A couple of days ago, I wrote a short blog post about the slow decay of tenure. It wasn’t a pro or con piece on the merits of tenure. I was mostly sad that tenure was going to disappear without a proper intellectual debate. Cost cutting hiring decisions are driving this bus, and I don’t really like that bus.
The academic bloggers are up in arms about an article in the Chronicle by Kevin Carey that argues against tenure using the standard critiques, but managed to open up the tense relationship between adjuncts and tenure faculty. I found these two blog posts rather shocking.
UPDATE: I’m still catching up on all the academic blogger blow ups over the holidays. Wow. So, so, so glad to be several steps removed. Check out the whoopla here.
Apt. 11d 
On the link in your update: yes, it is ridiculous to only give interviewees a few days notice for interviews in what will be a different city for most of them. But it’s also bizarre that the people who are most pissed off about the situation are the ones that are most desperate to join the system they seem to despise.
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Yes, the whole system is bizarro. I read all that hate for 30 minutes, and I need a shower. Even though these grad students and contingent laborers are desperate for a job, they are unable to even scrape together $500 for a plane flight to a conference where they will be one of a dozen applying for a job. All that for the vague hope that maybe get short listed for the real interview a month later. There has to be a bit more sensitivity to the extreme poverty of the job applicants. I saw the number of job openings in the entire country for history tenure jobs. Thank God, my husband left ten years ago.
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I’ve liked McMegan’s line, that one of the reasons academics are so certain that the business world is vicious and exploitive is that the context of the academics’ work is vicious and exploitive. ‘People volunteer for this’ is not an explanation we tolerate for other sorts of workplace misbehavior.
But what to do? I think it’s good to name and shame the worst offenders. I’ve been heartened by the ongoing collapse of law school applicant numbers, and this is pretty clearly because stories of broke law graduates working retail are forcing their way into the consciousness of college students who might have applied five years ago. I think getting the word out about ten years of ramen and no job at the end to potential graduate students is a good thing.
But – teaching is attractive, in some ways it is its own reward. My wife teaches as an adjunct, loves it, it is by far the least lucrative thing she does but she does it anyway. Probably teaching is always going to be a ‘many are called and few are chosen’ category. Get a realistic picture of a grad student’s prospects out into the colleges and maybe you can get it to ‘not quite so many and few are chosen’, with less waste and heartbreak.
I’m a little blurrier about this next, but it’s good if smart kids who adore history or anthro or English get a better sense of how they can have a satisfactory life doing something else, too. There is some tendency to idolize your profs and think that their lives are the model for yours, and particularly if you think your parents are vacuous Babbitts. Grinnell sends squads of students off campus to meet graduates who are making their way in the world and not as academics, maybe that’s a model.
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I think Dave’s last paragraph is a big part of the breakdown. Students, especially intellectual ones, need more models of success and fulfillment. But, as you say, professing, if you can get the tenured job, is a pretty sweet gig. In ever shrinking numbers, it’s one ofthe few stable creative intellectual jobs out there.
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I thought this blog post was interesting. http://annlarson.org/2012/03/03/rhetoric-and-composition-academic-capitalism-and-cheap-teachers/
“Where does academic contingency come in? First of all, we must understand that the problem of academic hiring is not a lack of jobs per se. That is the symptom, not the disease. A pool of contingent laborers has been created by global capitalism as a way to get around labor barriers to expansion. A reserve army of the unemployed, as Marx called it, is required for capitalism to survive, which in academia translates as cheap teachers.
Let me further explain the connection between academic labor and global capitalism. Colleges, like any business, are entities in which the majority of workers do not own the institutions where they are employed. Rather, higher education workers exchange their labor power for wages. One barrier to the growth of academic capitalism, then, is solidarity among workers, or what Harvey also calls the “culture of the workplace.” In order for the American higher education system to grow, as it has done for many decades, increasing numbers of workers are needed. From the point of view of capitalists, the majority must labor for low wages and on contingent contracts in order to ensure maximum flexibility for capital. This is why some critics have called academia a “pyramid scheme” in which privileged tenured faculty, and those William Deresiewicz calls the “immiserated proletariat,” are both necessary for capital to function. Here’s how Harvey explains it:
“[I]n a desperate bid to exert and sustain control over the labour process, the capitalist has to mobilise any social relation of difference, any distinction within the social division of labour, any special cultural preference or habit, both to prevent the inevitable commonality of position in the workplace being consolidated into a movement of social solidarity and to sustain a fragmented and divided workforce.”
In other words, one strategy that capitalists employ to control labor is the enforcement of a tiered system in which workers are encouraged to see themselves as fundamentally different from their colleagues (that is, if they see each other at all).”
Sorry for the long quote.
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But Dave S., you should be concerned about the fact that your wife is being paid less than she is worth. The vast majority of adjuncts are women — mostly because it’s treated as “not a real job.” She has your mortgage payment, your health insurance and thus in a way you are actually subsidizing the university, since you are subsidizing your wife’s working for below subsistence wages. You are thus both contributing to the problem and helping to create income inequality in the US. (The university likely regards your wife’s working as a sort of hobby, “something to keep the little woman busy.”)
Believe it or not, there are still plenty of businesses in the US where employers are aware of factors like the fact that “her husband has a good job.” I feel that I have been systematically underpaid relative to my peers for years because my employers know that I am not geographically flexible due to my husband’s job, there are only a couple of other universities in the area where I live and none of them are currently hiring. In other words, I”m trapped. If I want to work in my profession, I am forced to work for this employer which persists in behaving as though I don’t need to money and I”m just working for entertainment or something.
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Yes to the previous comments. Let me add another spin on this topic…
Paying adjuncts small stipends isn’t only a bad thing, because it’s exploitation and sexist. It’s a bad thing, because college teaching should be a profession, not a hobby.
College students can learn a lot from outsiders who come in and give some real world perspective to a topic. Nursing students can get some very practical information from a full-time nurse who wants to pick up some side cash and to talk about the realities of the job. But these hobbyists can’t be the bread and butter of the university experience. College teaching, when done right, requires prep work, syllabus creation, reading selections, power point slides (sigh), organization, discussion management, and assessment. All that takes time and experience. It should, when done right, use up the majority of brain power during a week.
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I don’t think anyone doubts that teaching at the post-secondary level is challenging and requires a lot of skill. The problem is that there seems to be a lot of very skilled people willing to take on adjunct jobs that have terrible benefits and pay. I don’t see the circumstances of adjuncts improving until the there are far fewer people willing to do the work.
Academia is sort of like acting or professional sport at this point: the pay-off is great if you can make it but very, very few make it. If one of my children told me his career plan was to be a professional baseball player, I would advise him that the chances of that happening were incredibly small and that he should have a strong back-up plan. I would give him the same advice if he wanted to be an academic.
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Louisa – “..university likely regards your wife’s working as a sort of hobby, “something to keep the little woman busy.”)
I don’t know what the U. thinks of it, but it is in fact sort of a hobby. Adjuncting is work, and between class prep and lecture and grading she makes per hour somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of what she makes working for her clients. She’s doing it because she likes it. Is she taking money away from some other wannabe professor? Don’t know, though I think in her line it’s a good thing for students to hear from a practitioner, so my guess is if she left the U would – for genuinely educational reasons, not particularly to save money – look for someone else like her rather than put in a job line for a full timer.
I usually make something between half and a third of our family income. In a really good year for her, a quarter. But yes, you are right, I have great value as a ‘husband with benefits’. Mister Blue Cross/Blue Shield, dassme. And, dental! I am such a catch, I tell her…
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