Heresy №2: If you can’t say anything nice, settle for the truth
By: Timothy Hagen
Tags: Adjuncting, Workplace Culture, Academia, Classical Music

Three years’ worth of moving parts were set into motion with the director’s voicemail, and my skin crawls when I consider slogging through it all chronologically. The road isn’t linear; it winds excessively. In order to make sense of these last three years, it is more helpful to look at the events set in motion on May 8, 2017, through three lenses. An examination of the work I did, as well as the sacrifices I made to do it, are together meant to give you an understanding of the sort of colleague I was. Fleshing out the relationships that developed between key players at Wisconsin and me is meant to give you valuable information about the negatively charged working environment in which I was expected to thrive and over which I had little to no control. I hope the process also gives you information necessary to draw conclusions about the character of the people who all too often call the shots in academia. (While my experience was that Wisconsin’s school of music was a particularly toxic environment, I know it is not the only toxic environment in American music academia.)

UW-Madison’s Mosse Humanities Building, which houses school of music faculty offices and, given the mushrooms that sprouted from under my office baseboards in the 2019 spring semester, is literally a toxic working environment

First, the work. My predecessor had retired with four students. Four. Contrast that with flute studios at what our director liked to call “peer institutions,” such as Michigan, Iowa, and Penn State. Those studios had between 12–18 flute students. A full studio at Wisconsin, if headed by a tenure-track faculty member, comprised 12 students. With me, a lowly adjunct, it was 12…ish. Maybe 14? 16? Our director couldn’t or wouldn’t give me a straight answer on that at any point during my first two years of employment, but we’ll come back to that later.

I wanted to increase enrollment as quickly as possible, both because that was one of my charges and because, like all of the adjuncts in the school of music, my pay was predicated on course load, or how many students were in the studio. By mid-June, before I even had a signed contract, I had taught my first complementary consultation lesson to an interested student who ended up auditioning.

Over the course of three years, I taught many of these lessons, alongside other recruitment events, such as clinics at high schools with promising programs in Wisconsin and Minnesota and over 40 guest artist/teacher appearances in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Kansas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Alabama, and North Carolina. In the summers of 2018 and 2019, I welcomed undergraduate and adult students from Tennessee, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Alaska, and Wisconsin to what I called the Wisconsin Flute Institute, a five-day intensive centered on artistic growth and community engagement that I created and ran at Wisconsin in coordination with dear MG, and for which I collected no salary or fee.

MG (center), Gabriela Ruiz (my Texas classmate and a kickass flutist and flute technician, right), and I, celebrating the end of the successful first Wisconsin Flute Institute in May 2018

Another initiative, one that I worked with three of my woodwind colleagues to produce, was the first-ever UW-Madison Wind Fest in March 2019, modeled after a successful program spearheaded by our brass area. When I say I worked with colleagues to produce the first-ever UW-Madison Wind Fest, allow me to clarify: the record shows that I almost singlehandedly produced that first-ever Wind Fest. A tenure-track colleague was out of the country for almost the entire preceding month, and our (tenured, full professor) head of the woodwind area did virtually nothing except show up and participate on the big day. The third colleague, who, like me, was an adjunct, had a busy travel schedule in the weeks ahead of Wind Fest but admirably carved out some time to promote the event by visiting a couple of school music programs.

I did all of the other logistical prep work. Coordinating repertoire and logistics with four out-of-town guest artists? That was me. Reserving various spaces for group and breakout sessions? That was me. Ensuring that we were in compliance, both in deed and on paper, in our interactions with minors attending? That was me. Visiting a couple of local high schools for promotional purposes between all of this and my teaching schedule? That was me. Making sure programs had been printed in an accurate, timely fashion? That was me. Physical set-up of the group session space? That was my flute students and me.

I could go on, but you get the point. We didn’t have high attendance, largely because the promotional activities that should have been a group effort fell mostly to me, but without my efforts, we would have had to cancel the event altogether. Who told me to take care of all of the loose ends? Nobody. I tied them up because if I hadn’t, it was apparent that no one else could or would. My thanks? An afterthought of acknowledgement at the end of the day from our bassoon professor, the aforementioned, tenured head of the woodwind area.

The Wind Fest experience encapsulates my three years at Wisconsin, and I’ve heard countless similar stories from adjunct colleagues across the country. All too often at Wisconsin and other institutions, adjuncts are the faculty members working hardest, bailing out water to keep the ship from sinking while many tenured faculty enjoy much bigger paychecks as they preside over studios with gaping enrollment holes. In the case of Wisconsin, there were multiple studios operating under full capacity while I was there. If I recall correctly, the horn studio had six or seven enrolled students in 2019–20, for example, and the same was true for bassoon. In 2019–20, only four students even applied for the undergraduate bassoon program. That number drops to three on the graduate side. There are many more student flutists than bassoonists in the world, but I assure you that several of Wisconsin’s “peer institutions” have bassoon application numbers far higher than Wisconsin’s.

I point to this data to provide context. While other studios foundered, the flute studio was the fastest-growing at the school. We started the 2017–18 academic year with six students, growing to 10 at the beginning of 2018–19 and 12 at the beginning of 2019–20. During this time of explosive growth, the audition process for the studio became increasingly competitive. By the 2019 application cycle, the average number of graduate flute applications had increased 50% over the 2014–17 average, and undergraduate flute applications had increased 100% over the 2015–17 average.” The vast majority of flute applicants, particularly undergraduate applicants, were from Wisconsin before my arrival; the 2019–20 cycle saw undergraduate flute applicants from California, Minnesota, Illinois, Maryland, Virginia, and Wisconsin, and graduate applicants from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia (the US state), and Ukraine (why I clarified about Georgia). My colleagues, including Wind Conductor and Bassoon Professor (and to a much lesser extent, our director), continually remarked upon not only the growth in numbers in the flute studio but also the growth in student ability and achievement.

Furthermore, I was the only woodwind or brass faculty member teaching a semester-long fundamentals course for music education majors, the flute fundamentals course. Each of the other woodwind and brass fundamentals courses was split between two faculty members, effectively halving their work for that course. Despite this discrepancy (or perhaps in part because of it), anonymous student evaluations singled out my course as one of the most helpful, practical, enjoyable courses in the fundamentals sequence.

Judging from their salaries (between 50–250% higher than that of the best paid adjunct faculty at the school), amount of job security, and amount of scholarship money at their disposal, it is safe to say that tenured and tenure-track faculty are valued far more at Wisconsin than adjunct faculty. This galls me, not because others were valued more than I but because they were openly treated as better than I, while their achievements paled in comparison to mine. This is not hubris but data, pure and simple. I would have far fewer issues with disparate treatment if every tenured faculty member at Wisconsin had recruitment data and student success stories comparable to mine. I’m not a superhuman; I just work hard/smart to the best of my ability, and I don’t think it’s too much to ask my colleagues to do the same. The success of any school is built through collective effort.