VirtualMessage

The failing Chronicle of Higher Education says only 17% of faculty are tenured and that they exploit adjuncts! http://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148 FAKE NEWS! There are SO MANY good jobs for all of you after the University grabs you by your earning potential!

Nice to see the FAILING alternative academics of yesteryear. These English departments are running like a finely tuned machine. FAKE job numbers! Sad!

How's the academic thing working out for everyone? I hear the job market has never been worse and recently read something on the *CHI* about the shame of our profession, but it's nice to see the eager sheep here hungry for the slaughter. I'd say servitude, but that'd mix up the metaphor. Good luck blessed community! It's your sacrifice that keeps the kids' parents writing checks--thank god! I'd say I'm bitter, but I just topped off my conference expense account with a cherry. For shame!

I agree, most people here seem not to give TWO shits. So, with your kindness in mind, a kindness that I've shown none of you, I'll return to the dirty hole that made me so horrible. I wish everyone here much luck and success. I repent! Forgive me! I came to a party filled with care and support and crapped all over the dessert. Celebrate! Toast! Live! Laugh! Love! Enjoy!

I second Boston. I sold my car when I moved here. Even getting around to the schools where I adjunct isn't so bad.

My theory is that my ravings have elicited such aggressive responses because I am both a big meanie and forcing a nasty confrontation with reality. I know that these confrontations are rarely pleasant, and I know they're especially hard for academics who will do almost anything to avoid them. Passive aggressive behavior is the usual manner in which anger, frustration, torment, agitation, and all of the other emotions tend to find expression in this profession. For the young lambs who see their betters model "professional" behavior, it must be outrageous that someone should directly vocalize her own. But it's still odd that for all of the talk in certain areas of criticism and theory about paying attention to affect and marginalization, we cannot tolerate finding it in what is supposed to be an OPEN dialogue about graduate school, the profession, etc. I know, you think I've crapped all over your hopes, dreams, aspirations, and fantasies with sneers, condescension, petulance, and all other things meanie. To some extent, I guess that might be true, but it hasn't been personal. Really, truly, honestly-- none of this is personal. I don't know you, and you don't know me. However, I don't think you've been reading very carefully. I have proposed "solutions," and I have provided detailed descriptions of the specific problems. But I think you want me to propose some sort of productive, optimistic collaboration or action plan? My point has been the impossibility of collective action and organization in the current climate. We are at an impasse, and it is my gut feeling that the only way to transform this fundamentally exploitative institution will be to change its culture. In order to effect that change, we must alter the mentality and foster an honest, impolite conversation about the impact of this unfair system on the majority of faculty. For me, that means finding a way to express the anger, outrage, and desperation that these economic conditions have engendered in so many, including myself. What has astonished me about the Gradcafe is how threatening this message seems to be for a group of people who will likely find themselves in a very similar position. Then again, I suppose that's the outrage of looking at the monster in the mirror and finding yourself staring back. But who knows, maybe you're just a better person than me, and you'll embrace her with affection, charity, and the promise of a better future together?

I want kidprint font! And when will that meanie shut up about all these massive structural problems? My parents take care of my health insurance and that Petulant Adjunct can just get Obamacare! She doesn't know nothing about anything and is just a big meanie troll set to ruin our first year in graduate school! Why couldn't she just leave it at that stupid Kafka story?!! But no! She had to come report the MLA job list numbers and use those snide hashtags. I'm not old enough to say it, but she is a B*&^% for brining all this negativity into our precious community. Besides, I'm going to spearhead a joint English PhD/MBA program at my school. Alt-ac is a good option! I'm already thinking about a literary cupcake venture.

From my perspective, dependence on adjunct labor is the problem at the root of what is undermining the profession. If you address that problem, you solve many of the others. My outrage is that Universities do not have to employ adjunct labor at these unforgivable rates (the national average is now close to 75% NTT), even if they try to excuse the practice as a matter of financial necessity. A generation of administrators & faculty (many occupying both roles) has let this happen because it benefits them. Unfortunately, I do not think efforts to placate Provosts and Deanlets by creating "labs" within humanities departments will address the enrollment problems or the labor problems. Nor do I think that halving the number of entering classes to elite doctoral programs will make a dent. Universities have already demonstrated that they don't really care much about credentials or CVs when it comes to hiring contingent labor, or if they do care, it's not for the reasons we would hope. They'll simply continue to expand intrusive curricular programs that "manage" the adjunct labor under the supervision of the few tenured faculty that remain. Unless we find some way to restore tenured positions that have a legitimate stake in University governance and the necessary protections to maintain that position, the profession will continue to create precarious contingent positions where job security, fair & equal pay, academic freedom, and the opportunity for real and meaningful advancement are an afterthought, at best.

While you're performing your trenchant rhetorical analysis, could you please stop gendering my comments? I know it's difficult to conceive of a female academic expressing her anger, but I would appreciate it if you stopped turning me into a man. Drop the gendered pronouns or get them right, especially if you want to start throwing around accusations of ad hominem attacks.

Fascinating that the number I put forward has vanished among all this navel-gazing--the current number of tenure-track jobs available within the entire discipline of English. That number is disgraceful. That number represents economic and emotional pain. That number is a number that the entire discipline should be talking about, and by "talk about" I don't mean the nonsense and totally unhelpful response by the MLA that English PhDs become "connected" (quietly bow out of the profession and figure out some other way to put bread on the table after years of teaching, research, labor). But hardly anyone is talking about it because we prefer to obfuscate the labor realities of what is happening within the University. It is simply too uncomfortable, too devastating, and too problematic to acknowledge the exploitation of graduate students/adjuncts and the feckless complicity of the tenured faculty. No, I am not making an effort here to be tactful or even intentionally persuasive. I am being unabashedly candid because I am not going to watch a bunch of young, capable, and ambitious students fresh out of college express their anxieties about GRE scores, writing samples, and "POIs" on this forum without warning them--repeatedly--that the floor has fallen out from underneath the venerable institution that they hope to join. If you find my posts aggravating, then don't read them. I find it hard to believe that aspiring scholars can't manage to navigate away from a topic that they find so irksome. Of course, the outraged and indignant defenders of-- ? -- are so taken aback by my posts because they cannot actually dispute their substance. Instead, they attempt to dismiss the raw, frustrated concerns, feelings, and experiences that I've described. I have no solution for the problems that afflict us. I sincerely wish that I did. But if you cannot find a common cause with the problems that outrage me, you're not paying attention to what's happening within our profession. It makes perfect sense though, doesn't it? How we got into this mess? Looking the other way, saying nothing, doing less, and keeping up the confidence that we need not stoop to consider the consequences of our labor and the future of our inaction. For all the interest in environmental humanities, you'd think we could see how we've effectively denied that anything has fundamentally changed in our ecosystem. Go ahead, repent. It'll take a while, but the last judgment was never going to be swift.

Your link is for a piece that was published in September of last year, and the resounding answer to its question was that many more jobs never arrived. I am fascinated by the collective delusion present on this web forum! The profession you want to join is in the middle of an unprecedented labor crisis, and you're looking to an article last year in order to suggest that we should be hopeful this year when we know that last year the great onslaught of jobs never materialized? I proudly accept being an idiot lamb if it means finding this line of thought absurd. Here are the basics: tenure is being destroyed, the vast majority of jobs are contingent, and this trajectory will continue. Battered and shattered and underenrolled disciplines of knowledge will be left in the wake of this wrecking crew with little hope of prosperity in the future; scarce resources will be directed to "Big Data and Humanities Computing" (a current job listing at UC Davis) with the hope of one day reviving the humanists whose brains have been cryogenically frozen to unthaw on some future day and model critical thought for an academy that has lost it. I will be an excellent lamb if I can help one person think twice about entering this profession before they give up on other viable career options. Actually, you should eat me. Because lurkers on here have contacted me in private to tell me that they're deeply concerned about going into a doctoral program when slaughter awaits--they rather eat than be eaten. You should respect their preference. So, if it takes discussing this OVER and OVER and OVER again to bring the realities of this desperate situation to other excellent sheep, I'm happy to keep whining and jumping over fences throughout the night.

Hello! I am the cute little lamb Virtual Message, a caricature. And like all of the other young scholar lambs, I am chewing my cud until it's time for my adjunct slaughter.

If last year's MLA job list was "carnage," then what should we call it this year? I vote for "unreal." Because you'd think it didn't exist based on the silence from all quarters of the professoriate. Guess how many jobs are currently listed in English studies for all areas, including many Creative Writing and Rhet/Comp positions? 146 #Nofutureforscholarship, #Radicalindifference, #Ivegotmine, #Thegradstudentskeeponcummin, #Holyexception, #Adjunctdestiny, #Hopeychangeyacademe

I prefer find-and-replace reading: Before the Tenured by Franz Kafka Before the tenured sits a member of a search committee. To this search committee member comes a adjunct from the country who asks to gain entry into the tenured. But the committee member says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The adjunct thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in later on. “It is possible,” says the committee member, “but not now.” At the moment the gate to the tenured stands open, as always, and the committee member walks to the side, so the adjunct bends over in order to see through the gate into the inside. When the committee member notices that, he laughs and says: “If it tempts you so much, try it in spite of my prohibition. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the most lowly committee member. But from room to room stand committee members, each more powerful than the other. I can’t endure even one glimpse of the third.” The adjunct from the country has not expected such difficulties: the tenured should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the committee member in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. The committee member gives him a stool and allows him to sit down at the side in front of the gate. There he sits for days and years. He makes adjuncty attempts to be let in, and he wears the committee member out with his requests. The committee member often interrogates him briefly, questioning him about his homeland and adjuncty other things, but they are indifferent questions, the kind great men put, and at the end he always tells him once more that he cannot let him inside yet. The adjunct, who has equipped himself with adjuncty things for his journey, spends everything, no matter how valuable, to win over the committee member. The latter takes it all but, as he does so, says, “I am taking this only so that you do not think you have failed to do anything.” During the adjuncty years the adjunct observes the committee member almost continuously. He forgets the other committee members, and this one seems to him the only obstacle for entry into the tenured. He curses the unlucky circumstance, in the first years thoughtlessly and out loud, later, as he grows old, he still mumbles to himself. He becomes childish and, since in the long years studying the committee member he has come to know the fleas in his fur collar, he even asks the fleas to help him persuade the committee member. Finally his eyesight grows weak, and he does not know whether things are really darker around him or whether his eyes are merely deceiving him. But he recognizes now in the darkness an illumination which breaks inextinguishably out of the gateway to the tenured. Now he no longer has much time to live. Before his death he gathers in his head all his experiences of the entire time up into one question which he has not yet put to the committee member. He waves to him, since he can no longer lift up his stiffening body. The committee member has to bend way down to him, for the great difference has changed things to the disadvantage of the adjunct. “What do you still want to know, then?” asks the committee member. “You are insatiable.” “Everyone strives after the tenured,” says the adjunct, “so how is that in these adjuncty years no one except me has requested entry?” The committee member sees that the adjunct is already dying and, in order to reach his diminishing sense of hearing, he shouts at him, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

That isn't my reading of Kafka. The problem isn't a total failure of knowledge; it's the problem of being subjected to the judgments, desires, and whims of others for which knowledge has no power. The injustice is that young, capable people are being recruited by graduate programs for a profession that cannot provide gainful employment. And yes, people who attend top programs have repeatedly been told by their mentors that if they publish in top journals and win top fellowships and teach top classes that they will find a job, especially if they have a top project. The point I continue to stress is that merit has gone out the window, and that there aren't even decent jobs for many of the most well-qualified applicants. Instead, there continue to be more and more shitty positions with dog chow for the hungry. That makes me mad. There's no lack of demand for our profession. Many students need to be taught, but our profession has failed to protect its most vulnerable members. Where's your anger? If I'm the jerk for belittling and straw manning and just being a big meanie troll, what do we call people like you-should-have-known-this-wasnt-a-real-profession ExponentialDecay, who seems to relish the idea that academia has become a perverse hunger games? "Calvinist" seems too pious.

Thank you for telling us what the conversation has become, and that it should end. I can't tell you how terrifying it is for me that educated people--literature and writing scholars no less--advocate to censor conversations on a web forum because they have some heat. But again, this would be another example of the guiding ethos found among junior members of this profession who seem to have more delicate sensibilities than the man of feeling. God forbid people express some anger and frustration and passion when they're being tread on in a profession where it would be sudden death to voice those emotions. Can I propose some censorship guidelines for the moderators? Supposedly the people here are intellectuals capable of writing at a high level. Can we ban the adolescent use of GIFs and feel-good gimmicks to stress the importance of academic discourse among academics? PS: Please erase most 18th century periodical literature from the archives. I don't like the community that Addison and Steele promoted. It was too mean.

The academy has become Kafkaesque; you don't have to take my word for it. Go ahead and look at the Academic Jobs Wiki, especially the recent Humanities postdoc searches. There you can witness firsthand the total disconnect between people who have jobs and the many who do not. If you want to experience Kafka first hand, initiate an academic job search of your own. The systemic problems young scholars are facing in higher education are both simple to identify and very difficult to solve. We need to invert the ratio of full-time TT faculty to NTT. Currently, around 75% of the faculty are adjunct. However, it seems largely impossible to find the will at the Universities to change this incredibly damaging labor situation because graduate students, tenured faculty and professional associations apply no meaningful pressure. I am not making the claim that there is no agitation, but I do not see the kind of remonstrance necessary to effect substantial change. This web forum has been eye opening for me because I now see that some ambitious graduate students try to use these problems to a competitive advantage by demonstrating their submissiveness to the foreman. In short, they think that screwing on their mealy mouth and getting with the program is a sign of their coming election to the tenure track. Getting pissed off and angry about the exploitation of labor is a precondition for fomenting change. Too much of the frustration is sublimated because people (graduate students, adjuncts, etc.) think that deference will win them gainful employment. It probably will not, and it certainly will not save this profession. The more voices that cry out, the better, and I cannot fathom why ComeBankZinc thinks that the genre of complaint is all used up (maybe it's because ComeBackZinc has been working on this issue for years--whatever that means--and hasn't attracted the attention ComeBackZinc clearly relishes, but one man's narcissistic disappointment isn't a reason to shun the stories of others). Delimitude, I don't follow your point. The labor situation has changed radically in the last several years, and many of us were blindsided by it. But I'm guessing you also predicted the 2008 crash? Furthermore, there is still the suggestion at the top programs that jobs are obtainable if you publish and professionalize. Many entering students continue to be seduced by these implicit promises. I have seen this happen first hand, and I have seen the consequences for their careers. I do, however, appreciate your comments because I've just read "A Hunger Artist" again, and I now have a better sense of the career possibilities for my doctorate.

I thought we already made it clear that you properly diagnosed me as a hysterical woman. If you would actually read what I wrote rather than keep palpating me, you might answer some of your own questions. I don't know what model of emotionless political change you most admire, but your recriminations always conjure the image of a bubble pipe with a wad of blowhard stuck in it. And for some reason, in this image, you're wearing a crisp lab coat with the slightest mess of mustard on the lapel. Oh my! Oh me! Put me back in my restraints; I think I'm having another attack!

Francophile, I'm unsure why your post has elicited some of these asinine responses (exponentialdecay wins first place with telkanuru coming in a close second). I suspect the usual mix of insecurity and pedantry endemic to academia. What they're unable to admit is that any good writer struggles with the problems you've outlined; however, many graduate students fail to acknowledge the problems in the first place. Successful essays are a struggle and a long journey comprised of obstacles, discoveries, sorrows, and joys. Good essays undergo countless major revisions, and they usually have many readers before they ever reach an editor. This has certainly been my experience with publication. The fact that you care about your prose already contradicts any notion that you're a sloppy writer. You want to develop your craft, and that's far more ambitious than most of the graduate writing I've read. You're asking the right questions, and you might want to check out Cook's Line by Line. I've also found it's helpful to identify an academic writer whose prose you admire. Emulation can be a useful step in the difficult work of discovering your own style and voice.

Let's focus on this: "Yeah, the economic structure of the academy right now is utterly flawed (admitting far more grad students than there are full-time or TT jobs because they are cheap labor; then employing the majority of most of those grad students as exploited adjuncts because they are cheap and available labor)" That's what I've been calling a Ponzi scheme; if you have a better word for it, please go ahead and offer it, but that might require you to employ some logic. It's unclear to me how you move from acknowledging a systemic problem with the mass exploitation of labor to making this a matter of "personal misfortune." The nice feature of the Ponzi scheme analogy is that it recognizes the many suffering at the bottom as well as the few at the top who benefit from their exploited labor. Your comments remind me of Madoff's jailhouse interview when he criticizes his victims for being greedy; I'd think you would rather admire him for his competitive enterprising. When are members of this profession (especially the younger ones on here who seem to think divine providence will save them) going to stop making excuses for an inequitable and nasty way of doing business that is deceptively naturalized as a meritocracy?

Exactly: "Academia loves this kind of circular logic: the best person for the job is the best person for the job because we have decided that they were the best person for the job." Do we want to speculate about what might be the criteria for election, if not merit? I'd offer identity as one, or another way to put this is rationalized prejudice justified by identity politics. Personality is a second-- a personality that validates the unquestionable superiority and value of the faculty that confers the stamp of election. I once had a junior faculty member offer me this piece of advice for interviews/campus visits: "Don't make the mistake of giving them the impression that you might be smarter. You have to convince them that they're smarter than you." Right. At the time, I couldn't believe this advice would be necessary because the idea of placing myself in a hierarchy of smartness seemed ludicrous, especially the suggestion that I perform stupidity. But I was confused. It's not stupidity that is desired--it's servility. Walking through the gate of my graduate University for the first time, I never could have imagined academia was so insecure about its status, so obsessed with prestige, and so destructively at odds with the very intellectual rigor that it is supposed to practice, cultivate, and teach. I know, I was naive, but I enrolled because I wanted to learn how to conduct research and to teach, and I assumed I'd live or die by how well I did it--not who I was judged to be. I thought that kind of discrimination based on the perception of an individual (without even knowing very much about the person, might I add) was reserved for Princeton's eating clubs, law firms, and the precincts of society I was actively trying to avoid.

I am sorry to say it, but what you've discovered is only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the problem you outline, we have many, many TT hires going to people who are moving laterally from one institution to another, we have the inside hires, and we have "assistant professor" searches routinely going to very advanced assistants, if not outright associates. Furthermore, I've seen postdocs awarded to faculty members who are already in TT appointments several years out of graduate school. Once you consider the number of junior positions going to people with multiple postdocs, other TT jobs, etc., an already desperate job market reveals itself to be virtually impossible. Your friend is numb to the labor realities of our profession because it is in the interest of elite programs to cultivate a state/mentality of exception for their faculty and graduates. These people often want to have their cake and eat it too: they're good liberals or Marxists who are doing their best to think about the disadvantaged at the same time as they exploit their adjunct colleagues and discriminate against them to perpetuate the rhetoric of divine academic providence--a providence divorced from merit but obsessed with prestige. However, even for many graduates of elite programs, the situation has become increasingly grim. You'd think this would motivate substantial reform, but it doesn't. Instead, "alt-ac" is touted as some kind of viable alternative or solution. Once you see these realities, it becomes difficult to take seriously anything established faculty say, especially when it's laced with the moral indignation and superiority so commonly found in Humanities departments. The conclusion that I draw is that the people making these hiring decisions do not think about what they are doing in the context of a larger profession and their responsibilities to it. Their hiring calculus is much more narrow, idiosyncratic, personal, territorial. But, of course, look forward to reading their forthcoming volume, The Marginalized Other and the Ideology of Late Capitalism.

The students aren't as uninformed as you might think. They might not be able to articulate the finer nuances of the problem, but they know what gainful employment looks like, and they know there's some kind of a problem when their teacher has no office. Moreover, their parents think that--even if it's not founded on a precise understanding--that the humanities equates with professional failure or at best a professional handicap. Like I said, all of these problems are connected. You're right that the adjunct problem is not isolated to the humanities, but it is where the problem predominates. Moreover, I'm willing to bet the average pay of a humanities vs. STEM adjunct is considerably less--in fact, I know it is. And, of course, opportunities for adjuncts who are licensed professionals,etc. exist far outside of the academy as opposed to the limited career possibilities for most humanities scholars, which is precisely why the University can take advantage of us. So, maybe I'd revise my claim: the students correctly intuit these problems in the humanities and they don't want to become the underemployed person who is teaching them, so they shy away from humanities disciplines. We cannot underestimate the consequences of a profession that relies on exploited workers to meet its budgetary needs, nor can we be surprised when the devaluing of our own profession leads others to the conclusion that the humanities aren't worth very much--certainly not $30k+ of student debt. Again, the career outcomes, etc. can help us make the argument for many different forms of value associated with the humanities BA, but we have an image problem founded on a labor problem that we need to address.

For administrators at most colleges, it is all about the enrollment numbers. The relative cost of a humanities department to an engineering program is a much less important factor in the salvation of that department than the revenue generated by student enrollment in that program--FTEs. You also have to consider the full-time personnel costs of large, bloated Humanities departments such as English that are overstaffed because many of these programs have lost considerable undergraduate enrollment (from the administrator's perspective irrespective of continuing dependence on adjuncts). Humanities Departments are going to live or die by the FTE equation. I'm unsure how you convince an undergraduate and their parents that they should enroll in programs where many of their adjunct teachers are on food stamps. Until you address the labor problems afflicting humanities programs--until you address the working conditions--you cannot improve the learning conditions. And if the learning conditions are bad then why would students be drawn to the humanities? Of course, there is a good argument for the value of a humanities BA as indicated in the report. However, the PR-- or total lack thereof-- on the part of Universities and our own professional associations isn't helping to make the case. Unfortunately, all the problems are connected-- labor, dropping enrollment, divestment in the arts/humanities, cultural indifference toward our cultural heritage--and the network of problems has become so complex that one has a difficult time even clearly mapping it.