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April 12, 2013 |
On April 8, 2013, the
New York Times reported that
76 percent of American university faculty are adjunct professors - an
all-time high. Unlike tenured faculty, whose annual salaries can top
$160,000, adjunct professors make an average of $2,700 per course and
receive no health care or other benefits.
Most adjuncts teach at multiple universities while still not making enough to stay above the
poverty line. Some are on
welfare or
homeless. Others depend on
charity drives held by their peers. Adjuncts are generally
not allowed to have offices or participate in faculty meetings. When they ask for a living wage or benefits, they can be
fired. Their contingent status allows them no recourse.
No
one forces a scholar to work as an adjunct. So why do some of America's
brightest PhDs - many of whom are authors of books and articles on
labour, power, or injustice - accept such terrible conditions?
"Path dependence and sunk costs must be powerful forces," speculates political scientist Steve Saidemen in a post titled "
The Adjunct Mystery".
In other words, job candidates have invested so much time and money
into their professional training that they cannot fathom abandoning
their goal - even if this means living, as Saidemen says, like
"second-class citizens". (He later
downgraded this to "third-class citizens".)
With roughly 40 percent of academic positions
eliminated since
the 2008 crash, most adjuncts will not find a tenure-track job. Their
path dependence and sunk costs will likely lead to greater path
dependence and sunk costs - and the
costs of the academic job market are prohibitive.
Many job candidates must shell out thousands of dollars for a chance to
interview at their discipline's annual meeting, usually held in one of
the most expensive cities in the world. In some fields, candidates must
pay to even see the job listings.
Given
the need for personal wealth as a means to entry, one would assume that
adjuncts would be even more outraged about their plight. After all,
their paltry salaries and lack of departmental funding make their job
hunt a far greater sacrifice than for those with means. But this is not
the case. While
efforts at labour organisation are
emerging,
the adjunct rate continues to soar - from 68 percent in 2008, the year
of the economic crash, to 76 percent just five years later.
Contingency has become permanent, a rite of passage to nowhere.
A two-fold crisis
The
adjunct plight is indicative of a two-fold crisis in education and in
the American economy. On one hand, we have the degradation of education
in general and higher education in particular. It is no surprise that
when 76 percent of professors are viewed as so disposable and
indistinguishable that they are listed in course catalogues as
"Professor Staff", administrators view
computers which grade essaysas a viable replacement. Those who promote inhumane treatment tend to not favour the human.
On
the other hand, we have a pervasive self-degradation among low-earning
academics - a sweeping sense of shame that strikes adjunct workers
before adjunct workers can strike. In a
tirade for
Slatesubtitled "Getting a literature PhD will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor", Rebecca Schuman writes:
"By
the time you finish - if you even do - your academic self will be the
culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe,
incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you
worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a
job, it will destroy you."
Self-degradation sustains
the adjunct economy, and we see echoes of it in journalism, policy and
other fields in which unpaid or underpaid labour is
increasingly the norm. It is easy to make people work for less than they are worth when they are conditioned to feel worthless.
Thomas A Benton wrote in 2004, before tackling the title question,
"Is Graduate School a Cult?":
"Although
I am currently a tenure-track professor of English, I realise that
nothing but luck distinguishes me from thousands of other
highly-qualified PhD's in the humanities who will never have full-time
academic jobs and, as a result, are symbolically dead to the academy."
Benton's answer is yes, and he offers a
list of
behaviour controls used by cults - "no critical questions about leader,
doctrine, or policy seen as legitimate", "access to non-cult sources of
information minimised or discouraged" - that mirror the practices of
graduate school. The author lived as he wrote: it was later revealed
that "Thomas A Benton" was a pseudonym used by academic William
Pannapacker when he wrote for the
Chronicle of Higher Education - a publication said to employ more pseudonyms than any other American newspaper. The life of the mind is born of fear.
Some
may wonder why adjuncts do not get a well-paying non-academic job while
they search for a tenure-track position. The answer lies in the
cult-like practices Pannapacker describes. To work outside of academia,
even temporarily, signals you are not "serious" or "dedicated" to
scholarship. It does not matter if you are simply too poor to stay: in
academia, perseverance is redefined as the ability to suffer silently or
to survive on family wealth. As a result, scholars adjunct in order to
retain an institutional affiliation, while the institution offers them
no respect in return.
Dispensable automatons
Is
academia a cult? That is debatable, but it is certainly a caste system.
Outspoken academics like Pannapacker are rare: most tenured faculty
have stayed silent about the adjunct crisis. "It is difficult to get a
man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding
it," wrote Upton Sinclair, the American author famous for his essays on
labour exploitation. Somewhere in America, a tenured professor may be
teaching his work, as a nearby adjunct holds office hours out of her
car.
On Twitter, I wondered why so many professors who study
injustice ignore the plight of their peers. "They don't consider us
their peers," the adjuncts wrote back. Academia likes to think of itself
as a meritocracy -
which it is not -
and those who have tenured jobs like to think they deserved them. They
probably do - but with hundreds of applications per available position,
an awful lot of deserving candidates have defaulted to the adjunct
track.
The plight of the adjunct shows how personal success is not
an excuse to excuse systemic failure. Success is meaningless when the
system that sustained it - the higher education system - is no longer
sustainable. When it falls, everyone falls. Success is not a pathway out
of social responsibility.
Last week, a corporation proudly announced that it had created a
digital textbook that monitors whether students had done the reading. This followed the announcement of the
software that
grades essays, which followed months of hype over MOOCs - massive
online open courses - replacing classroom interaction. Professors who
can gauge student engagement through class discussion are unneeded.
Professors who can offer thoughtful feedback on student writing are
unneeded. Professors who interact with students, who care about
students, are unneeded.
We should not be surprised that it has
come to this when 76 percent of faculty are treated as dispensable
automatons. The contempt for adjuncts reflects a general contempt for
learning. The promotion of information has replaced the pursuit of
knowledge. But it is not enough to have information - we need insight
and understanding, and above all, we need people who can communicate it
to others.
People who have the ability to do this are not
dispensable. They should not see themselves this way, and they should
not be treated this way. Fight for what you are worth, adjuncts. Success
is solidarity.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
Sarah
Kendzior is a writer and analyst who studies digital media and
politics. She has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University.
