Don't Adjunct

It finally appears that there is a growing awareness in American society of the crime of adjunct labor exploitation. Today Gawker did an extended piece (in a running series) about it. I remember a time when students in classes taught by adjuncts didn't even know what adjunct professors were.

It's May, which is when the so-called "secondary" academic job market is in full swing. In this job market positions are minimally advertised, if at all. In this market departments look at their ledger of courses marked "staff" in the system and are looking for someone to fill them. Whereas regular job searches can be painstaking, the secondary market can be quite haphazard.  A lot of the folks on the secondary market are just about to get their PhDs, but have struck out in the tenure track search. I remember the May of 2006 vividly, because I was one of those people. I remember the pure, unrefined fear for my future that I was feeling, and I empathize greatly with those feeling it right now.

All of a sudden, I went from someone who was unwanted to having four job interviews for temporary gigs and three job offers, all for "visiting" positions. Not good enough to score a campus interview in the regular search, I was suddenly a hot commodity on the secondary market. (This was during a time when enrollments were shooting up and before the crash of 2008. After that even the secondary market got dicey.) It was then that I started to realize just how much of the academic labor system was kept afloat by temporary labor. (None of the institutions where I matriculated relied on it much, so I had been shielded.)

During my visiting gig I realized that I was relatively lucky. A friend of mine adjuncted, which meant he taught the same number of courses as me, but got paid a little more than half as much (without benefits), meaning that he supplemented his income with classes at another local university and a part time job. There was no reason for this disparity, other than the fact that the school I worked for wanted a ready stable of cheap, on the spot labor.  (At least he got promoted to visitor the next year. Evidently some of the same folks who adjuncted are still there today, a decade later.)  While there and at another institution I soon observed that adjuncts are paid as low as the market will bear, and can have classes taken away from them at the last moment, meaning their standard of living is always in doubt.

The Gawker article has all kinds of adjunct horror stories, and I've heard and witnessed my share myself, even if I never adjuncted. I've heard and seen enough to know that scholars leaving their grad school days behind need to hear this message: don't adjunct.

Of course this is not absolute. You gotta eat, after all. But you should only do it for as little time as possible. You should spend your time while adjuncting finding ways to get jobs that aren't adjuncting.  This is not victim blaming, because it's no one's fault that they are an adjunct, it's the fault of a corrupt system that refuses to pay people a living wage for their labor.  If you're at a school with a unionization movement, join up and fight, but if a union is not in your future, start planning your escape.

You can't pull any yahoo off of the street and ask them to teach a college course, but adjuncts are paid and treated like, well, yahoos who are just pulled off of the street.  On an hourly basis you'd make more money doing practically anything else.  I get sad when I hear stories of long-time adjuncts who die destitute, and then I get angry, but then I get frustrated. Don't do that to yourself. You are highly educated and the economy is growing again.  There are paths out. I and a lot of people I know have found jobs outside of academia that involve better pay, more respect, and security. It's not easy to make this transition, but it's a helluva lot easier than being a "freeway flier."  You might love the life of the mind, but trust me, you can pursue that in your free time, too.  (That's what I do.) You might love being part of academia, but academia won't fix your broken tooth or pay for your retirement if you're an adjunct. It will put you on the street when it needs to. Academia has no loyalty to adjuncts, so it is absurd for temporary academic laborers to feel any sense of loyalty to academia.

When all is said and done, wretched adjuncting jobs will be around as long as there is a mass of people willing to take them. Once enough people refuse to spend their time being exploited like this, things will change. Until then, it'll just keep getting worse and worse. Adjuncting work not only keeps you poor and insecure, it helps maintain a system that keeps other people poor and insecure, too.  Don't be a sucker or a cautionary tale. Don't adjunct.

The Adjunct Walk-Out, Long Overdue

The academic labor situation has been a wretched garbage fire for some time now, one of the many reasons that I got out.  Things were bad even before the crash of 2008, with departments not replacing tenure-track lines and adjuncts becoming the norm.  The crash then allowed conservatives to slash hard at higher ed budgets, and to give university leaders cover for hiring more part timers, and treating the full timers like dirt.  I went from being a "visiting assistant professor" to a tenure-track assistant professor in 2008, right at the point the crisis hit.  Suddenly professors were told they weren't getting any raises, and that we were lucky not to be furloughed, as others were in states like Georgia and Illinois.  Travel money and library funding, meager to begin with, got the axe, while enrollments increased without additional hiring, meaning bigger classes and more grading.  Adjunctification is part of this larger story, and casualizing labor and driving wages lower via adjunct labor does few favors for those on the tenure track, even if many of them cling to lifeboater status.

Of course, adjuncts are the laborers who've suffered and continue to suffer the most from the big squeeze in higher ed in the past forty years.  They work for ridiculously low pay, often sub-minimum wage if they calculate their hours, as a friend of mine once did.  They take this pay without health benefits, job security, or a place at the table when it comes to shared governance.  I once worked in a department where contingent faculty like myself taught a majority of the classes, but were barred from faculty meetings.  All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others, I guess.  This happens to them despite being highly educated individuals with all kinds of talents, those talents being squandered because they are not seen as having anything to offer beyond cheap labor.  It is a disgusting, rotten, intolerable system.  When I tell people outside of academe about it, they are seriously horrified, unaware that a PhD teaching four classes of college students a semester could be getting paid less than a student work study.  (This was the experience of another friend.)

Tomorrow adjuncts at several universities will be walking off the job for National Adjunct Walkout Day, a day that is long overdue.  The only way that the current exploitative system will change is through direct action.  Politicians in both political parties have been slashing higher ed, and only care about cutting costs, while the general public is mostly unaware of the academic labor situation.  The most powerful thing a worker can do is withhold their labor, and if enough academic workers do this, the world (and their employers) will have to take notice.

It's not that far-fetched.  As a graduate student I participated in a walkout to secure a union for TAs and other graduate student workers.  We faced lengthy court battles and an intransigent administration, but once we stopped working and picketed the campus for two days, that completely changed the dynamic, and they eventually caved.  Just as with adjuncts, we did not have even close to complete solidarity, but if you get enough people out there downing tools and making noise, that doesn't matter.  My participation in that walkout thirteen years ago was probably one of the most meaningful things I ever did in my life.  It was tremendously liberating to feel like my peers and I were actually having our voices heard, and actually making the upper administration listen to us.  I wish the adjuncts who walk out tomorrow all the best, and hope that those who aren't adjuncts respect the picket lines.  The future of academic labor, and academia itself, depends upon it.

The Informal Academic Job Market

I wrote the following on my old blog four years ago, and it's as relevant now as ever.  With May here all kinds of academic departments will be hiring, just not in public.

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It's been awhile since I've talked about the academic job crisis in these pages, but recent things I've observed and heard about merit comment. I've been reminded this week that the month of May is an intense one in the academic job world, but one you won't discover in the jobs section of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Oh yes, many jobs are being offered and taken right now, but very few of them have been advertized.

Here's the deal: at the end of the school year, department chairs have to scramble to fill all the slots in their introductory level classes in the Fall. Because of hiring freezes, this year the gap between class sessions that need to be taught and the number of faculty on hand will be quite severe. However, department chairs can safely rely upon the large reserve army of unemployed academics to take low paying adjunct work at the last minute. They never have to look far. Just as a contractor knows the corners where the day laborers wait and can be hired for low wages, department heads have a steady supply of newhomegrown MAs and PhDs who need work and are willing to teach classes for peanuts and without benefits.

The key to the informal job market is to be at the right place at the right time. Most department chairs want to put as little work as possible into finding the warm bodies necessary to fill in the classroom gaps. In the past I have witnessed patently incompetent people get jobs simply because of desperation on the part of department chairs. These incompetents (who are a minority of adjuncts, btw) then managed to retain their jobs because it was just too much bother to replace them with someone who knew what they were doing. The quality of education received by the students very rarely factors into the equation. Even worse, the naked exploitation of a captive labor force making poverty-line wages never, ever seems to make those doing the hiring lose any sleep.

As the formal job market gets worse with each passing year, the informal market will only get bigger. The math is pretty simple, actually: tenure track positions keep getting scarcer, but enrollments are still growing. Until we shine a light on the informal market and force the same "accountability" on university administrators that's being forced on faculty by them, in no time at all the "formal" market will be a thing of the past.