lifealive

As I thought was evident in my original post (but I guess not, and I should have taken more time to explain), this went beyond simply putting a bumper sticker on a car and admitting that you voted for a Republican. I've known plenty of more conservative grad students; few of them derailed discussions in class to make somewhat tasteless comparisons between Native Americans and the "natives" of Benghazi, or sent messages to the graduate student listserv gloating about election returns in certain districts. Really, no one cares about your political views if you're not aggressive about them. Like I said, the most brilliant person I know is a die-hard free market capitalist, and he's done just fine. I also know other people who quietly hold less popular views, and they've also gone through graduate school without incident. I do think that respecting the culture of an institution is important; for instance, I wouldn't take a job at an evangelical university and then advertise my atheistic tendencies to other professors and students. About not all political views being equal--yeah. I'm sorry, but if your party politics are premised on exclusionary practices or exploiting fears and insecurities about difference and diversity, then no, that's not okay. Ever. I worked for a public university; part of our mission is to educate all qualified residents. When a grad student holds these views about the very students we're there to educate (Muslims, Native Americans, etc.), it's not alright, and it doesn't get to fall under the umbrella of "respecting political difference." That's all I meant. I didn't mean to imply that the OP was this kind of person, or that their concerns fell in the same camp, but hey, you never know. I just decided to share an anecdote as a kind of cautionary tale.

No, it has nothing to do with the job market and everything to do with the trolling. Trolling sets me off any day of the week, especially when that trolling blames the humanities' lack of funding on its failure to accommodate a particular political agenda. But anyway, sorry for the snark. I'll curb it from now on.

It was a fair effort at trolling, but luckily it didn't go anywhere. 5/10 for mentioning a theorist that no one's discussed since the 1990s; 6/10 for invoking political relativism as something that people in the academy should aspire to (in a seminar no less); 7/10 for passive-aggressive, MRA-style "I'm too cool to really be invested in this discussion" rhetoric; 4/10 for transparently invoking the "I'm not a _____, but ...." 3/10 for accidentally flashing your hateboner for all things literary "politics" on a literary study message board; 2/10 for backpedaling on the parenthetical thing and getting reamed in the process.

Thank you for schooling me in my own job market, rising_star. You're right--my failure to get a TT job (which, by the way, does not make me unusual, and I came quite close for a few different jobs this year) is because I lack the ability to adequately market myself for different kinds of jobs. I lack the ability to see that a 4/4 load at a comprehensive college will require teaching, and therefore I put my research letter forward, which emphasizes nothing but my postdoctoral research, forthcoming book, and published articles. For research jobs, I talk endlessly about how I love teaching composition, emphasizing the 700 students and 14 classes I designed and taught solo during graduate school and after. I have also never consulted with a JPO, an advisor, an external recommender, other job-seekers from my own institution who have jobs, other postdocs, the professors at SLACs (who, by the way, have been working long enough now that they are the ones making hiring and T&P decisions, not the young "assistant professors" that you seem to think they are), the CHE forums, or TGC. But you, wow. You have really helped me here. Here I was, totally screwing up by barging into comprehensive SLACs, talking all about my research. I had no idea about how the job market worked until you came along, enlightening me about how things are done in social sciences. Your advice would have worked well in 2005. As for right now--well, as fancypants09 has pointed out, you've done nothing here but argue in bad faith or draw upon a well of bad information that perhaps works in your discipline, but not ours. And your potshot at my employment status is in EXTREMELY poor taste, coming from a mod. In this thread you have done nothing but put people down. You mischaracterized fancypants09's argument in ridiculous ways, and now you're arguing that I am unemployed because I deserve to be, while you have a job because you deserve to have one. Congratulations for demonstrating so well what many of us in this thread have been arguing. But really, you're a lousy representative of TGC's mod team. And I also hope that other job seekers don't take your advice, i.e. apply for a 3/3 load at a SLAC and assume that it's all teaching, all the time. Believe me, no one, and I mean no one, is getting a 3/3 these days without research, and I would not have even been interviewed at 3/3 SLACs without research. Ignore at your own peril.

Forgive me for not believing you.

Are your friends representative of all hires out there? Are they even in English? I never said that teaching completely unimportant for getting hired at certain SLACs. Only that the common knowledge--that SLACs are all about teaching, except for the very top ones--no longer holds true in many searches. To repeat: the job market is competitive enough that many schools that were previously considered "teaching oriented" are now looking for different candidates. And much of it is coming from the ground up: promising candidates get hired by SLACs, they turn around and chair search committees a few years later and look to hire similarly promising candidates. They also WANT to spend their time doing research and push for an increase in sabbaticals, or use the promise of sabbaticals to recruit other candidates. Of course this is #notallslacs--never did I say it was. This isn't exactly news. Why you keep fighting it, I don't know. Then be the change you want to see in the forums and start new threads. But the rest of us have been having a conversation. No one said you had to read it. It's the internet, get over it. Except that no one said that the people who make lateral moves or move from NTT to TT or hold multiple positions at once are the people at fault here. Literally no one. Other than strawmanning your way through this "circle jerk," do you have anything else to offer? Okay.

Nice troll bait. But not all political views are created equal. And if you'd actually included the rest of my passage, you'd have had to confront the fact that this person was obnoxious and aggressive about his views, which turned people off. And no, we did not sit around talking about your hero Romney in the same way he talked about Obama. We had more important things to do, like talking about what we'd actually read that day, for class.

I don't know if I fully understand the point about identity politics. As to your point about servility: I think appropriate deference is part of it. I also think that academia has an obsession with people who look like they don't work very hard (or work very hard at the wrong things, i.e. teaching or landing a job) or want something too badly. Not to be too tongue-in-cheek, but it harks back to an old-boy system of wealth and privilege where the sons of the WASPy upper class simply told their school masters what Ivy League school they wanted to attend, and it was done. The privileged need not break a sweat about their future because the future is always a sure bet. It's that kind of attitude that lives on even today, totally at odds with our current economic system and needs. Even The Professor Is In lays down a bunch of crap about "not appearing too enthusiastic" about the job you're applying for. The reasoning, of course, is that a candidate who wants a job really badly doesn't have better options. And of course we don't want someone who doesn't have better options; we want someone who is currently being wooed by every university in the English-speaking world, even if the current job market makes such a prospect absolutely ludicrous. The job candidates that universities want to hire will OF COURSE have multiple options. Because other institutions will naturally recognize their genius. And that is what makes them valuable. Apparently academics are incapable of making decisions about a candidate's merits based on their writing sample or some other thing like that. Take the UC-Riverside case of two years ago. UC-Riverside gave its MLA interviewees five days' notice before the MLA convention even began. This caused a huge uproar; it meant that some candidates might find themselves scrambling to make hotel and flight reservations five days before the convention. And given the cost of such accommodations and the meager pay of most grad students and adjuncts, that could mean two months' salary. But of course, if you get an interview at MLA--even just ONE interview--you have to go. Why? Because if you don't go--if you tell the committee "gee, I can't afford to go, can we do this on Skype or in some other way?"--Oh my God, you have just shown your hand. You don't have any other interviews. No one else thinks you're worth the time of day, so neither will the committee. Again, in our discipline, our value is determined by all the other institutions that quietly confer our status. Worse, if you don't have money to go to MLA, then you don't have a department with enough clout to pay for MLA. And everyone knows then you are Not To Be Hired. This all goes beyond dressing for the job you want. It's more like buying a house in the neighborhood you someday want to be able to afford so you can get into the country club, even if doing so means taking out the worst mortgage ever. In fact, I think that MLA interviews are one of the most ludicrous ways that our discipline shows itself to be totally out-of-touch and seeking to ferret out which candidates are backed by invisible currencies of wealth and prestige and which are not. It's like a miserable test--if you can afford to go to MLA, then you must deserve to be there. So much for bootstraps--if you don't have enough invisible institutional wealth backing you, don't bother. "Self-made?" Don't apply. The list of such behaviors goes on and on. People are told not to teach at community college because you'll never wash off the taint. Yes, seriously. That's what certain gatekeepers think about actually working and teaching for a living--it is a "taint." Don't email/call a search committee to ask about the status of your application! Doing that shows that you're actually concerned about getting the job. Of course, a sought-after job seeker is one that would never be concerned about the status of their application. Be cool and unenthusiastic when corresponding with search committees or professors. Again, any kind of enthusiasm could make you look desperate. And on and on. I was never told to dumb myself down, though. I'm guessing that things are different at different institutions. At most of my interviews I had to prove I could operate at a higher level.

Oh, you'll be fine then. Now you've left me wondering who this guy is, though.

I agree with echo449 in that approach is going to matter here. I have seen people get burned in programs because of political disagreements--not because of politics, necessarily, but because they advertised those politics far and wide and were obnoxious/aggressive about them. (The best example that comes to mind is a guy who, during an election year, slapped a Republican bumper sticker on his car and actually spoke about "Obamacare" and "Obama's idiocy" in seminar. He got terrible grades from that professor and the next year was asked to leave the program. I don't know if one thing actually had to do with the other, but his political views were a topic of discussion among grad students and professors alike--everyone knew that he was a Republican and he didn't have a lot of fans.) I think that echo449 also brings up a compelling point--that much of what we do rests on Marxist theory. But this is just part of the issue. Espousing a neo-liberal view of the marketplace is very politically tricky in university settings, as so much of the current funding scarcity and job crunch has been driven by a devotion to free market capitalism. A lot of people might view you as out of touch with the current climate or actively working against efforts to unionize. Then again, if you're good, you might get away with it. I know a PhD who subscribes to the free market like it's a religion, and he gets support--but only because he's good. If your views are unpopular, you better be really freaking brilliant. Really.

This is just flat-out wrong. First of all, the job market has tightened to the point where small liberal arts colleges can and do command the best and most elite job applicants possible. That's not just the top 25 to 40 programs anymore; that's more like the top 100, maybe 150. It's why you get SLACs far outside of the Oberlin 50 looking for candidates who have a research profile. They might want people who can teach--sure, all schools say they do. But they mostly want people who look good to the outside. Even students at St. Mary's College and Wittenberg University are paying out the nose for an education. So again, the way to secure those investments is to shore up that institutional prestige. I actually interviewed at a SLAC in the top 150 this year, and they were interested in my teaching, sure. But I wouldn't have even gotten the interview if it hadn't been for my research profile/fancy postdoc. Second of all "teaching ability" and "teaching experience" have become increasingly subjective in this day and age. A lot of people get hired at SLACs with precious little teaching experience, or with just enough experience to prove that they can handle themselves in a classroom. When it comes to teaching, these days less is more. If you have taught just a few classes at the right institution, you'll be on the same footing with someone who's taught 10 sections of comp and 5 massive literature surveys. In fact, you might even have an advantage because your teaching portfolio is probably peppered with the articulate feedback of students who were happy to be in your class. You might have also had more freedom to design classes with trendy course themes rather than "functional writing 101" and "Introduction to the entire literary canon for non-majors." Trendy course themes translate well to SLACs. It is true that non-national SLACs and small teaching colleges put more emphasis on hiring candidates with teaching experience. An elite degree will not help you on that market. Unfortunately, though, many of those schools aren't hiring. They're getting by on adjunct labor, or they're asking their existing faculty to take on increasingly high course loads. They do make some hires, and that's where you can just hope to get lucky. But those schools have really been hurt by the economic crunch. ??? Huh? I've never said that the people who take these positions are doing anything wrong. I don't think fancypants09 has said that either. I don't know in what context you've misread this whole thing as moralizing against people who get admitted to multiple graduate programs. I'm saying that I think the structure of graduate and higher education culture--wherein people must accrue advantages through systems of prestige, not actual achievement--is a fucked-up model worth our attention. I personally don't care about the personal ethics of someone who plays graduate programs off one another, or even jobs off one another. Given the climate of academia, and the meager amount of money typically being negotiated, I think that you'd be stupid to not negotiate out of a sense of moral obligation. What I abhor is that our system actually celebrates such a thing, deliberately seeking out candidates simply because they've been "vetted" or "anointed" by another institution and holding fast to the belief that having a job means you deserve a job, and that failing to secure a job means that you don't deserve to work in academia ever. There is enough talent to go around that institutions don't need to hold positions while people finish postdocs. As fancypants09 pointed out, the working world doesn't operate along those lines. If you get a position at Goldman Sachs but want to try out another job at JP Morgan, Goldman says, "Enjoy JP Morgan; we've got other candidates lined up and work that needs to be done right now." That academia doesn't operate that way is indeed mystifying--and, as I've said in other places on this forum--only serves to devalue its purpose. If you've hired someone to teach at your institution but don't actually need them TO TEACH or physically be present--to the point that you can pawn the duties off on a grad student or adjunct--then that says volumes about how your institution perceives teaching. And since teaching is the lens through which the public understands our contribution most clearly, this attitude toward teaching--that it can be done by anyone--is harmful to us all. I'm surprised you don't see the issue. ETA: I agree with fancypants09 above that you're being willfully obtuse, rising_star. I really don't understand why you're attributing things to people that they clearly didn't say, or making ridiculous comparisons that make no sense. I don't know what your end game is here, or what your purpose was in derailing this discussion, but you should drop it because it sucks.

I apologize for misinterpreting the reason for the outrage of your original message. Yes, it is outrageous that a university would allow someone to defer for two years and use an adjunct (but more likely a VAP, considering the caliber of this type of institution) in their place. Quite simply, the "winner takes all" approach goes far in academia because academia looks to other institutions for validation. Being able to hire a professor who was sought-out enough to juggle multiple offers is a way to validate your department and to know for sure that you got someone good. Never mind the fact that there are tons of equally qualified people whose CVs are just sitting there. This "one who almost got away" has been rubber-stamp validated by other institutions, so they're the ones to shell out cash for, or to lure away with a hefty research budget. And that's the kind of thinking that's becoming the slow death of academia. Taken to its other extreme, it's precisely why adjuncts or unemployed academics can't get hired. They weren't rubber-stamp validated. No one thought they were good enough that particular year (even if they have publications or tons of teaching experience), so no other institution is going to stick its neck out either. Many of us have already experienced this kind of thinking in graduate admissions. These programs like to play it safe there too: If you're under 25 and come from a good school, you're a more attractive bet than someone who's older and started off at community college. Etc. It's insane, really. I was trying to explain today to someone outside of academia why your PhD is basically worthless about 2 years after it's been conferred. They didn't believe me and thought I was making the whole thing up. They were like, "That doesn't make any sense! Why would a PhD stop meaning anything simply because two years have gone by?" They don't understand that in our system, the only way you can make it is to have someone else validate you within a very narrow window of time. Failing to get that validation ripples outward, telling everyone at all the other institutions that you are Not To Be Hired. And as a side note, rising_star is wrong about SLACs wanting people with more teaching experience. SLACs are really the new R1s when it comes to hiring practices. They are looking to hire elite candidates regardless of what kind of teaching they're actually capable of doing. When parents are shelling out $60k for an education, they want professors with elite credentials. In fact, it's now a given that SLACs are notoriously not-picky about the candidate's research, either--unlike R1s. "Professor So-and-So got his PhD at Yale" is much more immediately compelling to parents than "Professor So-and-So got his PhD at Indiana but is published in American Literary History and has a book forthcoming on a topic you've never heard of." My advisor has basically told me that I have a better chance of getting hired at an R1 than a SLAC because an R1 is actually going to look at my research and my publications while a SLAC won't know one journal from the next and goes immediately for the name on the degree.

I didn't "jump all over" you, rising_star. I merely questioned why you were niggling over a rather minor point when the larger issue is that academic hiring practices replicate institutional privilege. I personally don't agree that taking a job is trampling over the prospects of another or cheating someone--it's more like cashing in on systems of privilege--but that's not really the bigger issue, is it. Changing the subject--i.e. emphasizing a poster's naivete and outrage over common hiring practices--is derailing, as far as I'm concerned. If you don't have anything constructive to contribute, then don't butt in at all. And now, rising_star, yes, I am jumping all over you. In case you were wondering.

Why does it matter, rising_star? Does fancypants09's naivete excuse the larger abuses of the academia labor market? In other words: what's your purpose here?

The academic market is generally like the economy at large: there will always be that top 1% that is immune to all recessions. https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent I actually know someone like the person you're describing--postdoc at an Ivy League school, job lined up afterwards at one of the top 15 universities in the country. That job is sitting empty right now. If it's any comfort, though, it doesn't require much teaching anyway, so I doubt that any adjuncts have been hired to take on the onerous 1-1 course load. Quite simply: it's an outrage because the person being touted as the "best person for the TT job" is one who has most likely accrued advantages throughout the years and is now sailing by on those privileges. The people sought out for these kinds of positions are generally the ones who came from the right schools, did the least amount of teaching, and were protected from the realities of academic labor at every turn. They were given a lot of time to do their research; therefore, their research is good. Also, it is looked at as good because they were given these advantages. 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. Same stuff that we see here every year: "the best applicants get into the best grad schools because they simply are the best applicants because graduate programs are self-sorting." No one ever stops to examine what this kind of thing implies--that it is the very opposite mentality of the Marxist social justice rhetoric that many faculty profess to believe in. The Chronicle Vitae article I linked above explains it better than I ever could, anyway. Fascinatingly, the person I referenced above has been hailed as the future of our discipline even though they have never published an article. But the scholarship that is coming is amazing, I can guarantee that. Because we've already decided that it's amazing.

I actually wonder if part of the problem re: convincing people to major in the humanities has to do with the fact that the law market has been such a disaster for the past several years. When I was in college, I never worried about majoring in English because I always assumed I'd go to law school afterwards--and then consequently make a lot of money. The law market was more robust back then; and if you wanted to go to law school, you majored in English, history, philosophy, or political science. But these days, people are warned away from law school just as they're warned away from grad school in the humanities. Hopefully the law school market will rebound again and seem like a valid option for college students. Regarding the question of "pre-professional" majors: Ugh, I wish I could warn students away from hyper-specializing in college with some of the cautionary tales I've collected throughout the years. I know so many people who majored in something with the thought that it would provide a stable career, and they're completely miserable now. I know a guy who majored in health care systems and absolutely hated it, and now he works at Starbucks. (So much for down-on-their-luck English majors filling those Starbucks jobs.) I know a guy who majored in a STEM field but sells cars and tells me he would have rather majored in history. And the sanctified engineering major--I know far too many miserable engineers. A lot of people think that an engineering major is a golden ticket. Truth is, it does land you a big salary right out of the gate, but your earnings usually plateau. And the work itself can be very boring and unvaried. There is also the issue that technology is always shifting--if you're the kind of engineer who works on some piece of technology that grows obsolete, you may find yourself out of a job. And then there's business, the biggest waste-of-time major of all: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/education/edlife/edl-17business-t.html?_r=0 Additionally, and what I wish I could stress to students, the problem with majoring in one of these highly specialized fields is that there's not a lot of room for changing careers midstream. And there's not a lot of margin for error. The guy I know who majored in health care systems trained for a job he ended up hating. Had he double-majored or minored in a more conceptual field, he could possibly use his skills for something he finds more rewarding. Same with the nursing major empress-marmot mentioned. If nursing doesn't work out--or you get injured on the job and can no longer perform basic nursing duties--then what do you do, if all you've "trained for" is to become a nurse?

If people followed this advice, then literally no one would ever go to graduate school in the humanities. Was that what you were trying to say? (I'm honestly confused.) Because no one needs a PhD in the humanities to do any other job besides teach college. In any case, I don't think it's really up to anyone to have the final word on the "good reasons" vs. "bad reasons" for going to grad school. These are life choices that people make for their own private reasons. It's probably not smart to go to grad school, say, because your girlfriend is going to grad school. But who knows. People grow and change and sometimes get lucky. And these decisions aren't set in stone. If you go to grad school and don't like it, you do something else. If you graduate and can't find a job, oh well--you played a hand. You'll find something else.

Speaking for myself--I definitely don't think that digital media or composition is "beneath me" or a form of punishment or anything. I've been teaching since the day I entered my graduate program, and most of it was in connection with rhet comp. But I also still honestly believe that there are benefits to what certain elements might call "old fashioned study." I think that students are well served, some of the time, by cultivating a relationship with a text without any new media around. I actually think that's one thing that an English class can provide--a way of reconnecting with physical textual artifacts in order to develop skills of close reading and deep focus. I know that sounds deeply old fashioned--and the kind of thing that people are now deriding as elitist--but I don't think the two approaches to teaching have to exist in opposition. And I don't think anyone here is saying that, but that's often the way it plays out. If you say to anyone these days--students, administrators, whomever--"I want to design a class where at least some of the time students aren't able to use computers, and it's just us sitting around in a circle with a book in front of us, talking about the text for a sustained hour" you'll seriously get branded as a neoluddite, or worse. And you certainly won't get any funding for that. So I support the technological initiatives, and I've benefited from them greatly. Digital stuff basically allowed me to write my dissertation without traveling to a hundred different archives or looking through the dreaded microfilm. But I'm also hesitant about the way we have come to fetishize technology as a way to make our teaching more hip and relevant and fundable. There's a lot gained, but there's also some stuff that gets lost, too. I noticed an immediate change when I started allowing students to have laptops and other technological implements in discussion-oriented classes. Not necessarily a loss, but maybe. Definitely a change. Moreover, I'm not sure that added technological initiatives have helped students so far see the market value or meaning in an English degree. I think that if they want to do GIS or design, they go into the program that does that. But I'm a book history person. So.

I don't think anyone here disagrees with this. I too, along with everyone else, am sad that the rigorous liberal arts education that we received and that we were trained to impart is crumbling. However, I think that the problem is beyond all of us, and "us" also includes faculty and program administrators. Kids simply aren't going to college to major in English anymore. And yeah, maybe there are things that English departments and universities can do to change this fact, but the problem is so huge and systemic that it's almost too late to turn around now. It's like climate change--even if we change our ways, it's still goddamned inevitable. The humanities are suffering in part because tuition has skyrocketed while entry-level wages have stagnated, so people want to be able to turn their degree into cold hard cash upon graduation, and they don't think a humanities degree will do that for them. These problems run really deep--they're built into our economy and the fact that higher ed became a bubble that, unlike the housing market, never burst. College students are also under a lot of social pressure to choose the right major. There is such vitriol spewed at English and humanities majors that I don't think even I would major in English right now. When I was in college back in the early aughts people would occasionally laugh about the uselessness of the English major, but there wasn't the kind of absolute hatred and anti-intellectual "you don't deserve to even go to college because you're just taking up space" attitude that I see now. The only kids I know who are majoring in English are double majoring in something else--usually a STEM or business field. Universities are also admitting fewer students who declare an A&S major in favor of admitting more students in pre-professional fields. This is further killing English class enrollments. So as much as I want to say that bhr's recommendations seem cold and capitalistic, they're probably right, and they might be the only way English departments will survive this downturn. We really will just have to remake ourselves as technical writing teachers and digital media specialists and show the world why THAT in and of itself matters. It's not pretty for those of us who went into English because we value literature for its own sake ... but unfortunately it's what the market wants right now. And student tuition dollars are a very powerful force. We might recognize it as sad that only an elite few will get to study literature and creative writing for its own sake, but the rest of the world doesn't recognize it as sad because they didn't want to study English in the first place. Since I started teaching several years ago, I've come across more and more students who are outright hostile to gen ed English. And not just hostile in the "I hate having to take this required class" way, but in the "I think your department has no right to exist because you don't actually make anything or cure diseases" way. Unfortunately, the end result of all this practicality shit could be that English-as-professional-writing-instruction-departments are eventually eliminated and absorbed into other departments who want to teach more field-specific writing courses. It's actually already happening.

And indeed, this is where faculty attitudes need to change the most. Although I'm glad that such jobs exist, as they provide a viable alternative to low-paid no-benefits adjuncting, I somewhat understand VM's reservations about them (at least as I think I understand those reservations)--that they also set up a tiered system within departments themselves as those who research (and make much more money on 2/2 loads) and those who do the bulk of the teaching. Lecturers are never really brought into the fold and never really valued as professors by the other "real professors" who were lucky enough to graduate in better times or go through more connected programs. I'm also less rosy about these positions because they offer few opportunities for advancement. In other fields, you take that entry-level position in the hopes of someday working your way up. Not so with academia. I think that academia is one of the few career fields that actually punishes people for taking an entry-level job with the goal of working their way up. If you fail to get that TT job within two or three years of your PhD, you will never graduate from lecturer to assistant professor. And while not all NTT jobs are bad, many do have a kind of "ceiling"--a point at which you can't make any more money or enjoy different opportunities. You're pretty much "stuck" teaching the same classes while TT professors--who are paid twice as much--teach less and get to design upper-level classes while never having to "slum" down to the gen ed requirements. My department, for instance, pays lecturers only $30k a year to teach 3/3, while assistant professors start out around $50k or $60k with guaranteed multiple course releases and sabbaticals in the first four years. As a graduate student, I actually had to take on a huge lecture class that was supposed to be taught by a faculty member on the tenure track. The reason? The faculty member needed to be "protected" from the strains of that kind of teaching so he could get tenure. But no one cared to protect a grad student from the strains of that kind of teaching so that I could get my degree, finish in a timely manner, and actually succeed on the job market. The faculty member went on to get tenure despite not having taught all that much or having received above-average evaluations. I graduated and didn't get a job, despite having taught many more students than the faculty member. That's the kind of attitude toward teaching and teachers that sucks and that needs to stop. By constantly denigrating teaching, the humanities continues to self-cannibalize. And by actually privileging people who have less experience--and by actually VALUING that lack of experience as evidence of their genius--we just fuck ourselves over. I'm guessing that VM has such a hate-on for NTT positions because he or she is at a department that won't touch teaching with a ten-foot pole and deliberately shreds the CVs of people who have been working as lecturers for the past three years. VM knows that he or she will not get a job if they hold a NTT position because people in that program view such positions as ruining them professionally. Only ACLS fellows need apply. tl;dr: I think that NTT jobs would definitely offer a viable alternative IF full-time faculty stopped viewing these people as second-class citizens who, by virtue of actually having WORKED for a living, aren't allowed to dream of moving up.

Oh boy, this discussion again. Therein lies the problem. Adjuncts do their jobs well--or at least decently. So there's literally no incentive to pay them better. But the problems run even deeper: humanities education is viewed by society as a very "low stakes" endeavor. Several years back, a plane fell out of the sky near Buffalo because the pilots were poorly trained, overworked, and paid about the same amount as adjunct instructors. In fact, it was uncanny how similar the situation of beginning pilots was to that of adjunct instructors. The country was outraged, but little has actually been done since then to ensure that beginning pilots are actually paid fairly and treated like human beings. If the population of the US is unwilling to advocate for decent wages for the people who put them 30,000 feet into the air, why would they give three shits about the people who teach those "useless" subjects like feminist literary criticism? We don't put people 30,000 feet in the air. We don't even teach classes about putting people 30,000 feet in the air. Of course our subjects are important to the survival of society, but it's difficult to make the case that we should get paid more because we ensure the existence of a more literate and egalitarian populace and stuff. I don't think anyone has ever died because of poor English instruction. The thing is, no one is coming to save us. I've seen Virtual Message rail all over this thread at god knows what--tenured faculty who should be ashamed to work at institutions that employ adjuncts (almost all of them). I still don't know what Virtual Message wants other than to "raise awareness" and "have a dialogue" (which mainly consists of them shrilly berating the people who study RC and condemning everyone who doesn't immediately defer to their hyperbolic scorch-the-earth rhetoric). But unfortunately, adjunct exploitation is going to continue until one of two things happens: 1) people stop sending kids to schools that rely on adjuncts, and that's unlikely since a non-adjunct education now runs people $60k a year, or 2) educators make a clean break from adjuncting and move to sectors where they can make something at least remotely approaching a living wage. That's an unpopular thing to say, and a lot of people (okay, just Virtual Message) have accused me of "victim blaming." I am not blaming the victim; I lay the blame fair and square at the feet of the overpaid administrators and legislatures that have done their damnedest to snuff out the humanities in any way possible. But correctly apportioning blame doesn't change things. It doesn't change your basic material realities. It doesn't change the fact that you're making $20k a year to work 70-hour weeks with no health insurance, sick days, benefits, or opportunities to advance. And doesn't change the fact that literally no one in the world cares that you are making $20k a year to perform a valuable service--not your students, not their parents, and not the country at large. I also know that "move to another sector" is easier said than done, and that there's exploitation in another sectors as well. But no one here has offered a viable alternative. There's definitely blame to go around for faculty, but I'm not quite as sold on pillorying them as Virtual Message. I blame faculty most for the things that are within their control to change but that they do not, such as hiring practices. Hiring committees view applicants who have adjuncted as second-class citizens. They throw their CVs out. That's fucking wrong. There's also the whole "shelf life of your PhD" dynamic--google the Colorado State hiring debacle from two years ago. More importantly, faculty also continue to perpetuate a culture that designates research as good and teaching as bad. Teaching is looked upon as punishment, and it's typically less well-paid than getting a sabbatical. This attitude starts when you are first admitted to graduate school--those on fellowship are paid more while those on TA-ship are paid less (and, in my case, not offered full-year health insurance). That's something that faculty have the power to fix but do not. And rather than actually looking outside the box to hire people who are slightly older, or who have followed a "non-traditional" path, or who have taught at a community college while waiting out the job market, hiring committees instead constantly go for the "easy hire," reinscribing old boy networks and hierarchies. (An aside: When I was on the job market, I was actually told to minimize the amount of teaching I had done. I taught something like 600-700 undergrads as an IOR while completing my PhD in a five years and coming out with a well-placed publication. A record of achievement, right? But I was told that my having taught so much would be viewed as a "red flag," i.e. that I'd look like someone who was "low class" and couldn't win fellowships. I shit you not.) While I admire the faculty member who resigned her position to protest the poor treatment of adjuncts, I can't help but also be puzzled by her actions. Is this what people like Virtual Message want? One less tenure line, one less full-time faculty member suckering in those poor unsuspecting graduate students to their doom? Buried in the article was a much more sensible perspective: Among the instructors who lost jobs was Tsering Lama, who had been there two years. Ms. Lama said she had refused Yeshiva’s offer of a new part-time position because it would have offered less than half of the pay of her current position, with no benefits. "It would just be a lot more work for a lot less money," she said. Bingo.

This is one of those times when I am reminded of what CBZ has said in other threads--that people at the beginning of this process, despite claiming to know about the job market, don't really grasp how bad it is. There aren't that many NTT full-time jobs out there. Period. So, concluding things like, "I'll just dial back my expectations and get a NTT job instead!" is like ... yeah. I want a pony too. Unlike VirtualMessage, I'm not one of these people who sees myself above these positions. But they aren't as readily available as you would like to believe.

That's not quite how we see things in English. You don't want two papers out there treating the same subject, one vastly better than the other. In general, you don't want anything other than your best work out there, period. One way to ensure that the article is good is to get it into a reputable journal.

In English, conference proceedings won't "hurt" you; they're just considered a waste of time and a waste of a good opportunity. It's just more advantageous to find the best venue for your publication that you possibly can. And conference proceedings are looked at as a "last resort" publication--meaning that you either couldn't get your paper published in a better place and ran out of time, or you didn't really know what you were doing. If you've got something good, get it into a peer reviewed journal. That's much more meaningful on a CV than a conference proceeding.