Gawker is Asking for Adjunct Stories!

Hi readers!

If any of you out there who are still reading or finding this blog are adjuncts and would like to share your story, Gawker is looking for people who are willing to share their stories for an upcoming article or series that they're planning. They are guaranteeing anonymity. See the info at this link.

From the article:

What is the reality of life as an adjunct professor? I’d like to run some stories from adjuncts. Please email me if you’d like to share the following info: How much money do you make? How much do you work? How does your school treat adjuncts? What is your quality of life? And what do you think should be done to change the labor system of colleges and universities, if anything?

Email me. Anonymity guaranteed.

If you have time and are willing to share your story, please do. If there's one thing I've become convinced of in the last five years (and maybe longer than that), it's that nothing in higher ed/grad school/academia will change unless we start agitating for it. And successful agitation is probably going to require some public attention on the plight of adjuncts and grad students.

As always, I hope you're all doing well and are finding support while you're working your way through grad school, academia or postacademia. Take care and be well!

Adjuncts! Tell Your Story Here!

(Editor note: Please share this post far and wide - on twitter, on your blog, Facebook, wherever. I don't blog-flog as a general rule, but I welcome any sharing of this post that anyone wants to do. Let's get as many stories as possible, and then we'll see what we can do as far as getting them out to a wider audience.

Also: I'm not going to respond to comments because I just want this to be a comment thread of stories, with minimal distractions. But I am reading all of them and listening.)

So it's been a rough week in internet-land for postacademics and adjuncts (and their defenders).

If you have a strong stomach for condescending, insulting comments, click here or here. But if not, let's just say that there has been a lot of insulting nonsense posted recently at academic forums, with (presumably) tenure-track faculty and/or grad students implying that academia is still basically a meritocracy, that folks who don't get tenure-track jobs are deficient in some way, and that adjuncting isn't really a major problem (and that even if it is, adjuncts know the market is crap so they deserve what they get).

It's cruel nonsense, of course ... but it's still obnoxious, and I don't think we should let it sit out there unchallenged.

But in an era when data about adjuncts is hard to come by and where graduate departments don't publish their placement statistics, it's hard to refute what those people are saying.

A few of us were talking about this problem on Twitter, and came to the conclusion that one thing that should happen is for more adjuncts and other contract faculty to share their experiences in a public forum. If more of you "come out" publicly about your experiences, then we stand a better chance of drowning out the voices who are insisting that everything is equal, that the most deserving always get ahead, and that things really aren't that bad out there for folks in the social sciences and humanities.

We need, in essence, a chorus of people who are on the lower rungs of academia to stand up and tell their stories.

Ideally, every single adjunct would have a column in a major magazine where they could do this. :) But in reality, of course, most of you don't have that kind of platform, and/or may not be comfortable "outing" yourselves publicly in that way - using your real name, and opening yourself up to shame and criticism.

So, here's a public (anonymous) platform for you to tell your stories, adjuncts. Take over my blog!

I want to hear about your working conditions, about how grad school did (or did not) prepare you for what you encountered on the job market, and about how adjuncting makes you feel as a person and as a scholar. If we hear stories from a lot of you, then it becomes easier to drown out the nasty comments and Pollyannaish narratives that are out there.

It certainly won't end the problems in academia, of course, but it might help in some small way ... if only by shaping the discourse on adjuncthood around your experiences, rather than around the statements and assumptions of tenured faculty.

So leave a comment (or email me at leavingacademia at gmail.com). Tell us about your adjunct life.

So Many Ph.Ds...So Few Jobs

I'm going to read the whole thing this weekend and will probably have more to say about it in future posts, but the newest NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates is out, and the picture about jobs isn't a pretty one.

According to the IHE, the percentage of folks who graduate with Ph.D.s and have firm employment commitments on hand at graduation has fallen sharply ... across every discipline.

Here's the table from the IHE article, which is drawn directly from the report:

(Side note - I am really surprised to see that the percentage of new grads with job commitments is highest among social scientists. Though I suppose if you include economists and psychologists in that group, you may be catching a number of people who are moving into industry. But still...).

At any rate, these numbers are pretty scary. Note that the comparison year is 2006 - which is at least a year or two before the academic job market is perceived to have started its collapse.

And as everyone knows, the next few years were awful. Fewer schools had money to hire new faculty, and many schools cancelled their searches when they were already underway. Graduate programs (like mine) where students who graduated in 2004 or 2005 were often mulling over 2 or 3 job offers as ABDs were suddenly seeing students who got nothing more than a single VAP offer or (if they really got lucky), an offer from a school that was at the end of their desirability list.

But now, in 2011 and 2012, we keep hearing that the market across multiple disciplines is rebounding. There are more job listings than in previous years, and schools are finally getting the go-ahead to hire tenure-track faculty. Don't worry, Ph.D. students! Everything is back to normal! Just keep working hard, and it'll all work out!

The New Normal In Academic Hiring

Colorado State University has now updated their job posting, so that now it only indicates that they are looking for an "entry-level" tenure-track assistant professor, with no further specifications listed about year of degree or anything else.

It's a nice gesture, I suppose ... but I'd still love to see how many long-term adjuncts they bring to campus for interviews. I'm thinking that the "best qualified candidates" will still mysteriously be the folks who are newly graduated, not those who've been already working as (non-tenured) faculty for five or more years.

I mean, I have a different definition of who your "qualified candidates" would be, but what the hell do I know, right? I'm not a professor, so clearly I know nothing.

So that's encouraging, I suppose. (Although I'm also open to the argument that it's better to see this kind of thing out in the open in job ads, to work against the myth that long-term adjuncting is the path to a tenure track job. It's a valid point, but it doesn't alleviate my anger...)

But if you're in the latter category - the ones who think that universities being blatant about this is a good thing? You'll be happy to hear (via a commenter on yesterday's post) that there is another job posting for a tenure-track assistant professor of Comparative Literature position at Harvard, which specifies that the Ph.D. must have been received since 2009. 

An Update on Colorado State's "No Olds Need Apply" Ad

The chair of the English department at Colorado State has responded to questions about their discriminatory highly controversial job ad, which I posted about earlier this week:

By specifying 'between 2010 and time of appointment' we indicated that we are interested in applicants with up to three years in a tenure-track position as well as those who are just beginning their careers. In examining the pool of applicants, we have actually given the true 'entry-level' applicant an advantage in that such applicants will not have to compete with others who have as much as six years' more experience.

Now, this sounds reasonable, if you are looking from the outside and have absolutely no idea what the academic job market looks like - especially in the humanities.

But from the inside of the academic job market - you know, the exact position that the chair of the English department should be looking from - this is still just as clueless and problematic of a statement as the original job ad was.

First, the chair is naively identifying "true 'entry level'" applicants as only those who are new Ph.D. graduates - or those who have jumped out of grad school directly into a tenure-track job. Wow, is that a blindfolded look at the academic job market! It's kind of staggering.

In a robust academic job market, this might be true. Every graduate will get a job, and then after a year or two young professors will reshuffle into different positions. That might make sense in a perfect-world academic job market ... but in the actual academic job market we have today? It doesn't. At all. And everyone in academia should understand that. No exceptions.

Ph.D.s on Food Stamps

The Chronicle posts an expose about adjuncts and temporary faculty who are on food stamps.

From a quick glance, the piece seems well-researched and well-written. I'm happy to see them quoting folks from the New Faculty Majority and referencing the Adjunct Project.

And while I'll have to take some time over the next few days to give it a closer read before I have more to say about it, I'll just say for now that I'm thrilled to see the Chronicle bringing this "dirty little secret" of higher education staffing to light.

As the adjuncts in the story report, this is an embarrassing reality for them that they don't like to talk about. And indeed, it seems that the reality that adjuncts are on food stamps is an embarrassing reality that the higher education system in this country would like to keep under wraps. So good on the Chronicle for bringing this issue to the very public forefront. The situation for adjuncts isn't going to improve overnight, but at least shedding some public light on it increases the likelihood that something will change at some point in the future.

After all ... if parents around the country begin to realize that the "impressive faculty" that they are spending tens of thousands of dollars to send their children to study under are actually adjuncts who are jetting around between four campuses and therefore aren't around to meet with and advise their children on their studies and their career goals? I can't imagine they'd be very enthusiastic about continuing to support those schools with all of their hard-earned money.

And if those same parents learn that their tens of thousands of tuition dollars are being used to build shiny new buildings and give a massive raise to the Assistant Vice President of Getting More Money for the University while their children's professors are lining up at food banks? I don't think the parents would have to be card-carrying Occupy Movement members to get pretty upset about something like that.

So a hearty "good job" to the Chronicle. I encourage my readers to share this article far and wide.

More Discussion of Privilege in Academia

Quick blogging/life note: Yes, it's after January 1st ... and yes, I'm restarting my nonacademic job search. I'm currently writing/revising two different resumes (for two broad categories of jobs) so that I have templates to work from, and I've been reading job listings all week to get an idea of what's out there for me. Resume sending will start this weekend, as long as I don't hit any unforeseen roadblocks. I'll write more about it later this week or next week ... but in the meantime, rest assured that I am making progress ... even if it's starting out kinda slow. The mental process of figuring out "what comes next" and "how to sell myself as a good candidate without spending 200 hours on every application" really is pretty tough ... not to mention simply trying to find time and motivation to sit down and work on such things *in addition to* the full 40-hour workweek. But I've got time and I'm working at it every day ... and I do have a job for now, so I'm doing okay.

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For another take on the question of privilege in academia, I turn to a couple of comments left on my last post about privilege and inequality in academia. This commenter has completed her Ph.D. and is now looking for work, and is finding that concerns about money, social class, and relative privilege are cropping up as she contemplates her career prospects after graduation.

Some excerpts from these excellent comments:

In my view, the class differences were not as big a deal in grad school as after. I went to grad school in an affordable city at a school that gave a stipend of around $20,000 each year. It was actually possible to go to grad school without taking on debt, which is one of the reasons I chose this school, despite getting into slightly more prestigious schools in much more expensive cities. (Which itself is a class issue, but that’s another story.)

Yes, that definitely is a class issue worth noting ... so let's talk about it for a minute.

In my earlier post, I mentioned that graduate stipends in my department (a top 10 program) were around $14,000 per year. This commenter describes a higher stipend at a slightly less prestigious school ... an offer that she took in favor of a more prestigious program due to economic concerns.

It's worth noting, of course, that if you come from a privileged background in which someone will be paying your rent, you are free to pay less attention to whether your stipend is sufficient, and more attention to the prestige/fit of a given program. If a top-5 program offers you a tiny stipend in a high cost of living area but a top-50 program offers you a sizable stipend in a livable city? A student whose parents will be paying their rent and helping them out financially is free to take the first offer ... and to reap the benefits of graduating from a top-5 program rather than a top-50 program. A student who has no such safety net will face two choices: take the second offer with its worse long-term job prospects but better financial security in the meantime, or take the first offer and start out their academic career with a load of debt.

In other words, the student who has help from their parents has better options right out of the gate, even though both students are being given the exact same opportunities. Privilege influences one's academic opportunities and academic career success, once again.

Also...

....I got another job ad/offer emailed to me today. To teach 2 brand new classes, at a campus that is two hours away by car.

The start date is in on Monday. In five days.

I won't be sending my CV in. And God help the students who are enrolled in those two classes. Whatever well-meaning person takes this position is in no way, shape, or form going to be able to put in their best effort. But I guess it doesn't matter, as long as they get a warm body to stand in front of all of those tuition dollars students.

Five days to prep. Astounding.

On Homeless Adjuncts

I ran across this post at the Chronicle today, which links back to this series of posts at The Homeless Adjunct ... all of which are drawing much-needed attention to the reality of adjuncting today in higher education.

Adjuncting is something that's often discussed in academia as a temporary condition ... as something that grad students or recent Ph.D.s can do to supplement their income during their last few semesters before they go off and get their "real" tenure track jobs.

And indeed, in some cases/places, that is how adjuncting works. In my department, grad students would occasionally take a one-course adjuncting gig at a nearby institution to earn a few thousand extra dollars and some additional teaching experience ... in exchange for giving the instructors at the smaller regional campuses a much-needed break from their huge course loads. No harm, no foul. Alternately, I'd taken a few courses at Grad U with instructors who had day jobs but taught a class at night, just because they loved doing it. Again ... no harm, no foul.

What I didn't realize until I started reading postacademic blogs, however, was the degree to which adjuncting is becoming the norm in higher ed writ large, especially in urban areas with their captive pools of recent Ph.D.s and their high number of campuses in small geographic areas. Sadly, what I've learned since starting this blog is that adjuncting is gradually becoming the "new normal" in faculty appointments at many universities, particularly in the humanities (but also with a growing number in the social sciences as well).

This is Your Academic Job Market...

It is July 14th.

I just received an email from the chair of a social science department at a regional university approximately 3 hours away from where I live right now. This email was addressed to about 15 people (presumably all ABDs or adjuncts) from universities ranging around the Midwest, based on what I can see. (I am very glad that the sender did not understand the BCC function of his/her email so that I could see exactly who gets these emails.). In this email, he is "inviting us to apply for this exciting opportunity at Regional Public U's Department of Social Science this fall!"

This "exciting opportunity" is a VAP position to replace two faculty members going on sabbatical. The teaching load is 4/4, and it is a one year, non-renewable contract.

The job starts August 15th, with classes commencing August 29th.

This is not the first email of this type I've gotten, but it's definitely the one that has come latest in the year. And it has left me equally rolling my eyes, laughing at my desk, and lamenting the state of higher education staffing that has caused this kind of position to be described as a "exciting opportunity!"

Reason I'm Leaving #7: I Want Out of the Exploitative Higher Ed System

This reason is one that has just recently occurred to me, as I have done more and more reading from dissatisfied academic and post-academic writers out here in the blogosphere.

I've mentioned before that I really had no idea of the extent to which adjuncting had become the "new normal" in academia. My department didn't use adjuncts (they had grad students to do their low-cost teaching for them), and while I had known several people who had left our department for visiting professor or instructor positions, I don't personally know anyone in real life who is teaching on the course-by-course adjunct system with no benefits and absolutely no job security. I really had no idea that there were adjuncts out there who were doing it as a full-time job (and not just for supplemental income in addition to a 9-5 job).

Since making the decision to leave and beginning this blog, however, I've learned that more than half of all college courses are currently taught by adjuncts. I've also learned that there are an entire class of people with Ph.D.'s out there who aren't just adjuncting a class on the side, but who are actually trying to string together an entire career based on traveling between multiple campuses and teaching 4 or 5 classes with no benefits, just to top out at a wage that approximates a life of poverty. Other bloggers and journalists have written about homeless adjuncts, adjuncts on food stamps, and groups of adjuncts who have been prevented from organizing together to buy group health insurance by their universities.

Article on the State of the Market and Higher Education

I was out of town for a few days and am immensely tired today, so I don't have much time for insightful commentary or discussion today. However, I did run across this article today, entitled "Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education," and wanted to post a link to it so you all can read it (Interestingly, it was posted to Facebook by one of my graduate student friends ... perhaps others in my program are considering other options???)

It's a piece from The Nation, discussing at length a number of problems with the system of higher education in the United States today - from the terrible job market across multiple fields, to the growing proportion of classes being taught by adjunct and contingent faculty, to the sluggish response by graduate programs and universities.

I haven't had a chance to read it in much depth or formulate clear thoughts yet, but later this week I plan to read it in more detail and post some thoughts. In the meantime, I thought I'd link to this just in case anyone reading might find it useful, or have any comments or thoughts to add.

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In other news - I had a phone interview for the job I mentioned in an earlier post. It seemed to go fairly well, although I'm not entirely sure I would want the position if offered. Still, it was great to get the experience and the small ego boost from being a semifinalist for a position. It helps me think that perhaps this whole "leaving academia" thing was a good move, after all.

On Fair Compensation in Academia

I was catching up on my RSS feeds tonight after a week or so with sporadic computer access, and came across a comment on Anastasia's blog (an adjunct working in, I believe, religious studies) that I wanted to highlight.

Over at her place, on a post (which everyone should go read now) in which she discussed the poor treatment she received from one of the two schools where she adjuncts, commenter "Inside the Philosophy Factory" notes that

"It's curious, in other business models, the people who bring in the most profit are treated well... in acadamia they're treated like an imposition."

This really struck me, because although I was basically ignorant about adjuncting as a Thing until the past couple of months, I have often made this observation about academia myself during my years teaching as a grad student.

Side Note - Go Read about Adjuncting, Now

Something I never realized until I started reading other post-academic blogs was the way that adjuncting is, more and more, holding up the entire university system on the backs of people with completed Ph.D's who work for less money than I make via my grad student stipend while teaching 3 or 4 classes per semester on multiple campuses, with no benefits.

Neither my graduate or undergraduate program used adjuncts (my grad program has tons of grad students to take on that role for them!), so I was woefully unaware of how exploitative and widespread the practice of adjuncting is.

To those of you reading here who are not in a top-5 program (so you're less likely to land a tenure track job due to the hierarchy of rankings), or who are in the humanities or a very specialized field where there are very few job opportunities, I really recommend that you go read some blogs about the reality of adjuncting. This has been eye-opening to me, and has further solidified my decision to leave. Not only do I not want to wind up as an adjunct, but I don't want to contribute to a system that relies so heavily on such an exploitative system.

The list is small now, since I'm just learning about this new area of academia that I was previously pretty ignorant about. But I will tag this post as "resources," and add to it as I find more good blogs and articles about adjuncting life.