In “The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission,” Herb Childress describes a very different kind of commute. He writes about one of his friends, a sixty-year-old scholar who juggles teaching positions in Boston and New York. She grades papers on her four-hour bus rides between the two cities and, when she gets to New York, crashes on her elderly mother’s couch. Calculating her pay against the time she spends not only teaching but holding meetings, preparing lessons, giving feedback to students, and answering e-mails, Childress estimates that this friend earns roughly nine dollars per hour. There are others, Childress notes, who have it worse. He recounts the story of an adjunct who lived out of her car while teaching four classes per semester, often grading papers by the light of a headlamp in the parking lot of a Home Depot. After a while, the adjunct learned in which neighborhoods she needed to park in order to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep. He also recalls the tragic, widely reported story of Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct language instructor at Duquesne University who, despite twenty-five years of service, could not afford health care or even electricity. She died in her home, in 2013, at the age of eighty-three, having never earned more than twenty thousand dollars a year.
In “Standing for Reason,” Sexton remembers Charlie Winans telling his students, “Consider teaching, boys. It is the noblest and most fulfilling of all vocations.” But, by and large, at the more prestigious universities, teaching is the least valued part of an academic’s life. More measurable indicators, like grants and publications, do much more to advance one’s career. The task of teaching—of unpacking complex ideas in the classroom, grading papers, helping students shape their arguments and smooth out the kinks in their sentences or equations—increasingly falls to the adjuncts whom Childress writes about. In the nineteen-seventies, about a quarter of college faculty were on limited-term, adjunct contracts; the majority of professors were tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, it’s estimated that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts. Reading “The Adjunct Underclass,” whatever sympathy one might have had for Sexton’s jet-setting workaholism quickly evaporates. There’s a privilege in the weariness that comes with having too many opportunities.
Childress completed his dissertation in 1996, and he describes the praise that he received for his work. But he was unable to find a full-time academic job, and he took short-term teaching gigs wherever he could find them. He also sold furniture, volunteered, and worked for nonprofits. He now runs an ethnographic research firm and writes about higher education. Childress brings acid humor and earnest conviction to the latter pursuit, as well as the insights and the fury of someone who once cherished the idea of a life spent on campus. He has an eye for the finer distinctions within academia. Small liberal-arts colleges—like the one where I teach—are “uniquely specialized ecosystems, with wildlife as specifically evolved as that of Madagascar,” he explains. He is witheringly accurate when describing the atmosphere of faculty-wide meetings:
“The Adjunct Underclass” belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as “quit lit.” (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned “content providers” trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as “shock absorbers” and compares their situation to the “invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.” They are like migrant laborers, who “watch the weather, hoping that the next growing season looks promising, and wondering whether it’s time to move along themselves.”
These somewhat hyperbolic analogies understate the oddness of academic life. When journalists and other writers point out the gross inequities on display in the treatment of adjuncts at many American universities, one popular response is to say that nobody is forced to pursue a graduate degree—and, in fact, those who go to graduate school typically have advantages that, say, garment workers in Bangladesh do not have. (The entire quit-lit genre has been described as a form of “humblebragging.”) People usually try to become professors because they are passionately curious about a particular subject, and the academic system encourages them to believe that this is all that matters. Prospective graduate students are rarely told by department heads or other administrators that they are entering a system that relies on contingent labor to survive. “I went into higher ed because I was selfish, because I wanted to be a teacher and a writer, because those things mattered to me,” Childress writes. The subsequent realization that academia preys on these dreams devastates him. A string of adjunct positions gets him no closer to joining the tenure track; it is “morally indefensible,” he writes, to lure adjuncts to work by dangling a “vague hope” that they may one day be welcome as a permanent faculty member. For people stuck in this permanent holding pattern, that hope of being selected is the contemporary academic version of the larger American dream, and it feels, at this point, no less dubious.
by Hua Hsu, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Cathryn Virginia
In “Standing for Reason,” Sexton remembers Charlie Winans telling his students, “Consider teaching, boys. It is the noblest and most fulfilling of all vocations.” But, by and large, at the more prestigious universities, teaching is the least valued part of an academic’s life. More measurable indicators, like grants and publications, do much more to advance one’s career. The task of teaching—of unpacking complex ideas in the classroom, grading papers, helping students shape their arguments and smooth out the kinks in their sentences or equations—increasingly falls to the adjuncts whom Childress writes about. In the nineteen-seventies, about a quarter of college faculty were on limited-term, adjunct contracts; the majority of professors were tenured or on the tenure-track. Today, it’s estimated that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are adjuncts. Reading “The Adjunct Underclass,” whatever sympathy one might have had for Sexton’s jet-setting workaholism quickly evaporates. There’s a privilege in the weariness that comes with having too many opportunities.Childress completed his dissertation in 1996, and he describes the praise that he received for his work. But he was unable to find a full-time academic job, and he took short-term teaching gigs wherever he could find them. He also sold furniture, volunteered, and worked for nonprofits. He now runs an ethnographic research firm and writes about higher education. Childress brings acid humor and earnest conviction to the latter pursuit, as well as the insights and the fury of someone who once cherished the idea of a life spent on campus. He has an eye for the finer distinctions within academia. Small liberal-arts colleges—like the one where I teach—are “uniquely specialized ecosystems, with wildlife as specifically evolved as that of Madagascar,” he explains. He is witheringly accurate when describing the atmosphere of faculty-wide meetings:
Scholars have made their entire careers out of finding problems within what is perceived to be settled knowledge. They carve out that tiny bubble at the edge of what we know, and they focus all of their ample energies and intelligence on precisely defining, or redefining that small issue. Gather a hundred of these people together, and give them a policy to review. You think that’s going to go well?Childress knows the outward academic scene; he also knows who is backstage, making sure that appearances are kept. “A quick visit to any college will feel like a historical reenactment, the past lovingly restored and maintained for daily use,” he writes. But the famous professors, the “public face of the project,” are propped up through “the labor of the unseen.” Students—the “protected consumer”—rarely delineate between those who will still be there years after they’re gone and those with short-time gigs and no job security. Even when students do become aware of the discrepancy between these separate classes, and try to do something about it, their activism tends to run, inevitably, in four-year cycles.
“The Adjunct Underclass” belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as “quit lit.” (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned “content providers” trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as “shock absorbers” and compares their situation to the “invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.” They are like migrant laborers, who “watch the weather, hoping that the next growing season looks promising, and wondering whether it’s time to move along themselves.”
These somewhat hyperbolic analogies understate the oddness of academic life. When journalists and other writers point out the gross inequities on display in the treatment of adjuncts at many American universities, one popular response is to say that nobody is forced to pursue a graduate degree—and, in fact, those who go to graduate school typically have advantages that, say, garment workers in Bangladesh do not have. (The entire quit-lit genre has been described as a form of “humblebragging.”) People usually try to become professors because they are passionately curious about a particular subject, and the academic system encourages them to believe that this is all that matters. Prospective graduate students are rarely told by department heads or other administrators that they are entering a system that relies on contingent labor to survive. “I went into higher ed because I was selfish, because I wanted to be a teacher and a writer, because those things mattered to me,” Childress writes. The subsequent realization that academia preys on these dreams devastates him. A string of adjunct positions gets him no closer to joining the tenure track; it is “morally indefensible,” he writes, to lure adjuncts to work by dangling a “vague hope” that they may one day be welcome as a permanent faculty member. For people stuck in this permanent holding pattern, that hope of being selected is the contemporary academic version of the larger American dream, and it feels, at this point, no less dubious.
by Hua Hsu, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Cathryn Virginia
