Professor Glenn Reynolds recently featured an article on the the death of a longtime, penniless Duquesne U. instructor that seems to illustrate the plight of adjunct professors.

Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty takes a look at the ensuing debate across academia about the working conditions of part-time staff members.

A column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about Mary Margaret Vojtko, an adjunct instructor of French at Duquesne University who died sick, alone and penniless this month, went viral Wednesday, as adjuncts across the country reported seeing something tragically familiar in her story.

The piece, written by Daniel Kovalik, senior associate general counsel for the United Steelworkers union, describes a telephone conversation he had with Vojtko, 83, a few hours before she suffered a massive heart attack on her front lawn.

Vojtko, who’d worked at Duquesne for 25 years, was undergoing radiation for cancer. Someone had contacted the county’s Adult Protective Services, reporting that she couldn’t take care of herself. She begged Kovalik – whose union has worked on Duquesne’s adjuncts’ protracted fight for unionization against the Roman Catholic institution’s claims of religious exemption from federal labor regulations – to intervene. (Adjuncts voted overwhelmingly in 2012 to organize under the steelworkers’ banner but have been blocked from doing so by the legal fight over the religious issue.)

Kovalik describes Vojtko – a “proud professional” who he said had just been fired from Duquesne – as “mortified.”

He called Adult Protective Services on her behalf.

“I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Duquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits, and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty,” Kovalik wrote. “The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, ‘She was a professor?’ I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.”

The next paragraph rang particularly true with adjuncts throughout the day, as they shared the story on listservs and social media, including Facebook and Twitter – many with the marker #iammargaretmary:

“Of course, what the caseworker didn’t understand was that Margaret Mary was an adjunct professor, meaning 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 between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course. Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities.”