Invisible Adjunct

No lectures here. Just sympathy. Been there, felt much like that, it *sucks*.

You are not alone. Script rewrites happen. Good luck with yours. I wish I could rip the script out of your hands and rewrite it for you myself, but I can't.

I've also been there and have felt like you described. It's doubly hard when you have a successful husband, because you want to match up with his image. I will tell you this; contrary to pop psychology (where they tell you that it isn't the lack of a job that's bugging you, it's something deeper) finding a full time job will cure everything! I mean it. So don't spend a lot of effort trying to find the root cause of your fears; the finding of a job will put those to rest, trust me. When you find your full time job, all of this will be a memory. I know it worked that way for me!

IA: I finished my PhD in 1995 and I have never taught full time. (And I love teaching, especially undergraduates.) But I have had very interesting adventures, earn okay, and love what I am doing at the moment. I really panicked in the final year of working on my PhD, thinking that I should go and work in my father-in-law's store for life, but then an unexpected opportunity opened up ....

No lecture, but a cheer: despair not!

Leaving academia isn't a shipwreck or a failure; it's a decision. I like your script-rewriting analogy because it reflects that truth: even though circumstances suck, you are an actor, an agent, not a passive victim of those circumstances. But the fact that academia makes you feel as though leaving is a failure (and, by extension, so are you)... well, that's a problem with the system for sure, and it makes me wish I knew better how to fix the system.

As someone who is today also "having a day" you have my complete sympathy. {{{IA}}}

Of course, I must also express my admiration of your having expressed your frustrations so eloquently. That has to be worth something! :)

(By the way, all -- I apologize for the permalink problem -- I'm still trying to figure out blogger coding).

It's probably not you, Rana. "Permalinks bloggered" has become a cliche.

I offer sympathy, hugs, and perspective. I've been there. I've done that. The t-shirt has been burned. The evil attitudes that pervade the system have been there for a very long time; my father, now 74 and retired, ran into them in the early 60's, as did I almost exactly 20 years later. Contrary to the myths you find in the ivory tower, leaving it makes one neither a traitor nor a failure.

You are yourself, not whatever anyone else says you are or are not. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. I left grad school; I remain an historian. I left teaching; I remain a scholar. I am married with a small son; I remain a person in my own right.

So rewrite the script, to your expectations rather than your family's. Be proud of yourself, for having the strength to walk away. I've known a lot of people who didn't, no matter how self-destructive it was.

Hugs and luck
{{{{{{{{{IA}}}}}}}}}

Thanks, everyone, for these words of encouragement. I really appreciate it.

I have a related but very different perspective. I have always been of a scholarly bent, but at various points (1968, 1981, and 1990) decided not to go to grad school. I have kept up my studies on my own time and have published three pieces in refereed journals and am working on a fourth.

I just retired with a small pension and plan to continue my studies. I have decided for a fourth time not to go to grad school. No surprise there.

The main lessons I draw are: the humanities are not valued much; the tenured professors are the ruling class and I, along with the adjuncts, am some kind of peasant or lowlife; and that the professionalization of the humanities had a big down side.

In order to justify their jobs the existing tenured profs had to keep cranking out PhD's, who theoretically would replace them except that by that standard each tenured prof. should sign no more than 1 Phd. in his lifetime. (Not all tenured profs teach graduate students, so the number is larger, but not a lot). The existence of these programs misled people into thinking that there were jobs.

Of course, the whole confusion of purpose of today's university enters in: keeping culture alive, or job-training?

The fact that PhD's as such are scarcely hirable, even as high school teachers (even though everyone is whining about the quality of H.S. ed) is another example of how the humanities are held in contempt. As an English major (not a high-powered B.A.) I learned to recognize the Ed. majors by their relentlessly practical approach ("Three books at $75, two five-page papers and a test, 3 credits, compared to 4 books at $100, two ten-page papers, two tests -- easy choice"). But they would have jobs.

Specialization causes more trouble. A PhD normally only knows about a very narrow area. The really bitter thing is that a lot of the PhD's I know ended up studying things they weren't especially interested in to prepare for jobs that didn't exist. The main reason why I didn't go to grad school was what I saw of the methodological and disciplinary narrowing of scholarship imposed by the departments. (For me, BTW, post-modernism, which seemed liberating once, is just another im;posed paradigm, and a very annoying one).

With my tiny pension, at this point, I would actually be happy to be a grad student in a school which gave me a good grant and free rein. Doubt I'll see that. I'd also be happy to be an adjunct, PhD or no. I do know something, I like to teach, and I'll work for peanuts. Doubt that will happen either, and if it does I suppose you'll all hate me.

Why would we hate you? My complaints center around not being able to do the job I was trained to do, not about other people succeeding at doing what they want, and I think that's true for most of the folks posting here. I like your comments about choosing one's own identity, though, rather than waiting for an institution to do it for you.

This reminds me of an ongoing conversation a friend and I had when we were both ABD. We sometimes shopped for groceries together, and she would often remark that, if our academic careers didn't work out, we could always get a job at Kroger, the local supermarket chain. She would be cashier, I would be bagboy. We wondered if Kroger would hire us. Probably not, we figured: 'overeducated.' We imagined how we'd plead with them to reconsider. How we'd spend the rest of our lives working for Kroger, cashier and bagboy.

Two years later, my friend got a tenure track job at Stanford. But we had the same conversation, with the same anxiety, just the other week. Four years into the tenure track and doing outwardly well, she's still half-convinced of her Kroger-calling.

I don't have a point. Your vignette merely triggered this memory from eight years ago. In those dark years, my friend and I convinced each other that we could be happy working at Kroger, and that gave us hope.

Checking back to witness the wails of weeping inspired by my poignant comment, I note that I do not know how to add two and four. The memory was from six years ago.

Rana -- well, suppose you were applying for a not-so-good adjunct job and found that you couldn't even get that because a non-PhD autodidact had been hired instead. There might be hard feeling.

My pension is tiny and I do need some other income. What people say about "over-education" is true, I think. Educated people argue too much and there's always the suspicion that they have other options, whether they do or not. On one of my resumes I don't even mention my B.A. degree. I'm also dealing with age discrimination and a very weak economy here in Oregon. (Age discrimination lawsuits make it harder for old people to get jobs. If you don't hire us we can't sue.)

Maybe. I like to think that I'd blame the system, not you. I'm not begrudging any one else's success -- heck, I'm trying to join them! If I was mad at all of my competition, I'd have to devote my life to being mad -- calculate 50-150 people per position per year and it adds up. So person A gets it instead of person B. It's not as if person A had any control over whether or not the committe liked him or her better than person B. Presumably both meet the qualifications for the job. So why should person B get mad at person A?

Also, by your logic, there should be some people out there wanting full-time tenure-track jobs who are mad at me for making do with a temporary, part-time job that is never going to turn into a tenure-line position. Am I personally keeping someone from tenure? No. Is the system? Yes. So that's where I'm directing my animosity, not at individuals.

IA: That was a very meaningful post. I like your idea about changing "scripts" and think you will enjoy yourself a lot more once you have shifted your life to a different one. When I made my move ("Out of Academia" by Isak Dinesin), I thought all the time about replacing a future without any hope with one with hope. It's the same idea, I believe, despite the different wording.

Great post. I can relate on a few levels...
Not having been in academia, but around it for a while now, it seems to me that this feeling of being constantly judged can really do a number on your psyche. I know that sounds silly, but you don't always notice it. You think, I'm strong, I know who I am and this isn't everything, but it gets to you insidiously.
And I know we get judged by mates and friends and the job market too, but having worked a decade of dead end jobs, the feeling is strongest in school. There's something kinda paranoid about academia (speaking as someone who would like to go to grad school) I just went back and got the degree, at 30, trying to turn things around. And having some of the same gnawing doubts.
I try to think of what will matter forty years from now...and I don't think even getting a PhD in an arcane discipline (economics) is going to be the biggest thing that makes me happy.