As a former full-time employee, a current adjunct faculty member at Guilford College and as a Quaker, I love the ethos at Guilford. It’s a place founded on the belief that all people have the right to express their voices and can expect to be heard. It is a community where gifts and shortcomings alike can be brought to light to be examined and explored.

I believed this as a full-time employee, and I still believe it as an adjunct instructor. However, the ongoing issue of salary disparities between full-time faculty, adjunct faculty and professional staff members has been eschewed for many years. Had the issue been addressed fairly in years past, I would still be working full-time at Guilford.

After promised salary adjustments were tabled year after year and professional staff members received only two small increases in the six years I worked full-time, I was forced to seek employment elsewhere. The salaries paid to my colleagues and I are not a living wage, and I could no longer “make do” as a full-time employee making a paltry salary and working the long hours my job demanded.

While my full-time job required a masters’ degree, the time salary was equal to what I had earned at an entry-level job in decades past. People ask me why I even took the position in the first place. In my hiring process, I was told that salary adjustments, which included my own salary, would be implemented by the end of the fiscal year. I believed that promise. When the adjustments didn’t happen, our supervisor made repeated pleas on our behalf to the school’s administration, to no avail. She often apologized that her efforts had not proven successful.

Another reason that I took the full-time position at Guilford was that I truly believe in its core mission.  It’s the same reason I continue to teach there, despite the small paycheck that comes with being an adjunct instructor. Guilford College is a place where good can unfold in ways that wouldn’t happen on many other college campuses across the U.S. And, although working full-time at Guilford left me financially depleted, I continue to trust that the salaries for adjunct faculty and professional staff members eventually will reflect the equality and integrity that is part of the College’s well-promoted core values and that is foundational to the Quaker practice.