The Boston Globe has picked up the story of Invisible Adjunct's departure from academe, which becomes the occasion for a more general reflection on the corruption of the academic labor system:

Few people realize how important part-time labor is to the modern university. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), nearly 50 percent of all faculty positions are now part-time, non-tenure-track -- a proportion that has doubled since 1976. (Another 16 percent are full-time positions off the tenure track.)

"Adjuncts are like sherpas," says Patricia Lesko, editor-in-chief of Adjunct Advocate magazine, a bimonthly based in Ann Arbor that mixes investigative pieces about the plight of adjuncts with can-do advice intended to buck them up. "The people on the tenure track climb the mountain of tenure, while adjuncts carry the luggage of introductory courses with them."

The Bay State is no stranger to the problem. At Emerson College, roughly half the courses are taught by part-time faculty. Last month, after a three-year struggle, adjuncts there finally won raises of 15 to 20 percent and some health benefits for long-term teachers. At UMass-Boston, where adjuncts teach three-fourths of all continuing education classes, they also get health insurance -- though this is rare.

At UMass-Amherst, meanwhile, adjuncts will very likely be an issue in upcoming negotiations between the administration and the faculty union (which includes adjuncts who work at least half-time). Since 1994, the number of full-time tenured faculty at UMass-Amherst has declined 17 percent, to 894, according to Dan Clawson, a sociologist and vice president of the union. Over the same period, the number of "contingent" faculty -- all teachers with no shot at tenure -- rose 61 percent, to 210.

Even so, I've got mixed feelings about the way IA has become, in the wake of her departure, a sort of faceless poster girl for the degradation of academic work. On the one hand, the human interest that surrounds her story has made it possible to publicize a problem that needs all the publicity it can get. On the other hand, the hand-wringing has a bitterly ironic quality to it: What IA wanted was a job teaching college history; instead, she has become facelessly famous as the woman who was wrongly denied that opportunity. Meanwhile, I have to wonder whether any of the gainfully employed academic historians who have publicly mourned the fate of IA have tried to find a place for her--a real, lasting place for her--in their profession. It's obvious from IA's site what a fine teacher and scholar she is--the Invisible Adjunct's blog may quite reasonably be read as one of the longest and most eloquent job interviews in history. She's readily reachable by email; if reporters can talk to her, so can prospective employers. So what's the problem? Inquiring and frustrated minds what to know.

UPDATE: More at Cliopatria, where Ralph Luker agrees with me, but also notes how our position has been deemed "unrealistic" by various commenter-historians. My own feeling, watching the responses to my post accumulate, is that the ones from working academics that dismiss my question as unrealistic are fascinating artifacts in the academy's ongoing apparently suicidal mission not to repair itself. Of course my post is unrealistic. What I was asking--and I really thought this should have been obvious--was not why, practically, the academic hiring system makes it difficult to place someone like IA in a decent job, but whether, perhaps impractically, any gainfully employed academic historians had tried to set their minds to solving either the immediate problem posed by IA's departure from their field or the larger structural problems that departure exemplifies. To respond to such a question with a litany of reasons why the system is the way it is and why no one person can ever hope to alter it and why this is proper and correct even if it results in sometimes unhappy outcomes is to show what strikes me as a deplorable lack of institutional imagination, one that is as conservatively convenient as it is "realistic." Things aren't going to change unless and until tenured faculty not only decide that they can and must, but also accept personal and collective responsibility for making that change happen. Handwringing in the absence of such a commitment is inadequate, and insulting to those for whom the hands are being wrung. As Planned Obsolescence put it, "one can imagine IAís very 'colleagues,' reading [the Chronicle piece] in their offices, shaking their heads and muttering about the terrible loss to the field, never noticing the woman down the hall, packing her few things to leave. ... This is the way we like our tragedies: visible enough to be clucked over, invisible enough to avoid any personal implication therein."

An excellent point. But there are probably several reasons, including the fact that the academic historians who might be in a position to do what you suggest and find IA a position are probably also the least web-aware. From what I see now and then, it's apparently a mark of distinction among English professors that they don't read e-mail, for instance, and I would assume the more hidebound and influential historians may be in the same situation.

Also, demonstrated merit is not, of course, necessarily a qualification for many jobs, especially those as valuable to those who have them to give as tenure-track openings. If someone hired a person for nearly any job as capable as IA appears on a job interview package like that, he or she would simply not owe the hiring aurhority a thing. He or she would simply do his or her own job and (in a perfect world) be appropriately rewarded for it. What boss could tolerate that?

And also...I don't know much about academic hiring procedures, but aren't they pretty bureaucratized? Is it typical to be able to simply offer someone a job, or is it more typical to post an opening--have everyone interviewed by a committee--argue about the selection process--and finally arrive at a compromise decision?

With Any Luck, Tenure is being de facto Abolished

Since 1994, the number of full-time tenured faculty at UMass-Amherst has declined 17 percent, to 894, according to Dan Clawson, a sociologist and vice president of the union. Over the same period, the number of "contingent" faculty -- all teachers with no shot at tenure -- rose 61 percent, to 210

I was still at my graduate institution when a TT position became available. The faculty was split between full professors (there were three of them) and the rest of the department (about three times their number). The full professors, who realy disliked each other in all other instances, banded together to back one candidate, who happened to have been the undergraduate of one of them, and who was clearly expected to be in a position to back up her mentor when hired. Interestingly enough, the department already had a tenured assistant professor who also had been an undergraduate of this same professor. In the hiring process, though, he had "broken tradition" and gone against his mentor with respect to this matter, which resulted in a gigantic rift. The bulk of the faculty wanted the candidate who was clearly an up-and-coming literary critic. Who was chosen? The administration finally had to step in after months of deadlock, and chose the second choice of both parties (who, by the way, is a great guy and an accomplished scholar in his own right).

The result was incredibly unfortuante for the rest of the department, especially the grad students. Those full professors, two of whom held endowed chairs, had command of quite a bit of money that they could disburse to grad students for research, and one professor in particular "made his stand" against the "injustice" and refused to give any aid to his students. Most of our research is done overseas, and grad students don't make the kind of cash which makes this easy to do without some kind of grant.

Long story. My point is, I can't help but wonder if a key element in the hiring process is finding someone biddable! If that's the case, IA's excellent qualities and her strong character may also be a red flag to departments and university admins who want someone who will maintain the status quo. The people who make the decisions don't want to hire an "agitator" who has spoken up about these issues, and who will continue to do so, so one hopes.

The problem is that at the vast majority of colleges and universities you cannot just create a position out of thin air for a specific person, you have to have "an open and fair" hiring process.

There is another aspect to this story, geographic mobility. IA lives in New York. She is married and has a family. Her spouse does not work in academia. How geographically mobile is she? Where can she move to? While one can be an accountant pretty much anywhere, academia often requires a great deal of geographic mobility for success. Such geographic mobility maybe a factor in IA's case. For myself, my decision was to choose teaching at an independent school in a city I liked near my extended family overruled college teaching somewhere far away.

Because academic hiring simply doesn't work that way. Which you know, Erin.

Let's take my situation. I have a high opinion of IA, as you know, and not merely her blog, but her scholarship. But what could I possibly do with that? In my own institution, there are nine tenure lines in my department. All of them are presently occupied, and will likely remain so. Were one happen to open and were it to be in IA's field, I would gladly look out for her application and push it hard. But that's an unusual circumstance at any given moment that you know of a strong candidate that you'd like to see hired. Nor is one person pushing any guarantee of success: in fact, I'd say I'm enough of an outlier in some respects that to push too hard for someone is to probably damage their case more than help it.

So what else can I or anyone else do? Argue for a new tenure line because I know of someone promising? Not exactly likely to get traction with the administration, no matter how well liked I might be. Nor should it, really. There are plenty of people in my own institution who have excellent judgement and whom I would trust to find new candidates for the college--but were they allowed to, the faculty here would double its size in five years. So why should I be permitted the privilege, and I alone? So could I make some calls to other institutions? Doesn't help, to be frank, and may in fact hurt--academics hate to openly appear in any sense 'nepotistic'. Plus I don't honestly know *that* many people, and outside my own field of speciality (African history) I have very little currency with other specialists.

There are deeper issues here that were often discussed at IA's blog. IA's blog is not one of the longest and most eloquent job interviews in history: everything she had to say would hurt her in an actual interview rather than help, and I know you know it, just as I do. That's one of the things we're mutually critical of about the academy: it is not especially interested nor does it solicit criticisms of its current labor policies, pedagogical strategies, or anything else. If IA had wanted to make her blog something that made her more attractive as a historian seeking a tenure-track job, the best thing she could have done is not have one. The people who control most academic departments don't even know what blogs are, and if they did, they wouldn't like them. I suppose a blog that was exclusively focused on historical scholarship couldn't hurt terribly, but neither would it help much.

People are not hired into tenure-track jobs for their pedagogical insight, their understanding of the institutional problems of academia, or even necessarily for their overall quality of mind. They're generally hired by the peculiar Peyton-Place cultural logic of any given department of individual scholars, for a certain quality of conformist excellence within the heuristic constraints of what is considered appropriate disciplinarity, for a certain poise and for evidence of careerist drive.

The only way to get to a situation where "prospective employers" could read about an interesting candidate and feel free to make offers would be to radically shift academia towards an entrepreneurial, entirely market-driven set of norms not radically different than that of most businesses, with no tenure and tremendous flexibility in the terms of employment.

I agree with previous posters that although IA's blog has been excellent, it isn't realistic to expect that her posts will attract academic job offers. Universities have no reason to go looking for people, and they have no vested interest in hiring someone with her sense of candor and individuality.

That said, I'm an adjunct but my full-time job is not in academia, and whenever I'm in charge of hiring new employees I look very closely at the resumes of disaffected academics. It isn't hard to spot a grad student who's stopping after completing an M.A. and is searching for a new direction. If IA lived in my city I'd recruit her in a second, even with the expectation that the gig would be a transitional job for her rather than the beginning of a long-term career.

But in academia? No one's going to step forward and make the same offer. The system is too conservative, in the most literal sense of the word, and it rarely rewards innovation, creativity, or reform. It doesn't need to.

Before anybody endorses Tim's scary vision of "an entrepreneurial, entirely market-driven set of norms not radically different than that of most business," remember that labor markets have two sides, buyers and sellers. The academic labor market actually depends upon labor sellers behaving irrationally and inefficiently.

Think about it. You get to pay thousands of dollars for seven plus years to get a degree that offers no assurances of a job once you're done. Even if you become one of the select few who get a tenure-track job, there are no assurances that you can keep it beyond the six-year pre-tenure period. Even if you get tenure, you are unlikely to get rich working for most universities in this country.

IA's great service was to provide information that sellers in this labor market needed to make informed choices (and the same thing goes for Erin's blog). An entrepreneurial academic labor market might have made IA's prospects of getting an academic job better, but even with a completed degree she might very well be better off without one.

In an inefficient labor market, we shouldn't be surprised that there is no justice. Making it more entrepreneurial would just make those inefficiencies worse.

My prior post on this general topic was much too terse.

There appear to be three completely different trends in academia as far as adjuncts go.

The first is transparent as far as teaching positions go. Universities have graduate programs. Instead of teaching undergraduates, the faculty teaches graduate students and the graduate students teach the undergraduates. PhDs have been well described as the excreted produced by such a system as that part of the system has no real use for the volume of PhDs created, they are merely a by-product of a system that lets the professors avoid teaching the boring classes and instead teach the fun ones. Ignoring outside funding, if you got rid of all the graduate students in such a system and made the professors teach the undergraduates, there would be minimal change in the number of professors, just not having as much fun or excreting as much.

The second trend is using adjuncts to stretch budgets, either in continuing education programs or otherwise. Continuing education is a special case as many people who teach in continuing education programs develop their own classes, recruit their own students and run their own programs for profit as a part-time job. I've known lots of those types. Some continuing education programs pay well (three thousand dollars for teaching ten classes is the benchmark I'm familiar with), some are hideously poor on payment (three hundred dollars for teaching thirty hours of classroom time). Understanding how budget stretching adjuncts work is a separate function from the graduate student adjunct/t.a. matter. You can flow chart the budgets for most universities and watch the growth of adjuncts. You can also work out whether replacing the adjuncts with professors would result in less classes, budget problems or some other result on the matrix. "CEO" pay in university settings obscures the overall budget issues (and is a silly development as well), but the bottom line is that budget stretching adjuncts are much too common, but they tend to be a side effect of the oversupply of PhDs combined with the budget problems of the institutions. I have yet to see an institution that did not have budget issues that opted for adjuncts. They do not increase the status of the institution or of a program.

The third trend is the use of "teaching" faculty vs. "research" faculty. Most ADR professors in law schools are of the first type. Business law professors at SMU are teaching faculty, paid about $8k a class each semester (teach three classes, make $24K that semester. Take a semester off, make nothing). It is enough to draw dedicated teachers who remain secure as long as they are politically astute, but not enough to draw serious practitioners until they are retiring. When I was enamored of teaching, I would have taken one of those jobs. I wouldn't take the pay cut now. Business schools are leading the way, and many "teaching" faculty actually do research and publish. Some institutions place individuals on different tracks who are teaching the same subject (i.e. a few law schools have ADR profs as tenure track instead of "teaching" faculty track). Generally "teaching track" classes are classes where the subject matter really doesn't evolve quickly and the academic research in the area is done in other places (i.e. law classes in a business school, statistics classes in an econ or engineering school).

Teaching faculty tend to have fewer credentials, no "publish or perish" issues, more flexibility, but to be very dependent on political savey and connections to get and keep their positions. It is an interesting development and one that would make little difference if all the positions were changed to tenure track positions. Pay would remain the same, the profs would get more security, but would have to spend more time on extraneous endeavors (publishing, committees, etc.) and institutions would focus more on credentials and less on teaching ability as the teaching faculty would suddenly count for statistical purposes.

How would making system changes affect the overall market, other than one time alterations (e.g. when the USFL was started, a large number of guys made it into pro football who wouldn't have been there without the extra league. Long term it didn't affect the number of people moving into the pros in any significant number, but it made a big difference for the first year)? Well, if the excreted by-product issue were solved there would be fewer, far fewer, PhDs on the market. It might well be good to change the PhD track into two parts: Teaching PhDs and exit PhDs. The one type has to teach, adjunct/t.a., publish, etc. The other has to learn advanced studies in the subject, but with the understanding that upon graduation they are not qualified to teach -- assuming you would have students who would study for the love of the subject. Psych PhD programs have fair numbers of students who have no intent of every teaching, the same with Physiology.

Well, backing away from the pipe dreams, any program with a placement record of less than 40% would be forced to close its doors by being denied any federal funding or eligibility for any grants. The cut-off would start at 40% and would move to 75% over time. That would make a big impact on the excreted by-product issue. Next, U.S. News would be pressured to add into its ratings % of classes taught by adjuncts. That would be a major impact move.

Those two inputs would probably be enough to alter the entire adjunct landscape as they would change the massive oversupply issue and increase external pressures. Both could be accomplished by political pressure (legislatures would be pushed to cut out the "fat and waste" in higher education for the first change, U.S. News could easily be pressured by a "teaching quality" rating system set up in competition to its current ratings).

Anyway, that is a meta analysis of the issue and of a solution track that has an implementation path that is possible and fairly easy to set up.

Regards,

Stephen

"Even so, I've got mixed feelings about the way IA has become, in the wake of her departure, a sort of faceless poster girl for the degradation of academic work."

You and me both :)

"Argue for a new tenure line because I know of someone promising? Not exactly likely to get traction with the administration, no matter how well liked I might be. Nor should it, really."

Agreed. I think Tim Burke is exactly right.

I'm not sure I share Jonathan Rees's opinion that a more entrepreneurial business model would inevitably be worse than the current system. Granted, it might lead to even more casualization, with everyone outside the top tier of elite schools basically working as an adjunct. But I can imagine a scenario where it might represent an improvement: full-time limited term renewable contracts would be a much better deal than part-time per course. But the point is, that's not what the current tenure-track hiring system is about. If someone -- Tim Burke, say -- *could* push for a tenure-track line for me, couldn't he also do the same for a friend or relative? Not saying the current system is a rationally functioning meritocracy (far from it...but I've said enough about this on my blog). But if it *were* possible for a senior faculty to find a place for me, wouldn't that mean that the system was not only structurally broken (which I think it clearly is) but also riddled with insiderness, nepotism, favoritism and the like? (not suggesting there aren't currently cases involving such abuses, but for the most part, I think the problems are structural).

"There is another aspect to this story, geographic mobility. IA lives in New York. She is married and has a family. Her spouse does not work in academia. How geographically mobile is she?"

Ahem. "Married female" is not synonymous with "not mobile." My spouse is portable precisely because he doesn't work in academia, and has always been ready, willing and able to move.

Actually, Erin, I think I have plenty of ideas about how to change things. I even offer one--not entirely seriously--in my previous comment.

What I object to is your implication--returned to in your updated comment--that this is primarily an attitudinal defect, that the reason it's not possible for the people who care about IA's fate or the fate of many bright and talented aspirants to do anything about it is that they simply don't care enough, would rather cluck their tongues, would rather feel bad but do nothing.

It's not attitudinal, though I don't doubt that the stagnation of the academy rests on attitudinal roots. It's structural, and profoundly so. To imagine a different circumstance is to imagine an academy that is utterly structurally different from its present form. This is mostly not something that you yourself do in your musings on this site: you imagine essentially a change in the mental conditions and work ethos of academics themselves. This would accomplish nothing in addressing the problem of adjuncts. That would take a huge change in the basic architecture of academia, in how labor power is allocated and the service of education sold. You can't get there with any amount of earnest concern. I'm not sure you can get there at all within existing academic institutions. It's why I think more and more about the need for an entire new form of higher education.

Tim,

I don't think, from your comment above, that we are in as much disagreement as you think. Surely you would agree that the massive structural changes you envision for academia cannot happen in the absence of a massive attitudinal shift; surely you agree, too, that such changes will in turn help to instantiate a new academic culture; surely you agree that the current massive structural shifts toward the casualization of academic labor are the result of a collective failure on the part of academics to adjust their attitudes toward their work and workplace; and surely you agree that for responsible and constructive shifts to happen, deliberate and coordinated efforts to alter attitude and structure in tandem are required? What I objected to in your original comment was the implied suggestion that because the system is structured as it is, there is no way to imagine one's way out of it and into a better one. Obviously we've both read too much Foucault at a formative stage. But setting that aside, I would love to hear your thinking about what an "entire new form of higher education" would look like. One reason I am leaving--one of many--is that I don't have constructive or viable thoughts on that front (whereas I have plenty of constructive and viable thoughts about more fundamental things like teaching).

I have been diddling for quite some time on my fantasy design for an entirely new kind of institution of higher learning. It's almost ready: I may even post it by the beginning of next week. It's an attempt to take some of these bulls by the horns and ask how we might fashion something substantatively different that would resolve out these dilemmas.

But one piece of the puzzle that we have to recognize regardless of whether we imagine reform or revolution is that we can't get to a new system painlessly. One of the hard truths here is that even the more modest reforms that many of us now embrace will not help people like IA in any immediate sense, that the people now in the pipeline are stuck with the system as it is, with all its constraints.

I just want to make a small addition to this thread. I think it needs to be said that that academic departments can in fact do whatever they want as long as it is more or less in line with administrative needs. At Haverford College (where I taught for four years) they hired a woman on a one-year fellwoship, and then managed to convert her position into a tenure track one. But wait, she wasn't finished with her dissertation yet, and so took another three years to complete it, at which point the department "re-set" her tenure clock so that it began not when it was originally granted, but rather when she finished her dissertation -- i.e., three years after being hired. In other words, on one view, she will get a 10-year long tenrue clock.

There was NO national search to fill the line they created for her. She was just slotted into it, quietly and without much ado.

She's also a former Haverford undergrad, and works on Asian-American literature.

The moral of the story: if there's a will, there's a way. Academic departments claim impotence in hiring matters only when it serves their needs to appear powerless.

p.s. I'm "outting" myself because after four years Haverford dumped me. Why? Probably because it was starting to look a bit fishy that after four years of continuous full-time employment they nevertheless couldn't find a place for me on the tenure track.

Whether they could have found one for me is anyone's guess. While I was technically a "replacement" hire, the fact is that I did create about 4 courses of my own, courses that weren't on the books, and only barely overlapped with existing areas.

No offense meant IA. Issues of childcare and family have been important in your blog. For me, those issues cut severely into my geographic mobility (nothing outside a day's drive of either grandparent). At the same time, the New York piece sets off all kind of warning bells. I grew up in NY and know people who will not leave; some of them won't leave Manhattan. And your spouse might have had a NY specific job or at least one that is not easily portable (say: city planner). But you are correct. Some spouses have jobs that can travel anywhere, some don't. If you could work in small town Nebraska or rural New Mexico, more power to you. I found out I couldn't.

I think that Chris does, in fact, make an important point: that even within the contraints of the system as it is, those with power to act in institutions with resources can and do work miracles for those they deem worthy of having miracles worked for them.

"In fact"? As in, hard to imagine? Unbelievable as it may seem? Will wonders never cease?

No offense intended, Chris. Your comment, which is a gloss on and runs counter to the thrust of Tim Burke's argument, uses the same "in fact."

Ralph -- sorry, my lame attempt at humor failed miserably. Note to self: work on refining blog comment humor.

Truly, sorry.

Some of us have tried to push in other directions from within the academy. Our union, for all my complaints about them, did succeed in creating a structure with this last contract, in which long-term adjunct faculty positions MUST be converted to tenure-track positions. My own department attempted to hire a tenure-track person whose sole responsibility would have been the World Civ intro surveys, a job that most places farm out to grad students (we don't have any) and part-timers (not a lot of qualified folks on the island; OK, we didn't have a lot of choice, but we really were doing it for the right reasons, too), instead of giving it a firm and important place within the department. We failed, not because of a lack of good people in the pool, but because of a FUBAR administration. I'll probably blog on this sometime after my grades go in and I get a few more details. But I remain committed to the idea that the work usually done by adjuncts -- intro courses in particular -- needs to be reevaluated and turned over to people who have the time and resources to do them really well and who get professional credit for that.

Don't forget that you can always enroll in a PhD program and opt for a terminal masters...That's what I did. As long as you are able to resist the demented careerism of elite humanities programs, it makes for a nice 1 or 2 year sojourn. I met some brilliant people, drank beer, and read cool books, all on the university's dime. If you are secure in who you are, and willing to be a bit of a pariah in the department, its perfectly possible to spend time in the academy without absorbing its perverted values system.

Quote from Lieter:

Universities, to be sure, will continue to have powerful financial incentives to exploit adjunct labor (just as they take advantage of graduate student teaching assistants). But one reason they can get away with it is because the marketplace currently supplies far too many candidates than universities could accomodate in tenure-stream positions (even if the terms of tenure-stream appointments were made considerably less attractive). There are more than 110 Ph.D.-granting programs in philosophy in the United States. If the majority of them were closed, there would be only a slight loss to the profession; if the weakest third of them were closed, there would be no loss at all, and, in fact, a net increase in human happiness, since it is these programs that produce the dreadful outcomes which The Village Voice laments.

Philosophy, at least, does not need more Ph.D. programs. It could benefit, I think, from more top-flight, terminal M.A. programs (like Tufts, Wisconsin/Milwaukee, Northern Illinois, Virginia Tech, etc.), as a way of helping students figure out whether the academic career is for them. Unfortunately, the trend right now is in the opposite direction, with what were quite attractive terminal M.A. programs becoming PhD-granting institutions, without any clear market rationale.

Of course there is no market rationale driving the upgrade of terminal MA programs into Ph.D. granting programs. Instead, what drives this process is individual and departmental ego; it's an index of departmental wide self-aggrandizement.

The belief is that since Professor Blowhard's second book was well received, and because Professor Stickuptheass's first book has been published by Stanford, and has received rave notices in the top journals, and they are now getting invitations to guest lecture at Cornell, this all translates into the kind of academic capital that warrants a Ph.D. program. Nevermind that producing Ph.D. students these days is tantamount to pissing in the ocean.

At the next MLA, when mid-50-ish, white-bearded, basso-voiced Professor Blowhard says to his colleague 'the dean is about to approve our design for our Ph.D. program', his colleague should say, 'but Bill, what's the point'. Sadly, of course, the colleague is more likely to say 'that's great Bill ... how are Peg and the kids'.

Such is the sociopathic disconnection that typifies current academia.