VirtualMessage

Virtualmessage agrees with all of this. And what's even more perverse is that there simply aren't that many full-time NTT positions, and they are often cannibalized from within. For example, Wake Forest had three lectureships this year for lower-division literature courses. According to the jobs wiki, two of these went to visiting professors already in the department. The remaining one has been deferred until next year. What's more, if you look at these people they are accomplished scholars with excellent publication records. That's how bad the situation has become, and how undignified--that the University would consider it acceptable to keep moving people from one contingent position to the next. These are often scholars with the same credentials and publications as tenured, associate professors in the very same department! @bhr..I don't mean you any disrespect, but please avoid turning me into a caricature of elitism and snobbery. You really don't know anything about how bad the academic job market is until you go out and have to confront these realities after 6-10 years of graduate labor. I think most of the seasoned job seekers on this thread can agree on how grim the situation has become. As for my vehemence about R/C and whatever else, you can take it or leave it. As I've said, a lot of the condemnation is the result of my own bitter treatment, and I've been clear about that. I don't think forum posts need to obey the same protocols as Op-Ed pieces in the Times or the Chronicle, and I've been thanked by numerous people on here for my candor. If you think I'm an ass for expressing my anger then so be it. I hate the way adjuncts are exploited, I hate the doublespeak from administrators, and it fills me with sadness and despair to see our profession crumbling. And I am sorry to say it but it is crumbling. Nobody is immune to the consequences, even those teaching technical writing or whatever else. We are witnessing the complete stratification of higher education. The traditional, rigorous liberal arts education will be enjoyed by the privileged few, and the rest will continue to suffer the consequences of the miseducation outlined so meticulously by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in their two studies. If there's reason for hope that the situation will change for the better, I'm all ears.

Thank you sir, may I have another? This is a web forum, and I have found it an exceptionally good place to vent my thoughts and feelings and despair in a profession that censures such candor. If only I were a little more masochistic, I might also enjoy the predictable upbraiding. I think we need to hear about the consequences of the academic labor situation on professional and personal lives, even if the tone isn't always pleasant or palatable.

Yes, I think that teaching is negatively affected by the working conditions of contingent faculty. Even the best adjunct teachers--and there are many, many excellent adjunct instructors--are hampered by the lack of professional development, the lack of substantial time for research, the lack of a leadership role or any meaningful role in the community of the University, and the lack of proper facilities such as an office, etc. And, of course, aside from the base salary there are the psychological and emotional consequences of this work that manifest in teaching--namely exhaustion, hopelessness, despair--everything we see in the genre of adjunct complaints that populate the Chronicle and other forums. Also, if this continues for another generation, imagine the scholars and teachers who will never realize their talents when they turn away from a PhD because they want to avoid the fate outlined by the invisible adjunct. Meanwhile, students pay more and more and more. For what? Lazy Rivers, Deanlets, Rock Walls, Customer Service. We need to enforce a strict ratio of TT faculty to adjuncts. At the very least the current numbers should be inverted: 75% TT, 25% Adjunct. But honestly, I find the very idea of contingent labor at the University to be entirely perverse. I realize my idealism isn't necessarily practical, but it sure would be nice to start hearing some plan for meaningful reform from one of our professional associations and the leaders of our profession. Because the current mess is untenable.

Back around page 3, but at the risk of having this thread subject to TheGradeCafe's overzealous "moderation" I will politely suggest this article as an example of the kind of thinking and activism we should be seeing from established faculty: http://chronicle.com/article/To-Protest-Colleagues-Lack-of/230057/ Resigning isn't necessarily the best answer, but her actions demonstrate real sacrifice and concern about her colleagues and her profession. It would be nice to see more of it--a lot more of it. Honestly, ComeBackZinc, I think we ultimately want to see many of the same things change for the better. And it's my hope that in the course of our careers the situation will improve, although I fear that I have very little reason for optimism.

This is what our profession has become: https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2015/05/11/essay-instructor-who-has-taught-adjunct-25-years I know for some people on this thread it's the adjunct's own fault-- how dare they let themselves be exploited! And I know for many others that you believe a degree from Berkeley or Chicago or Princeton or Purdue R/C will deliver you to the coveted precincts of success even if you have to acknowledge you're still playing a game of chance (albeit with weighted die). But there is simply no way around the grim realities of higher education at the present time: it exploits an entire class of workers--the vast majority of its instructional, professional, highly-educated adjunct faculty. This happens at nearly every institution in the country, and it should be openly and frequently condemned by every member of our profession. There is no room for equivocations, qualifications, and excuses if you're interested in challenging what has become the status quo. Remonstrance should be integral to the rhetoric of professionalization graduate faculty preach, but for reasons discussed here, most remain silent and aloof. However, we are all in grave professional danger. In the words of Frederick Douglas, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." Start demanding that those with power use their tenure, their security, and their words to protest the untenable labor practices at our Universities that are destroying professional lives, crippling scholarly inquiry, and cheating students out of the education they pay dearly to receive.

Thank you, Lord Protector! I had not considered that prospective doctoral students are moved to enter a profession in shambles because they are trying to spite people on thegradcafe, but I would say your theory accords perfectly with your sense of self-importance. Keep up the good work. You would think a rhetorician could see that the call for "reasonableness"--i.e. resolving that NTT is the best that we can do-- has hijacked any effort to meaningfully challenge the erosion of TT employment, but then again, we are in the age of Obama when mealy-mouthed advocacy often equates with unashamed self-aggrandizement. Congrats again for that new job you keep mentioning. Is that tenure track?

These jobs are actively destroying tenure lines and provide inadequate protections for academic freedom, among other things. But yes, I'm nothing but a snob for wanting to protect my profession. Just like how the OP is a troll for asking a question. Just like how anyone who disagrees with you provokes your unremitting condescension. Might I--(privately, of course)-- suggest a career in University administration? You might appoint "lifealive" as an Assistant Dean who manages the snobbish adjuncts; his/her disdain would be well-suited for the position. You could call your newfound kingdom a "Writing Program."

My "weird grudge" is the consequence of having been directly taken advantage of by the rhetoric of composition management that follows the best practices used to exploit adjunct labor across the country. Once you finish your master's degree and spend several more obtaining your doctorate, please do chime in about the virtues of NTT full-time positions. Tell me about the kinds of academic, curricular freedom those positions promote and the possibilities for advancing your career and having an influential role in University governance. It is exactly your style of deference that is undermining this profession--a deference that writing programs and their administrators tend to value and cultivate.

At my former grad program here in Boston, I had the chance to meet a lot of "famous" people who were attending events at the University. It was informative to be able to meet these kind of people mostly from the arts who could be more informal and relaxed in the setting of the University. A lot of them were coming back for different kinds of alumni functions. It made you realize how much of a halo surrounds these people in public life. I came to graduate school somewhat later in life, I'm 37, and I think it helped to be a little older and not so struck with their star power.

Trolls, Unemployed Malcontents, and Literature Professors, OH MY!

Congratulations! Don't think twice about taking this great job. Believe me, you're hurting nobody by doing what's right for you. Given the dire state of the humanities, you'd only be hurting yourself if you didn't take the job!

Solidarity? Here's solidarity: Insist on tenure-track faculty positions within your field and make no excuses for the failure to do it. Writing programs are hotbeds for efforts to rationalize and minimize the consequences of contingent labor and, ultimately, poor student outcomes. Here is a thought: If you want to increase humanities enrollment, don't have a student's first taste of English be in a writing course where the instructor has no health insurance, no office, no hope of promotion, and no meaningful control over her curriculum and/or pedagogy.

It became mainstream when it invented a jargon and management structure for exploiting adjunct labor in shameful writing programs.

God save the Humanities!

Narcissistic, naive, psychodrama? You forgot to mention my penis envy. I have laid bare my vulnerability by stating my feelings in the context of my experience within the profession. Furthermore, I have responded to the substance of various posts by offering claims that appreciate their content. For example, in my previous post, I suggest that you need to attend to the many different manifestations of "capitalism" rather than generalizing all institutions/structures/etc. as the same. That you need to assault and pathologize my character to posit your bullets reveals the irony that keeps manifesting here: the same smug, managerial logic and self-satisfied evasion that excuses the abdication of responsibility found among many academics. I'm not going to stoop to throwing insults back at you. But I will offer a challenge: Know thyself. It's imperative that prospective students know about the toll this "profession" exacts. I use scare quotes to offset the fact that this is not a profession for the many people suffering under the bleak conditions that continue to be obfuscated here. If their severity were acknowledged, you wouldn't be blowing smoke trying to assail a stranger on the Internet; you would be offering the details you criticize me for failing to report. But I have reported them, if you'd bother to read rather than project. The realities I've outlined are unavoidable, and they are painful. So painful, evidently, that you cannot actually address them in any greater detail than assuring us how obvious they are—so obvious that you need only to mock them. Instead, you must distract from the substance of the concern by shining light on the madwoman who "everyday" embarrasses the dream. If you were the good liberal your indignation suggests, you might find value in the personal pain expressed. However, your polite vision of these problems insists on a soft-spoken, blunted language that would have us keep pretending that we are all colleagues in this collective struggle. The fact of the matter is that adjunct labor benefits full-time labor, and the vast majority of the people who enroll in graduate programs are destined to become that adjunct labor. I do not see or hear the majority of full-time faculty advocating against this structure in their words or their deeds.

Generalizing the problem as the woes of "capitalism" abstracts the exploitation of labor and obfuscates the specific structural problems found in the academy. Again, what we need is an honest, open, and probing conversation about the details of this exploitation. However, more often than not I find the faculty trying to displace culpability for decisions that implicate them (as much as we like to blame politicians, administrators, etc.), including the decision to remain silent in the face of these problems in spite of the protections they enjoy with tenure. Instead, we see the kind of offended responses that populate this thread. You want to talk about naiveté? Let's talk about "theorizing" a labor problem that regards the exploitation of actual people—many people. You would think that people on the verge of entering the "profession" would want to have a pointed conversation about these systemic problems that threaten the entire enterprise of higher education. Instead, what I see here is a recurrent effort to deflate and diffuse these concerns, using rhetoric usually promulgated by the University President's Office. The fact of the matter is that nearly 75% of labor in the academy is contingent, that tenure is actively being eliminated, and that various disciplines such as English are in real jeopardy. You need to address the particular labor problems in order to move to the universal-- not the other way around. I know it's difficult to confront these realities, but one way or the other your work at the University is going to either exploit labor or suffer from it.

The problem with the "I am doing my PhD for the love of literature argument" is that there is no way to divorce your participation in academic labor from the Ponzi scheme. I love art, but my years in the academy have taught me that much of what you learn in graduate school is about cultivating professional habits that often have very little to do with love; in fact, they frequently work against passion, creativity, and conversations unburdened by "professionalization." I do love teaching and research, but the structural exploitation of labor has turned these endeavors into a financial and personal hardship that benefits the top. The rhetoric of love has enabled mentors and the University to shamelessly ask for uncompensated labor in the classroom and on the page. The University has a bottom line, and the dollars become appallingly and painfully obvious when you begin to look around at the exploitation of labor that is ubiquitous in American higher education.

Supposedly places like Vanderbilt (English PhD) are emphasizing alternative pathways, but I think that this is reactionary to the abysmal state of the academic job market. It does not seem to me that most graduate programs have taken substantial and meaningful action in response to the devastation of the humanities. I am sure they are having all sorts of "conversations," but my experience has been that most people with a stake in humanities graduate education are hoping that inertia will save them from painful changes. I do not think it will. It is great that you have this professional non-profit experience. The sad truth is that most faculty members understand success in very narrow terms. They value the graduate students who achieve the success that reflects their own accomplishments, and they ignore the rest. I can imagine many admissions committees dismissing your aspirations because they do not validate their own choices--choices that are increasingly dangerous for hopeful young people to make. To responsibly educate young scholars, English PhD programs should start supplementing funding offers with options to obtain a teaching credential. Maybe an MA in education option? Something tangible. It is a bitter irony that you can graduate from a top PhD program and be unqualified to teach high-school language arts without additional degrees/certificates.

I am glad it was helpful. You have a refreshing attitude. Good luck to you.

It is hard to say. Maybe a funded Masters or no graduate school at all? I discounted the idea that I could have a good career without a graduate degree, and I think that is one of the biggest mistakes I made after college. To be a professional you do not need a graduate degree. The connections and work experiences that are crucial for advancement are the most important, and those are the things frequently sacrificed by spending 7-10 years in a doctoral program. If you're passionate about the humanities and want to continue your studies, I think a funded MA is the way to go. Or if you're independently wealthy and the academic job market is unimportant, you could do a doctorate. If you want a profession and a good income, I think it is best to avoid the humanities doctorate. I know others on this thread find this advice very disagreeable, but I have seen the rhetoric of dreams land people in very difficult financial and personal circumstances. I hear incoming students to the doctoral program talk frequently about professionalizing and are spoon fed nonsense about professionalization. The irony is that there increasingly is no profession. Sure, there are still Universities, conferences, journals, books, and all the other trappings of what seems to be a profession. Often, what these people do not see (or do not want to see) is how their labors and dreams are funding it without any real hope of enjoying the security or income of their betters. Those investments--sweat and emotion-- made in good faith with almost no hope of return are why I think doctoral education is a Ponzi scheme in the most fundamental way.

So by this logic I need to know what the CCCCCC says about teaching writing in order to do it effectively? I need a position statement to be a good teacher? You have got to be joking. This is the same misguided thinking behind the push for the common core in K-12 education. You cannot standardize education by micromanaging it. You hire the best people-- professional people--and you entrust them to do a professional job. You draw on their passion and their cultivated expertise to teach their students. That's how it works at the country's best schools. But maybe someone should tell Toni Morrison at Princeton what the best practices are for her fiction workshops? It is a ludicrous thought: a PhD with years of teaching, writing, and research experience instructed to follow a position statement. Again, I am not saying that people should be obtuse. Good teachers learn from others and are constantly adapting new ideas and methods. But you're talking about top-down management, and that inhibits instruction. It is interesting to note how the position statement balkanizes writing instruction (as though a historian, art historian, or anthropologist can't effectively teach academic writing without making recourse to rhet/comp theory): 10. Sound writing instruction extends from a knowledge of theories of writing (including, but not limited to, those theories developed in the field of composition and rhetoric). The most fundamental purpose of classes devoted specifically to writing instruction (such as first-year or advanced composition courses) is to engage students in study of and practice with purposes, audiences, and contexts for writing. In practice, this means that writers engage in supported analysis of these purposes, audiences, and contexts and through supported practice with genres and texts that circulate within and among them. Institutions and programs emphasize this purpose by ensuring that instructors have background in and experience with theories of writing. Ideally, instructors have ongoing access to and support for professional development, including (but not limited to) attendance at local, regional, or national Composition and Rhetoric conferences. Institutions employing graduate students from outside of the discipline of Composition and Rhetoric to teach writing courses support development of this background knowledge by ensuring students receive sufficient grounding in and practice/mentoring with regard to key concepts associated with theories of writing.

The study of literature and the study of writing are not two distinct fields. Literature scholars study all forms of writing: fiction, poetry, non-fiction, rhetoric, etc. They publish a diverse range of articles and books on all of these topics, and much of the work in rhet/comp relies on the theoretical and historical work first done in literary studies. I fail to see how a scholar of literature is not qualified to teach college writing.

It is a reasonable question. The key point of difference is that I do not want to tell other humanities PhDs how to run their classrooms. In fact, I find the practice of imposing curriculum/pedagogy on other scholars to go against the fundamental principles of academic freedom and collegial governance. I recognize that what works for one teacher does not work for another. Passions and interests vary, and the best institutions value this diversity and actively promote it. They trust and respect the expertise and judgment of their faculty. In my experience--and the information gleaned from publications on this topic--there is a deep mistrust of the contingent faculty teaching writing classes. A point reiterated in Harris and Cripps is that pedagogical decisions should not be left to adjuncts and graduate students. They must be managed! And by management we are talking about imposing curricular decisions on them that include course texts and student assignments. Given the prevalence of adjunct labor at the University, we are talking about many PhDs being told what to teach and how to teach it on the basis of their contingent status rather than their expertise and credentials. This isn't respectful of the profession, and it cripples innovative and diverse instruction. The benefit is that is justifies the administrative positions and the bureaucracies they manage and grow. This isn't a concern limited to WPAs, but it seems to be a primary preoccupation of rhet/comp. The very institutional structure of writing programs promote this kind of management hierarchy. Even for those WPAs who actively try to empower their adjuncts, these ingrained management structures undermine those efforts. This is why Bousquet's critique is distinct and the most productive. To have a truly collegial structure in rhet/comp would require the elimination of the WPA. In literature, we do not have LPAs. Nobody has ever told me what to teach in a course on Early Modern Drama or how to teach it. That does not mean that I am not accountable: student evaluations, classroom observations, etc. It means that the faculty trusts me to bring my expertise and experience to the classroom without their constant meddling or the imposition of "best practices." There are no "best" practices. One instructor might find that teaching John Donne by having students recite verse is very effective. Another person might find that having the students imitate Donne's poetry works wonders. Another might think that a research paper would benefit the students. Maybe another doesn't want to teach Donne and rather focus on a marginalized poet. All of these people are capable of achieving good learning outcomes for their students, but in very different ways. I'm glad the MLA isn't trying to tell us the best way to teach literature.

"It doesn't advance the cause of undergraduate education or academic labor to hire people to teach writing for any other reason than they're good at it—or at least show a strong promise for becoming so" (Harris 895). And what defines being good at it? "In this version, success is measured not in the number, educational level, or scholarly commitments of writing instructors but, rather, in terms of curricular integrity" (Cripps/ Miller 129). In other words, you are good at teaching writing if you do what the WPA says you should do in the classroom (curricular integrity). Your doctorate, your publications, and your diverse range of pedagogical methods are secondary—at best—to the "best practices." These are practices defined by the full-time faculty member who lords their pedagogy over contingent faculty. I suggest if the OP is still interested in this line of work that they seriously consider the MBA. If you are going to manage people in a corporate structure, you might as well make some money doing it.

I know firsthand about the "pedagogy" WPAs value, which has actively crippled me in teaching many first-year students in many writing classes. And yes, I think many other humanities/social science disciplines are qualified to teach writing, and I think they probably should. That is often the way it works at the nation's best schools. I rather have an accomplished historian teach me how to write than one of your "compositionalists" with their "best practices." WPAs frequently impose pedagogy and curriculum; they don't just lead discussions. By making qualified scholars conform to their "best practices," they deprive students of the diverse teaching practices that should be present in the college classroom at the discretion of the instructor leading it. I know- I am a troll for calling into question your disciplinary practices on a thread concerned with them. This is exactly the kind of "helpful" officiousness that troubles me about rhet/comp in general. I have no problem with collegial sharing and governance, but as I keep pointing out, that isn't how the WPA system works. Anyways, I leave it to the OP if he wants to join your ranks. I certainly would not.