After slogging through an MA and a PhD at good schools and having had nothing but adjunct work offered to me, I’m doing a certificate of education this year. Which is proof I suppose of my lesser quality and resolve compared to higher-class beings, but at least when I get through the year I’ll get paid every week and even get a few benefits. This $8 000 per semester teaching, writing and marking a course for 80 people malarkey is just not on.

Time to write the book, I suppose.

But surely everyone knows by now that the underlying problem is irresponsible oversupply of PhDs in the humanities?

Nah, the underlying problem is that people don’t really want to grow up. (I realize this sounds a bit insulting, but bear with me for a minute) I remember an article that pointed out that a lot of these pizza and Red Bull powered dot.coms, where the fresh out of college workers basically slept at their offices, and the atmosphere was like the coolest dorm and this is part and parcel. University is often a great time, especially if you came from a place that didn’t have much in the way of intellectual stimulation, and a lot of us (I include myself in this) didn’t want to leave, so it is not simply weighing the earning potential, but also looking at the chance that one can keep living like a student.

This does not absolve the universities from their responsibility in the whole mess, utilizing a cheap labor pool while touching up donors to fund their endowment, but it makes it a bit more understandable why the ‘marks’ keep coming. In fact, it explains why so many people are willing to put up with a life of being an adjunct.

Henry’s comments about the ill treatment of adjuncts and the role of luck in hiring are accurate. The comment by Des about the irresponsible oversupply of Ph.D.s is less convincing.

First, not everyone who receives a Ph.D. is a good job candidate. Luck may help determine which of those who have done good work happen to give a good interview or attract the attention of a search committee; luck won’t, in general, help those who have done substandard research or who show that they haven’t grasped what academic work is about. And into this latter group fall a good many applicants for academic positions.

Second, the jobs one is talking about here involve tenure–or what amounts to a commitment to secure pay throughout a person’s working life, and even more important a commitment to deal with this person, day in day out, for decades to come. “Oversupply” means that a department has some ability to avoid bringing a person for the next forty years without risking having a bad colleague–any more than the department has to in any case.

As Max Weber noted almost ninety years ago, hazard plays a major role in university appointments and one runs across mediocrities all too often in academic life. But he also wrote, somewhere, that the nature of the academic appointment makes competition for these jobs necessary. Conditions haven’t changed.

None of this contradicts the fact that many universities employ excellent teachers and researchers as ill-paid adjuncts–and indeed, that many large, public institutions in particular use their graduate students to teach huge courses at low pay. Tenured faculty, graduate students, donors, and undergraduate students all have good reason to complain about these practices, and should.

I have to take issue with Liberal Japonicus on Grad School being a continuation of undergrad, at least in the Humanities. At most high powered programs in the US, those who think it is just more of undergrad leave after the first year. Sites like IA and others make it abundantly clear that it is not a continuation of undergrad. Most of the people who finish their degrees never bought into this in the first place, and almost all were hoping to get academic jobs, publish, teach, advise in some combination.

“But surely everyone knows by now that the underlying problem is irresponsible oversupply of PhDs in the humanities?”

This is only part of the equation (a big part no doubt). It is a combination of *oversupply* of PhDs and *undersupply* of tenure jobs (by this I mean the choice of utilizing around 50% adjuncts/part-timers instead of fulltime/TT positions.)

If humanities departments increased the split to something around 75/25 (tenure to adjunct) and limited PhD output to what they can afford to fund only, this might go a long way to at least reduce the job crisis.

I admit that perhaps this is not possible given the current financial situation of universities (esp. state ones), but it seems to be something we should be working towards.

bq. I accept the notion that luck has something to do with academic success but fail to see how this excludes academic ability as a powerful determinant or how it makes academics calvinistic if they believe that their ability is what got them where it did.

The point I’m trying to make is that many successful academics fail to acknowledge that there are other equally talented people who didn’t get their lucky breaks. And indeed view the adjunctification of the academy as just deserts – those who work as adjuncts wouldn’t have been able to hack it as tenure track academics. In some cases this may be true, but in other cases it certainly does not, and the implicit division between tenured and adjuncts maps very neatly onto Calvinist notions of the saved and the damned.

I have a practical question. Can an adjunct pull herself out of limbo by publishing?

I imagine Invisible Adjunct(s) trapped in a hand-to-mouth cycle which leaves no time for her own research. But surely a PhD should grow stale when a candidate hasn’t published anything in years.

But let’s say an unusually energetic adjunct keeps writing and publishing. Would such a person stand a better chance of breaking the Adjunct cycle?

Publication is critical to hiring and promotion. Some people slack off once they get tenure, but that’s another issue. Those “slackers” and their publishing colleagues serve on the hiring committees that determine who stays in adjunct limbo and who ascends to the tenure track.

Adjuncts should organize, not just to demand better pay and benefits, but also to create opportunities for the professional growth and advancement of their members. The adjunct system is especially cruel because it forces people out of research. These people become invisible because research is the source of visibility.

A strong adjunct union could sponsor fellowships, stipends, travel grants, etc. This kind of support exists for grad students (who will soon be fresh PhDs competing with the adjuncts.) The challenge is to transform the image of adjuncts from “failures” to “farm teams.” Not everyone can go right into the major leagues. Some people have to work their way up. We need to modify the system in order to help adjuncts remain competitive while they wait for the right tenure track opportunity.

It’s not just that a continuation of life in the academy is appealing to someone who has been a successful undergraduate student. I think, also, life outside of it can seem less appealing from inside the academy than it really is; hard to evaluate how difficult or how demanding a job in industry or finance or publishing or whatever will actually be. It’s also difficult for undergraduates to see what academic life is really like for faculty; I know I had, and I know my current undergraduates have, a bizarrely idyllic view of what actually goes on. So for all of these reasons I think it can be a line of least resistance to get carried away with your degree, end up doing several, maybe even get a job and get published, and never have really thought it through. And hence no surprise over-recruitment to graduate degrees is quite easy to maintain.

Publication norms vary widely between disciplines and even more widely between tiers or hierarchies of academic institutions. Taken over the totality of academia, Chun’s characterization is right; for the top two or so competitive tiers of institutions in many disciplines, it’s not right.

In any event, publication is not enough to break an adjuncting cycle. In fact, publication, even scholarly publication, undertaken even partially outside of regular employment by an academic institution will probably be ignored by most search committees even if the work itself is quite excellent. The average search committee uses a bunch of undiscussed filters to discard the maximum applications with the minimum effort, and these include “number of years on the job market”, “lack of a current academic post”. Notoriously candidates who apply for posts without an academic “home” somewhere are desperate to get access to someone’s letterhead–they will often seek non-paying fellowships that offer nothing besides letterhead and library privileges in order to be sited somewhere legitimate, even while they may also be adjuncting busily away elsewhere.

I believe and hope (for selfish reasons) that there’s a big difference here between adjunct positions and non-tenure track positions–as a visitor I have an office, access to letterhead, etc., and hope that my applications don’t get automatically circular-filed. (I also get benefits and a salary that is enough to support myself and my cat.) Any people with hiring committee experience willing to talk about any differences here?

We had the “there’s going to be a wave of retirements” speech too in 1989. And I think it was sincerely meant–it was based on a common body of information and projection that most grad professors had seen. Little did they know that what was coming when people retired is that positions would either not be filled at all, or would be filled with adjuncts.

Matt, yes, I think for many search committees, there is a big difference between someone on a 1 or 3-year contract to teach a regular load who has a presence in a department and an adjunct. And there’s a social difference, too–contract professors are often treated where they work as peers, as “real people”; adjuncts are not.

I am a tenured professor in a large humanities department at a top ten University. I went into the profession because my parents were academics and because I did very well in my undergraduate classes, so my professors strongly encouraged me and gave me some palaver about how mediated the working world was anyway. So I went to grad school, did well, got a great job, got tenure. I am now 36. I am completely burned out, exhausted, fried–in a deep almost soul-shattering way. I worked like hell to get tenure, but the life I now lead involves a whole lot of grading student papers; fending off attacks from my bitter and shitty tenured colleagues, all of whom act like big babies because no one can fire them; endless meetings about mind-numbing administrative matters; and very little actual intellectual exchange with the aforementioned shitty baby colleagues or with anyone else for that matter because we’re all too damned busy and burned-out. Oh, and have I mentioned that my salary is about what it would have been if I had become a low-level financial analyst right out of college? Also because there is no market per se I can’t just go get another job, so my salary will go up incredibly slowly if at all. So if any of you reading this are thinking of going to graduate school in the humanities, stop. Lash yourself to the mast. Do anything else–law, business, publishing, daytrading, retail. Get a job. The life you think you want to lead in the academy doesn’t exist.

I was a regular at IA. Basically, reading IA led me to forget about the PhD. I’m somewhat of an anomaly in having published in refereed journals without one. My guess is that IA would not improved her hiring chances with publications unless one publication created a tremendous buzz. I’ve actually thought of ghost-writing stuff for ambitious career-track people who want to get some numbers on the board.

The fine points of the reasons for the attitudes of the tenured (or some of them) toward the non-tenured are unimportant. The haves normally feel contempt for the have-nots, and any ideal whatsoever will do to justify the contempt. In the old days, someone might derive his whole (arrogant) identity from the fact that his great-grandfather had been awarded a large estate for winning a major battle.

The restructuring of academia via adjunctification has various causes / motives including oversupply. One issue I don’t see raised enough is that this amounts to a serious weakening of the University’s committment to fostering scholarship, as opposed to just teaching.

When right-wingers talk about the arrogance and complacency of the university elite, I routinely defend the university, but I understand what the right-wingers are saying. Because of tenure, the university (more than any other institution in our society except, I suppose, The Supreme Court) is dominated by invulnerable and unchallengable statusses. And pushing the argument to the limit, I’d say that there are plenty of Scalias in the system.

My other somewhat-related pet idea was that professionalization, restriction of access, and the dictatorship of hiring committees ahve led to a methodological narrowing to orthodoxy of many areas of interest to me, above all philosophy.

I’ve bookmarked this post over at the new Invisible Adjunct channel:

http://topicexchange.com/t/invisible_adjunct/

I am amazed that this graduate school scam is still going on. I went through the meat grinder in the early ’70s and quit a PhD degree program in history at a second tier school in 1973. I believe only 3 of the 10 who started with me stayed on to get a degree and find jobs. Most of us saw at the time that we were slave labor and held low opinions of the graduate school faculty so we fnally gave up. I still have a copy of the letter I wrote to the prof who asked me why I was leaving ( it was sort of a exit interview). And the reason I gave then was “There simply will not be enough jobs!” Now 30 years later that grad students are finghting the same battles just astonishes me. How do graduate faculties do it? How do they attract students to programs where falure is almost certain. What got me (when I was 25) was how attractive the life of a prof looked. But once outside the academy I discovered life was much more challenging and, after a few years, my decision to leave was the best thing I ever did.

Four kind of harsh thoughts:

* In enjoyed reading the IA blog quite a bit and I do wish her the best in her pursuit of a career beyond academia. But I always thought that her posts varied between spot-on analysis of the academic life and, well, whining. I used the phrase “pity party” one time, and while that was perhaps a bit strong, I don’t think it is entirely inaccurate.

* When folks here and elsewhere say things like “nobody told me this would be hard,” well, I don’t believe them. I too heard the stories of coming retirements back in the 80s, but I also heard a lot of warnings about the difficulties of the academic life.

Nowadays, the jist of the advice I give to students and anyone else that will listen is “don’t go, but if you’re going to go, be aware of the challenges if you choose a field like literature.” I know a lot of my colleagues give this same advice. I think what happens though is that the potential PhD students who get this sort of negative advice block it out because they have really made up their mind and/or they think “yeah, but those bad things won’t happen to me.” And then a few years down the road, when they can’t get a full-time teaching job in their field, they tend to only remember the folks who told them to go to school and they tend to forget the warnings.

* We shouldn’t just lump “the humanities” together into one (supposedly) unemployable pile. It just isn’t that simple. For example, in English studies, it is very difficult to get a job as a literature specialist, particularly in American literature (well, at least in the US). On the other hand, folks who do what I do, composition and rhetoric studies, tend to find jobs. And for folks in English studies who do things like tech writing, things involving computers, and/or English education, it is currently a “sellers” market.

* Cheer up, “do I sound bitter.” In my experience (though I must admit that I don’t teach at a fancy-shmancy school, I don’t have much of an academic pedigree, and I do actually teach quite a bit in my current tenured position), having a job in academia is a hell of a lot better than having a “real job.” So unless you’re independently wealthy, I would encourage you to appreciate what you have. Maybe you should take a summer to do some temp office work or take a job at a Starbucks; I suspect if you do, you’ll feel a lot less burned out about the academic job.

Agreed about not lumping the humanities together. Ditto other fields. In fact, what’s happening now is that people in lower-prestige fields are doing quite well. But that’s another story.

To “do I sound bitter”: look, if you’re tenured, and you’ve got a decent job, there is an awful lot you can control. If you really are at a top 10 research university and can’t find a friend to have lunch with once a week or once a month to talk about ideas, it’s your problem, not the system’s. I’m sorry. Intellectual communities are made and sustained by hard work. I know, because everywhere I go I have to build one for myself.

I know all about petty miserable colleagues who commit bizarre and cruel acts at unending faculty meetings. And everyone hates grading. But when I am in the classroom, when I am prepping class, when I am meeting with students, and when I am doing my own research and writing (and these four things still take up the bulk of my time), if I am not having fun, it is largely my own fault. I learned that is the only thing I can control in the business, and so I control it. As for grading and committee meetings and the shitty compensation, well, every job has its downside, and a professor’s salary is still enough to live on — outside a few major cities.

So I’m on the tenure track and I can’t complain. Well, I can, but I shouldn’t. I should be fighting for the rights of my exploited colleagues in the adjunct and graduate student ranks, and I enjoy doing it.

Over and out.

–JES