9 thoughts on “Spreadin’ Love”

  1. Why is Croxall still teaching, if it does not pay his bills? He is a grown man who has the ability to find another job. That, in my estimation, is what he should do — vote with his feet, in a meaningful way. If more people did it, teachers would not make such pitiful wages.
    There are all kinds of people in life who hate their jobs and b*tch non-stop about the job, but do nothing to change their circumstances. Yet when academics do it (perhaps because their b*tching is more eloquent than others’ b*tching) it’s positioned as worthy of more empathy than, say, a car salesman. I just disagree with that.
    A person who continues working for an employer who treats them so shabbily, when they have other options out there in the world, is somewhat complicit. Their employer is not completely free of responsibility but is also not totally at fault.

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  2. I agree with jen. There isn’t an entitlement, in this world, to receive lots of money for doing whatever you want to do. I’d love to quit practicing law and become a genealogist, but I wouldn’t make enough to live on. Why doesn’t Croxall become an orthodontist, then he’d have all the money in the world.

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  3. There are all kinds of people in life who hate their jobs and b*tch non-stop about the job, but do nothing to change their circumstances.
    When you are primarily addressing the people who trained you for your job (and who continue to train more people like you), bitching is probably the most effective way to change things, even if it won’t change circumstances for the bitching person. Of course, if this guy did get the job he wants, he’d only train more people who’d be in the circumstance he is in now.
    Instead of articles, he should write a novel about a group of Nazi vampires with the secret to better abs in thirty days.

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  4. I don’t think that these comments are fair to Mr. Croxall at all.
    First, there’s a big difference between an adjunct professor and a used car salesman, in that the adjunct is trying to work TOWARD his dream job of a tenured professorship. If he gets tenure, he will have both his dream job and sufficient income.
    Now, that makes sense only to the degree that there is a reasonable chance of getting a tenure-track job. Is this feasible? I don’t know, but he certainly thinks it is. And to the extent that the pot of gold may still be at the end of the rainbow, then toughing it out for a few more years may be the smartest avenue — as he may be more likely to get to a happy endpoint by continuing to adjunct for a few more years than by starting over in a new career.
    The calculus is simply different for a person three years post-doc than it is for someone contemplating grad school — Croxall has already put in the first eight (or however many) years. Maybe he’s just running on a treadmill, or maybe he’s on mile 25 of the marathon. You’d have to know the quality of his research to know which it is.
    I do think the complicity is perpetuating the system if he does get tenure is a fair point though . . .

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  5. I do think the complicity is perpetuating the system if he does get tenure is a fair point though . . .
    Maybe the best thing, by both moral and self-interested criteria, is to get tenure and do such a bad job teaching that nobody wants to study your subject.

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  6. Yes, grad students and adjunct faculty should definitely take a good look at the job market and run in the opposite direction. But have some compassion for those who keep working for peanuts. They put in years and years of work into getting a graduate degree. Their schools covered up the depths of the bad job market. All their friends are living in similar conditions and can’t possibly conceive of a life outside of academia. They haven’t been trained for anything else. And a great number of them are very, very good at what they do. It’s a tragic situation.
    The criminal situation is that many tenured faculty go along with the system and turn a blind eye to their exploited colleagues. They go along with it, because they are just so damn happy to have a job, they don’t want to make waves. They sort of believe that they have a job, because they deserve it more than others. The status quo works for them. They can get 1-1 teaching loads, because there is an endless supply of adjuncts to teach their courses for them.
    Outside the Internet, nobody complains about the system. That’s why this paper is kind of ballsy and why I liked it.

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  7. I liked Croxall’s paper, too, not the least because his writing ability hasn’t been completely ruined by grad school. And Laura, I absolutely agree that he was suckered by his advisors (“You fucked up! You trusted us!”) and is in an unenviable situation.
    But part of me also remembers that the dismal state of the job market was a topic in the 1990s, and well known by the end of that decade, and that the Invisible Adjunct was blogging on this topic by 2003–when Croxall was only a year into his grad program.
    How many times does the message have to be given until it sinks in? For all but the very, very best students, grad school in the humanities is a scam. Jobs are few and far between, and long-term changes in American universities guarantee that that’s the way it will be for the foreseeable future. Most individuals employed as professors don’t blow the whistle on this as loudly as they should either because (1) they are the beneficiaries of a system that allows them to teach fun grad classes, provides cheap graduate teachers (not TAs–grad students aren’t “assisting” anyone, they’re teaching their own classes) and a big pool of adjuncts, or (2) they believe they got a job because they were the “best,” not admitting the degree to which dumb luck played a role. I may be painting with a broad brush, but I think this is basically true.
    So each year I read some version of Croxall’s plaint, and each year my sympathy erodes just a little bit more. By now enough information is available that anyone entering grad school in the humanities should know the deck is stacked against them and shouldn’t complain when, 5-12 years from now, the job they wanted isn’t there. I know that sounds harsh–and may just be my reaction to reading the umpteenth academic-job-market-is-awful story, but there you have it.

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  8. So, I’m thinking that there’s also something of an availability heuristic going on here, though. I mean, a disproportionate large percentage of bloggers are people with advanced degrees. PhDs are aware of other PhD type problems. But . . .
    I you are a lawyer like me, you are aware that there is a huge field of comparable blogs for people who took out $100K in loans to go to law school, and now don’t have a job at a law firm.
    http://esqnever.blogspot.com/ and a few others were featured in a Wall Street Journal article, focusing on the plight of recent grads of third-tier law schools. And the blogs have a point (just as Croxall does). But . . .
    then, what about the bottom third of Communications majors who graduate from bottom tier undergraduate schools? Are there unemployed Widener or IUP grads with blogs talking about their four wasted years, how they were the first members in their families to go to college, and are making less money than their older system who chose to start working after high school? Pointing to statistics of how only 50% of people who begin 4-year colleges graduate with a 4-year degree? And how few well-paying jobs there are for Communications majors just out of college?
    There certainly could be. . .

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  9. “But part of me also remembers that the dismal state of the job market was a topic in the 1990s, and well known by the end of that decade”
    It was well known when I entered grad school in 1990.
    I still found the stat about something like 70% of English classes being taught by adjuncts to be shocking, though.

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