When Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct ad Duquesne University, died in poverty at the age of 83, she immediately became a celebrity among academics. Nobody cared about who she was as a person, of course. Nobody was willing to grant her reality a second of one’s time. There was a point academics wanted to make, and Margaret Mary Vojtko came in very useful for that purpose. She also allowed many of them to engage in their most favorite activity in the world: wallowing in self-pity and producing apocalyptic speeches. Posts of the “This Job Will Kill You” variety proliferated. Weepy chest-thumping continued for as long as Vojtko’s corpse could be squeezed for self-pitying juice. Then, everybody moved on to another fad in the genre of self-aggrandizing screeds.
Finally, however, a journalist decided that Vojtko deserved to be treated as an actual human being and not as a prop for other people’s exercises in rhetoric. She went to Vojtko’s hometown to research her life and discovered that Vojtko was not even remotely the abused and exploited adjunct of popular outrage. She was a religious fanatic who believed it was her duty to expose students to her homophobic and slut-shaming rants. She was also a mentally ill person who worked on her dissertation for 40+ years, hoarded immense quantities of junk, and refused all help from concerned colleagues and neighbors. As Vojtko’s mental illness progressed and her behavior grew so erratic that the university could no longer pretend everything was fine, her department started cutting her teaching load. Here is the article on Vojtko in case you are interested in learning the truth behind the hype.
Margaret Mary Vojtko was, indeed, exploited. But the people who exploited her are not located at Duquesne University. Duquesne put its pedagogic and academic integrity on the line when it employed a mentally disturbed person to the detriment of students and educators. Vojtko’s real exploitation was at the hands of people who used her death to attract traffic to their blogs and scratch their self-pitying itch.
The problems of mentally ill people who resist all efforts to help are an important issue that needs to be discussed. I hope that everybody who was creating weepy hash-tags and writing tragic posts will still have enough interest in Vojtko to discuss this subject even after she lost her usefulness for their exercises in self-importance.
Clarissa's Blog 
The first thought that crossed my mind when I read about her was that nobody would have given a shit about her story if she had been a waiter or a plumber instead of an academic.
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Exactly. And not just any academic either. As you can see, everybody immediately stopped caring the second she didn’t fit into their favorite narrative any longer.
This is very sad.
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Was Vojtko a Feminist? 😉
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Oh no. She was a religious fanatic who hated women, sex, gays, etc.
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Well, technically, being a fanatic, she may have fit in well with some feminists I know.
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No, she was a Catholic who thought the Pope is way too lenient and progressive. A
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An atypical case cannot be representative, almost by definition. This is a sad story no matter how it is spun. She should have been eased out of her position years ago, but the position itself if it is that long-term should have benefits, reviews of performance, etc…
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If industry or government discharged an employee who was incapable of doing their job, no one would bat an eyelash. It’s tragic that she and other mentally ill people don’t have proper social supports, but it’s also not the University’s job to provide them.
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Exactly. I feel for her but I also feel for the students who are entitled to not being harassed with hateful speeches coming from their instructors. It isn’t their fault that she is sick.
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Margaret Vojtko was a contemporary and colleague of my parents, with whom she shared interests in literature, music, history and theology, despite my parents’ being pro-feminist, anti-homophobic, anti-racist, fans of John XXIII and Adlai Stevenson, and lifelong NCR readers. She was a friend of the family for decades, so I have some personal experience with her. While I don’t question the veracity of the well-researched Slate article (which more people should actually read before spouting off), I do take issue with your hyperbolic, bordering on libelous, misrepresentations of its content. Margaret, like many devoutly religious people, could be narrow-minded, opinionated and uncompromising. That’s poor socialization, but it’s hardly hate or fanaticism. Her neurotic stubbornness only became a danger to her after her recent physical decline, which was caused by a relapse of her OVARIAN CANCER, which you conspicuously omitted from your narrative. Why? Perhaps because mental illness is still, even in 2013, more easily stigmatized? You chose to completely ignore the main point of the article (assuming you got that far), which is this: her death, while not caused by her employer, does serve to call attention to the widespread exploitation of adjuncts everywhere. It’s not abusive or exploitative to call out a university with annual tuition of $32,000 which pays barely poverty wages to advanced-degree teaching staff, with no health benefits, no retirement and no job security. One might also “feel for the students” who are paying these rates to be ripped off in the classroom, while administrators binge on facilities and draw six-figure salaries. Not content to stand by and do nothing, Margaret was an enthusiastic advocate for unionization, which was ratified by 85% of the adjuncts, only to see the administration renege on their agreement to abide by the results. If the publicity given to her impoverishment, and her need to work literally into senescence and until death, should lead to fairer treatment of her colleagues, Margaret would not call that her victimization — she’d call it her legacy.
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I’m wondering if everybody in that geographic area is suffering from mental issues. It is scary to read comments from such obviously unhealthy people.
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