When Maria Vittoria finishes a day of consulting newly started fitness studios, or working as a member of the board of directors for Urban Greenwalk, she prepares to teach class. Vittoria makes her way to Iona College and Westchester Community College to teach as an adjunct professor.

Like Vittoria, other adjunct professors employed at Iona College also work other jobs and live full lives outside of Iona, but still come to teach.

“It’s a flexible position, that works around your schedule and the school’s needs,” Vittoria said. “The position, though, has changed in recent years for adjuncts where they’ve been more of a participating rank.”

A participating rank means the adjuncts are involved outside of the classroom. Vittoria will be sitting on the new advisory board for the Marketing Department at Iona College.

“I am happy, I would love to have more of an involvement here,” Vittoria said.

There seems to be two types of adjuncts, according to Vittoria. One type of adjunct can be described as someone who works full time and does teaching on the side. This adjunct does so to “keep involved with younger people and offer guidance the way a role model may have done for them years before,” Vittoria said. Retirees who solely adjunct also fall under this category.

The other type of adjunct identifies as one who hopes to get tenure-track, or eventually get promoted to full-time faculty status. This type of adjunct struggles more than the other financially and in terms of benefits.

Vittoria currently holds the position of senior adjunct in the marketing department of the Hagan School of Business at Iona College and senior adjunct in the business department at Westchester Community College. She has taught at Iona for 14 years.

David Carlyon, Ph.D., an adjunct professor of the Fine and Performing Arts Department who teaches Theatre History at Iona College, taught also at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan-Flint as an assistant professor. Over a number of years he has written scholarly articles on circus, theatre, Shakespeare and even an article on the Gettysburg Address; he is a playwright and has published books and he is an Equity actor and former clown in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

Carlyon has been teaching at Iona for five years as an adjunct professor. Carlyon said the friendliness of the Iona community plays a role in making his teaching experience at the college a good one.

“I like teaching at Iona because the students are striving to get better, to improve their lives,” Carlyon said in an email. “Though that’s true of students at other schools, it seems to me a core impulse here.”

However, the life of an adjunct is not always full of roses. Adjuncts make a lot less money than full-time faculty members.

Typically, adjuncts earn between $20,000 and $25,000 per year, according to the National Public Radio. This is severely low compared to full-time professors who make around $84,000 yearly, according to American Association of University Professors.

“It’s hard because this is what I see myself doing,” Rachael Pompeii said, an adjunct professor in the English department at Iona College. “If I had maybe four to five classes that would be great, but I only have two [classes] because as adjuncts, you take what you can get. It is challenging because I love doing it and I love teaching, but I can’t just do this [to make a living].”

Adjuncts also have no benefits, such as health insurance, pension and job stability. They are not under contract and are usually expendable to colleges.

Not all adjuncts own an office space at Iona. Adjuncts often meet with students in the classroom before class, in their department lobby or one of the libraries on campus.

“Each department needs to have a place for adjuncts to hang out because you do feel like you don’t have a home,” Laura Esposito said, an adjunct professor in the Mass Communication department. “I know space is at a premium here at the school, but they need to have some place for the adjuncts.”

Dorothy Brophy, senior adjunct in the English department at Iona College, has had variety of experiences over her 17-year adjunct career at Iona. She also taught at the College of New Rochelle before she moved to solely teaching at Iona.

Brophy mentioned that building a reputation is important to an adjunct. Adjuncts should aim for good class evaluations, and to establish a reputation for their courses and themselves, so the school knows adjuncts are dependable and asks them to come back or stay and teach another semester since they are not under contract.

Brophy also served as adjunct representative on the Iona College’s Faculty Senate up until last year when she reached the limit of six years. She spent her last four years as a secretary of the senate and the Iona College Council. Brophy and the senate worked on full-time faculty and adjunct faculty issues.

Brophy, and the rest of the Faculty Senate, helped make an impact on a different number of benefits for adjunct professors at the school. The senate helped to get free flu-shots for all adjunct professors of the college with the free flu-shot program and established a rule that says when full-time faculty get a pay increase, adjuncts must get the same pay increase on their salaries.

The reason for Brophy and the rest of the senate fought for these benefits was because they acknowledged the inequalities between adjunct faculty and full-time faculty members.

“We’re all here to teach students whether we’re high ranking, tenured professors or junior faculty working toward tenure or adjunct faculty,” Brophy said. “A lot of times we’re referred to as ‘adjuncts.’ We’re faculty too, and we’re not shortchanging our students.”

“I’m a fighter,” Brophy said when speaking about her time as a member of the senate. “I always thought I was vulnerable, but I still opened my mouth.”

The trend of adjuncts making up a high percentage of the faculty at colleges all over the nation has expanded upward over the past few years.

In 2009, the Department of Education said about 75 percent of college faculty are off tenure track, meaning they are part-time, not full-time faculty.

This number translates to 1.3 million out of 1.8 million members of faculty being part-time and 700,000 of those 1.3 million faculty members, just over 50 percent, are adjunct professors.

Like Vittoria and Carlyon, Brophy’s experience as an adjunct at Iona has been positive due to the Iona community and the support they give to adjuncts.

“I love the student population,” Brophy said. “Students are saying ‘hi’ to me all over campus.”

The college’s administration also supports its adjuncts, allowing their experience to be successful, especially in situations when they have not done wrong.

“It’s the student population and the academic freedom that is here [at Iona],” Brophy said. “I’ve had situations where not only my department, but also the administration, in terms of a particular student [when parents get involved], but even the dean’s office supported me when a parent was annoyed. I feel like I have the support.”