the Greater Nomadic Council

More on Adjuncts: The Brutal Market in the Humanities

I thought this post from Michael Berube might interest you guys. But then SNW beat me to it! Nevertheless, check out what MB has to say....all of his links are worth following, including a handy Village Voice summary of the situation. Much of the discussion surrounds the death of the popular Invisible Adjunct blog, which was written by a historian lamenting the hopeless market in the humanities and working as an adjunct. In the end she gave up looking, left academia, and stopped writing the blog.

Entries like this one are very compelling indeed--most of her "Academic "Job Market" entries are worth reading, including the very interesting commentary that follows, where a variety of former academics weigh in. Here's a typical sample from the blog...

But how much worse to spend five or six or seven years! At a time when you could be building a viable career, and also creating a life for yourself (which might involve marriage, maybe having a child or two, possibly even buying a home or at least moving into a half-decent rental), you are toiling away in relative poverty, perhaps accumulating debt, and living under conditions of massive anxiety and insecurity. You must delay and defer so much of what many people (perhaps including yourself? be honest, now) would consider a decent, livable life, and without even a reasonable chance that it will all be worth it in the end. And I'm not talking about fame and fortune, the pursuit of filthy lucre and lots of it, but just the basics of a modest middle-class life: say, a living wage with health insurance. Be still my bourgeois heart.

And where I had once rather looked down at those who were busily pursuing jobs/careers/marriages/family out there in the real world while I engaged in something loftier and more pure... Well, let me conclude this overlong entry by saying two things: First, if I had to do it over again, I would not go to graduate school; and second, I try hard, really hard, not to hold it against those undergraduate professors of mine who encouraged me to go to graduate school and who actively discouraged me from going to law school because I was "too smart" for a legal career. Ach. I was smart enough, I suppose, in the booksmarts way, but it turns out I was actually rather stupid: not smart enough, that is, to not listen to such silly advice.

It’s really a very big discussion, and though this post is really long, it could be 5 times longer. Let me start with Berube's commentary. Although I don't disagree with anything he says, I find it a little silly when an academic star like Berube attributes his initial ability to find a job to "dumb luck". I don't doubt that luck played some part in his success, but when you look at the guy's CV and some of his prior blog posts about his daily life, it becomes crystal clear that the man is a fucking engine—a workaholic churning out essay after book after essay while raising a family and keeping up a teaching load, in addition to a blog and a more than healthy interest in politics.

Ultimately, I think it really does have to do with how smart you are, how hard you work and have worked, and how willing you are to relocate. In short, how much you deserve to be a successful academic is directly proportional to how much you want it. Take the case of Invisible Adjunct--she lives in New York and presumably isn't able to relocate since she has a successful lawyer husband. She must be aware that New York is the worst place in the world for people looking for tenure track academic jobs. Clearly, she isn’t prepared to move, which is completely understandable. But even given the geographic constraints, her case is still hard to believe, since she has showed herself smart and capable enough to launch a successful blog that became something of a rallying point for adjuncts everywhere. Still, I have to wonder—how much could she have accomplished if she had devoted all that blogging time to research on the Scottish Enlightenment? How many articles did she publish in the last year or for that matter the last 5 years?

The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that whether one gets a job comes down to the sacrifices you are prepared to make for the profession. It is true that most new graduate students hardly understand this, even if their mentors make every effort to ram it down their throats. I remember Mark telling me an anecdote about a buddy of his whose professor told him flat out "Don't do it! It's too much work!" That’s probably going a little too far, but maybe that’s what someone should have said to Invisible Adjunct.

I suppose there are 2 primary categories of the naïve grad student. First of all there are the normal, innocent bastards who think being an academic is a normal bourgeois career (it isn't) that pays relatively well (it doesn't) with good work hours (absolutely no way). They think that if they simply do what they're told to do (get good grades and write their dissertation) things will fall into place. This type will either sink or swim--either they learn the individualistic academic work ethic and pump out as many articles as possible (certainly, love for the subject matter is a big help here) or they are spit out with a Masters or even worse, produce a mediocre PhD followed by a near hopeless job search. I have occasionally encountered such mediocre dissertations when researching a paper—you wonder how it ever got into book form, or why the examining committee didn’t burst into laughter over the well-organized and well-structured stupidity of the argument.

And then you have an even freakier type of grad student idiocy (and I fear I fall into this category). That is, those who view/viewed academia as an escape from the "real world", a negation of mainstream society in favor of a monk-like existence with real parallels to a spiritual life, except with lots of coffee and hot undergrads with perky breasts. Left among themselves, this type of grad student is contemptuous of the anxieties and hang-ups of mainstream society. He/she has "a healthy lack of interest in consumptive patterns of the middle to upper-middle class", as one defiant Invisible Adjunct commentator puts it. Their lives are devoted to the higher, unsullied realm of mental masturbation and literary tiffs, in addition to proving that, when you think about it, philosophers should rule the world. Unfortunately, these sorry poetic souls soon find out that 1) the contemporary university is a bureaucratic system that is becoming increasingly rationalized and subject to the process of supply and demand, 2) the only way to hack it in the humanities is to develop a severe work-ethic characteristic of Puritans, med students, or novelists. Either way, you have to work your ass off and become a creature of the system to survive, unless you are some kind of mad genius.

Being part of the 2nd group, I am slowly coming to understand academia for what it is, and realize that I've either got to ratchet up the work ethic or take my hot ass somewhere else. In order to have a chance, we grad students have to remain in close competition with one another and constantly be asking ourselves how our research is valuable within the context of a supply and demand academic market. Hence the question emerges again--how badly do you want it?

For me, this is the answer to the adjuncts who bitch about the lack of opportunities in their chosen field (such people are incredibly numerous and annoying here in Germany, where the economy is in a total funk and may never recover), no matter how obscenely junior academics are treated in comparison with other bourgeois professions. The attitude that everyone is fucked because there aren't enough jobs is suggestive of a passive, victimized attitude toward work, where one doesn't know what one is doing when one makes decisions, since one's decisions are largely based on the advice and pressures of the system. Of course, I’m just as much of a systematic product as anyone else. But I think I realize that if I'm unhappy with the academic job market, there are 2 choices—1) work harder or 2) do something else. I am reminded of a scene in the movie "Comedian" (about Seinfeld) where the annoying up and coming comic whines to Seinfeld about how all his friends are doing better than he is, how things are so hard, how he isn’t making it… Seinfeld is incredulous and replies "What the hell are you talking about? It's not about making it. This is a special life.......Is there something else you'd rather be doing?"

I think this passage applies to any tough field, including academia. People have to get it through their heads that a PhD means jack shit if they can't teach and can't write interesting books. When it comes down to it, the less our profession is invested with institutional mediocrity, the better.

But don't get me wrong, I believe the professional structures in the humanities must be changed to provide an ethically acceptable as well as realistic solution to the problem. Clearly, the first thing they can do is cut back drastically on the number of Ph.D students admitted and the number of teaching assistantships available (the MLA has been agitating for this for years). In the case of German, they should take the money paid to T.As and hire full time Introductory German teachers. Ideally, these people would have M.A.s and be the type of person who loves and is great at teaching foreign languages, but doesn't have any overwhelming interest in literature or research. This type definitely exists, and many of them would enthusiastically prefer working on a university campus rather than a community college or high school. They would be prepared to take a relative pay cut to do so. And they tend to be much better teachers than grad students whose interests are elsewhere.

I think a similar strategy could help meet the demand for English Composition instructors and cut back on English TAs as well, although in the case of Composition, English PhDs might want the job (these days, many community college teachers have PhDs anyway). Again, an experienced, well-qualified professional is going to do a better teaching job than a bewildered 1st or 2nd year grad student.

Basically, relying on adjuncts and producing too many PhDs in order to take advantage of cheap PhD labor is unethical and exploitive, and the profs need to pressure admins to do something about it. Humanities departments around the country need to face the facts and get with the MLA program, even if it means cutting their beloved graduate programs.