By Jayne Bernasconi
I have been in denial for years now.
I am a dance professor at Towson University. I have been teaching here for 26 years, and I wake up most mornings genuinely excited to go to work. I love the students, the diversity they bring, what they teach me as much as I teach them. I love the department, the colleagues, the work itself. And for most of those 26 years, I told myself it was enough.
In 2008, a full-time position opened up, and I went for it. I put together the application package, gathered the recommendations, did everything asked of me. They hired me. Then the economy crashed, and they rescinded due to a moratorium on full-time hiring, they said, and quietly filled that one position with five adjuncts instead. It was a huge disappointment. I almost left. But I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. So I kept signing the semester contract. And I kept telling myself it was fine.
It was not fine. It just took me a while to see it.
As an adjunct, I have no job security, no path to tenure, and for most of my career, no benefits of any kind. No healthcare. No retirement contributions from the university. For years, I cobbled together a living the way many adjuncts do, teaching at other schools, taking private students, running a yoga studio I eventually had to close, and renting out rooms in my own home. Even my vacations are work trips as I have been known to teach a yoga retreat and call it a holiday.
When my marriage ended, the financial reality came into focus for the first time and it was the first moment the denial began to crack. Towson has never contributed a single dollar to my retirement. As an adjunct, it was never on the table. Whatever I have saved, I saved myself, on a salary that was never enough to make that easy.
For most of my career, I have paid for my own health coverage including monthly premiums, out-of-pocket costs, the quiet accumulation of sacrifices and delayed responsibilities that come with being underinsured while doing the work of a full-time faculty member for a major university. That was simply the reality for adjuncts at Towson. Health benefits were not offered to us. Last year I turned 65. Towson had by then begun extending some health coverage to adjunct faculty, and starting in January 2025, I received it. Six months later, I qualified for Medicare, and the contribution was no longer needed. Six months of employer support toward healthcare out of twenty-six years.
Then the denial finally broke.
I teach aerial dance and general dance classes across the dance curriculum, including classes that require music. I have been paying for a music service out of my own pocket for years, hundreds of dollars, because given everything else about my situation at Towson, it simply never occurred to me that I could ask them to cover it. This past year, I finally wrote a formal letter to our interim chair. Her response came back almost immediately saying yes, of course, we can.
Of course they can. So why aren’t they already? That’s when I understood what 26 years of denial actually cost me. I had been absorbing expenses, hours, and work that were never in any contract including compliance training, student mentorship, rehearsal attendance, faculty meetings, beginning and end of semester retreats. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on master yoga training and certificates over these past 26 years and did it all because I loved the work. But an institution cannot run on the love of its faculty indefinitely. At some point, the love has to be reciprocated.
HB 0106 would give adjunct faculty at public universities the right to collective bargaining. Not a gift. Not a favor. A deserved seat at the table as the workplace protections that faculty should have always had. The ability to negotiate pay, benefits, and basic working conditions. The kind of transparency and accountability that would have told me, years ago, that I didn’t have to pay for resources for my classes out of my own pocket. That I deserved healthcare. That decades of service should count for something.
I have no severance package. I may leave Towson after 30 years with nothing beyond what I scraped together myself. This is reality for adjunct faculty across this state, at every public university, holding programs together on semester contracts while struggling to support themselves and the institutions that collect the credit.
The Maryland General Assembly has the power to change this. Pass HB 0106.
Do the right thing.
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