ComeBackZinc

But see, here's the problem, for someone like me who's been engaging on this for years: there have already been a ton of essays published in exactly the same vein as that of VirtualMessage. Complaints like those aren't rare in the adjunct crisis/grad student crisis/academic labor crisis/etc narrative. They're the dominant form! They're ubiquitous! And I've been reading them for ten years. So my question is, how often can we write the same essays that get the same agreement from the same people and expect things to change? Part of what frustrates me is that VirtualMessage's complaints are so of

I am once again unclear, VirtualMessage, about what you want people on this board, or in the academy, to actually do. And once again, it seems clear to me that you are less interested in having some sort of constructive change than you are in getting people here to embrace a certain kind of affective or emotional attitude towards the academy. Suppose we all did: so what? If we all started beating our breast and emoting the way that you do, what would materially change? If you want to be useful, you have to learn to separate your own bitterness and anger over how you were exploited from the

My advice: 1. Use this summer to explore your creative writing work (which, FWIW, many people in rhet/comp are into), because you won't have much time at all to do such things once you've started and you want to give yourself mental space to rest and do your own stuff for now. Nobody expects an MA student to be getting published, let alone someone who's not yet started their MA. Of course publication is important, but if your work is good it will be good in the summer after your first MA year, which is a fine time to start drafting articles. 2. I would not try to rework a lit paper int

I recognize the legitimacy of your anger and I appreciate your overall political project. I agree about the need for solidarity and taking concrete steps to reduce the demise of TT positions. I do think you have more friends than you realize, if you would care to look for them a little more fairly.

I know all about it, because she first announced it on the WPA listserv-- that's right, she was a WPA, the very type of faculty member that you have derided in this space again and again. And she received great support and advice from the other WPAs. So maybe you should reconsider whether WPAs are the devil. And, yes, I want the same things. I just want you to understand that your tone is not always conducive to convincing the people who we both need to convince.

I know for some people on this thread it's the adjunct's own fault-- how dare they let themselves be exploited! Who? Based on what statement? Quotes, please.

As I said, the Atlantic article is just a quick hitter. Again: I've been studying this issue almost nonstop for two years, mostly with NCES and BLS data. If you think that their data is substandard.... that's interesting. Its first argument is that humanities majors have about the same unemployment rate as everyone else. Dude, no shit. In other words, you made an inflammatory and incorrect statement, got called out on it, and are now making a vastly different statement. On the other hand, take a slice from, say, the PhD labor market: science PhDs are tens of percent less unemployed

In fact engineering is undergoing a marketed labor slowdown in some subfields, and the general notion of a STEM shortage is unfounded: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/the-myth-of-the-science-and-engineering-shortage/284359/

The supposed poor employment condition of liberal arts majors and English majors in general has been the subject of several years of research of mine. In fact, humanities majors do not suffer on the job market. Though the notion that they do is commonplace, it lacks evidentiary basis. Indeed, English majors themselves do quite well on the job market. What you're saying is factually inaccurate. I'm sorry to blow up your spot, but thems the facts. Here's a quickie, for example: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/06/the-best-argument-for-studying-english-the-employment-numbers/2

*bump*

Yeah one point that I try to be very nuanced on is that a) the academic job market is very very bad, but all for all recent humanities PhDs aren't doing as terribly as we've been told.

Here's a cool, worthwhile initiative from MLA along these lines. https://connect.commons.mla.org/

You ignored the question, of course. By the way: I neither mentioned my job nor said that NTT is the best we can do.

If in any given employment situation the choice is between an adjunct making $3K a class with no contract, no benefits, no respect for research at all, no room for advancement and no hope, or a full-time, long-term, contracted lecturer making a living wage, earning benefits, and having the opportunity for promotion, which do you think is better? Making the perfect the enemy of the good does nobody any favors. And I condescend to you because you have single-handedly hijacked this forum again and again, in a way that doesn't make it any easier for people like me to counsel others to consider

I applied for several NTT jobs in my job hunt this past year. All of the ones I applied to had the following characteristics: they provided a living wage that would enable me to live modestly but comfortably; that they had multi-year contracts; that the teaching load was no higher than a 3/3; that people currently in those positions reported privately to me that their work was respected and valued and that their research was taken seriously. A nice bonus was jobs where research funding was possible or jobs where NTT faculty had a voice in the faculty senate. Some of these jobs were quite well