A New Phase, and Why You Should Never Ever Adjunct, Ever

Wow, it's been a while! I've been away from this blog living my life, and as much of the post-PhD rage and confusion has shifted into something softer and more manageable, the drive to put pen to paper (or fingers to keys, as it were) has eased. But I also have realized that writing my story has a role other than just crisis intervention. It's like the marks on the wall a parent makes as a child gets taller: it lets me see how far I've come and know that, even with all the ups and downs, I'm still me.

Where I've Been

So here's some stuff that happened in the last four years (in no particular order):

• I started teaching high school
• I got laid off from said high school, and spent a year adjuncting
• I learned that NO ONE should adjunct, EVER (see exception below)
• I got a job at another high school to get me out of adjuncting

So yeah, lots has happened! I may need to unpack these in several upcoming entries. I'll start with adjuncting and why no one should ever do it.

But First, the Exception

As far as I can tell there is only one type of person who might feasibly adjunct: If you are independently wealthy or have a spouse who makes a lot of money, and thus any income from adjuncting is purely optional--kind of like the employment equivalent of finding loose change in your sofa--then by all means, knock yourself out. Adjunct away! For the rest of us, i.e. those who actually need to make a living, be self-supporting, take care of their health, and not live off credit cards, we should never ever adjunct ever. Here's why:

Adjuncts as Academic Day-Laborers

Say you were a highly trained professional, let's say an MD, and you are offered a job at a hospital, doing the same things the other doctors at the hospital do. However you are going to get paid very little and also very irregularly. Sometimes you will make as much as a busboy at your favorite restaurant, sometimes closer to what illegal day-laborers who hang outside of home improvement stores make. And you'll never know when you have work or when you don't until the last minute. You'll work without a contract, or if you get a contract you'll get it after you've already been working for several weeks. You may think you have a job but then at the last minute they tell you you won't be working for four months because there aren't enough patients. And if there are too many patients, and you ask your boss to hire you full-time, you'll be told that that's not going to happen because they will instead hire another person like you and cover the patient load with multiple underpaid underemployed doctors instead of rewarding your time and devotion with a real job. But don't forget that you have the same responsibilities as the other doctors, and should be producing the same quality of work as the ones who actually have a living wage and job security. AND if you ever want to be one of those doctors, who actually can support themselves doing the same thing you're doing, you have to do all this extra unpaid work on the side conducting medical research that you finance yourself and somehow get published in top journals, while you are eating cat food and your teeth are falling out because you can't afford to go to the dentist. What do you get in exchange? The right to hang around the hospital and pretend you are a real doctor.

Sound like a great gig? Do you know any MD who would sign up for that? Then why would you sign up to be an adjunct instructor??

Assistant to the Assistant Professor

At my institution, let's call it ASU (Adjunct Slavery University) they have come up with something very clever: they actually give us the job title we have worked so hard for.... "Assistant Professor P/T". Aren't they clever? I wonder what overpaid MBA pretending to be a dean came up with that one? The trick is that the title doesn't come with anything other than just, well, the title. We are paid like adjuncts, receive (no) benefits like adjuncts, have no job security like adjuncts, but we get to strut around the halls of ASU and call ourselves Assistant Professors and pretend we aren't getting royally shafted by an exploitative system. We get to tell our friends and loved ones that we are professors while they wonder why we drive cars that were built in the Reagan era and ask for rides to the free clinic when said cars break down and we need to get someone--ANYONE!--to refill our psych meds.

"But Dr. Now-What, I'm Working on My Book and If I Leave Academia I Won't Get Back In!"

This is a pseudo-reason for adjuncting. Emphasis on the PSEUDO. And unfortunately there is some truth to this logic. I was a finalist for a big-deal tenure track job and, though I'd been actively publishing and doing other stuff (I still cared at that point) I found out later that the reason I didn't get it is that I had been working for a year outside of academia. TO PAY MY RENT. Jesus H. Christ. They know their system is broken and that people can't make a living, and yet they penalize you when you take the action of a sane human being and get other employment rather than adjunct. So what should you do if you fit the above description? Unless you fit into the exception (i.e. are independently wealthy) then go find a real job.

HIgher Education is for the Independently Wealthy

My conclusion is that, unless you are one of the lucky few who lands a tenure-track job right out of the PhD, then the only way to stay in academia is if you are independently wealthy and/or supported by a spouse, because if you take other employment some dean somewhere will put the kibosh on your C.V. whenever you get close to a tenure-track job and claim you don't have the fire in the belly needed for tenure (i.e. the willingness to sacrifice your health, sanity, relationships, and future via adjuncting). Thus I conclude that academia is designed for the independently wealthy, intentionally or not because, for the majority of academics, that's the only way to make it past the barriers that stand between the PhD and that first tenure-track job.

Why Academics Like to Talk about Race, but Not Class

This leads me to the topic of a future post: "Why Professors Like to Talk About Race but not Class." I'll give you a sneak-peek of my argument on that one: it's because talking about class would invite a critique of higher education and its firm ensconcement in and active reproduction of the class system in America. Through our vaunted institutions of higher learning, wealthy parents open doors to wealth for their children via a system which requires wealth for full participation. Yep, that's right, our universities--supposedly bastions of social mobility where the American Dream becomes a reality--are actually fortresses built by the 1% to keep the rabble out. More on that later...