunted w/ the same sort of contingency,” read one typical tweet. “#Adjunct labour in #HigherEd makes a more tangible product than #WallSt, & rakes in money for schools, but gets peanuts,” read another. One professor titled his blog post about Vojtko’s death: “This Job Can Kill You. Literally.”
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2013/11/death_of_duquesne_adjunct_margaret_mary_vojtko_what_really_happened_to_her.html
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