April 30, 2004
Indivisible Adjunct
Since we're all either aspiring academics or unapologetic brainiacs, I thought I’d do a bit of a transplant of a discussion that I first noticed via O-Dub. The Village Voice recently published an article on the academic job market, a seemingly perennial topic of hand-wringing in the librul press. Appropriately, at a time when grad students are slowly unionizing, Wal-Mart is getting blasted for not providing health care to its legion of part-time workers, and outsourcing to India is a political hot potato, the focus this time around is on the increasing reliance on adjunct faculty to fill the holes left by the decline in tenured positions and/or the rise in student populations. The adjunct massive claims that it is the downtrodden plebeian underclass of academia, while this blithely irresponsible tenured monstrosity thinks they could all use a few years down a coal mine to put things in perspective.
The one thing that strikes me in much of this reading – it seems widely acknowledged that adjuncts do little or no research and writing. Is this because these are people primarily interested in teaching, are they just uninterested in research? It seems like common academic knowledge these days that a book is pretty much a prerequisite to tenure – are the adjuncts just people who can’t get with the program? And as I told Mike, I don't think this sort of question invalidates my position against the overuse of adjuncts - there are both general and individual causes that can be in effect simultaneously.
A couple of bonus links:
A discourse on the history of the current crisis.
One of the adjuncts gets dissed hard by a community college administrator.
Dude, that is crazy. I was just in the process of composing a big post on this debate myself.
Well, I think that once one is out of grad school and adjuncting full time, one doesn't have as much time for research. Adjuncts also don't have the grad school structure and the support of profs. But I would argue that if you're actually producing interesting research, you can keep adding on to your CV and when you reapply people will notice.
I think that if someone like the character in the Chronicle article wants a full time community college job, they usually have to adjunct for years and get some good student evaluations before they're considered for a real job. Or, he can concentrate on writing a cool book and maybe a creative writing program will notice and throw him a bone. A final option would be to move away from the cool city to someplace where there is demand.
As for tenure, first you get a tenure-track position (which only 1 in 5 begining grad students get), then you think about tenure. Normally, you publish a book (usually based on your dissertation) in your first years and then you produce another book before you qualify for tenure. If you can't get tenure for whatever reason, you can try somewhere else (usually a lesser school) or leave academia.
So are you guys, especially SNW and mallarme, who are just starting their postgrad lives, disheartened by this, or were you pretty aware of the situation before you went in? Also, where do you place yourselves in ludwig's two categories?
David, I was already aware of it from reading blogs like Invisible Adjunct, but it's not encouraging.
Scott, you seem to dismiss the problem of adjunct labor a bit blithely, putting most of the blame on the adjuncts rather than the system. The point, as I see it, is that too many PhDs are awarded compared to the number of job openings. Even if every newly minted Doctor were to publish a mind-bogglingly good book the same percentage would still not get tenure. It's in the interest of the already tenured professors and the college administrators to use graduate students and doctoral candidates as cheap teaching labor so they continue to do so, despite the exploitative nature of that relationship. Since most people who invest the time and effort to get a PhD do so in hopes of getting a career in that field, claiming that they can just leave academia is a bit callous. Many just don't have any other lucrative skills.
One of the most interesting points that was brought up over at Invisible Adjunct was the fact that for the most part, the books published by today's humanties faculty are only read by grad students and other faculty. Hence, without a large pool of specialized grad students, there is no market for their ideas. Add to that the fact that spending 8+ years researching a topic, faculty members really jump at the chance to do a graduate seminar in their research area and see how their students react to the topic.
Hence, there are real factors that work against senior faculty members swallowing their pride and realizing the situation for what it is. Nobody wants to admit that their university is one of those "2nd-tier" schools that needs to eliminate its PhD program or cut back on the newly enrolled to help fix the situation. On the contrary, faculty tend to fight hard to expand, even while admitting to their students that the market is super tough. Meanwhile, the admins have no interest in replacing TAs with full timers with benefits when they could just hire adjuncts.
So perhaps national adjunct and TA unionization is ultimately the best way to enact change.