Invisible Adjunct

I think you can back up and undercut at least one step of the market argument. Public education is a public good because there's a fair amount of evidence that the market underprovides it¹. So if you can work up a good argument that there currently isn't enough history being taught *below* the grad. school level, then the problem is that the market is too small, and won't fix itself. It's then an open question how many history profs (or historians - which do you fundamentally want to be?) are needed.

And, really, there should be some good historical examples of historical ignorance being dangerous. Alas, it might be dangerous to the competitors of your enemies, in which case they aren't likely to change their minds.

¹ People who won't believe in externalities are, um, left as an exercise for the reader.

Actually, I'm amazed that a mainstream publication like USA Today is featuring this sort of story. It's about time the public becomes aware of what is happening.
However, I do agree with the author on one point: people are stubborn and will not listen to reality. It doesn't matter how many warnings they get about going a certain career route. They think that a) they are different, better than the rest and will beat the odds, or b) the entire monolithic university system will change to meet their expectations (i.e. create more jobs). And if that system doesn't change, it then becomes just the system's fault and no one else's. I'm not sure how the author could have put this any other way to make their point.
Yes, graduate departments need to warn students and/or limit their admission numbers. However, if these policies were aggressively enacted, do you think the potential graduate students would see the reasons behind such efforts? No way! They would interpret the warnings or cap on admissions as coming from a bunch of jealous, paranoid, full-timers who are trying to keep out the "really talented and deserving people." I know that comparing academe to the entertainment industry is sort of silly, but in a way it fits. Hollywood is also full of bitter, underemployed actors who were most likely warned by relatives and friends against their career move from the get-go. Now they see the industry as full of elitists who seem to have a vendetta against "talent." Okay, the system is elitist. Are we really willing to change it? You know good and well as soon as an adjunct makes it into the system they will drop all radical talk and take their new full-time job with gratitude. Happens all the time.

"These men and women have chosen to spend years training for jobs that don't exist by accruing knowledge no one will pay for."

OK, I find this just downright offensive. PhD programs aren't just about "accruing knowledge." They are about gaining a skill set that includes research abilities beyond the undergrad solution of just typing something into google. Doctoral candidates have to master the art of thinking about disparate pieces of data (or sources, in the history world) and bringing them together creatively in order to communicate their ideas to people.

Next, "training for jobs that don't exist." Plenty of jobs DO exist...they just might be outside the field of academia. Recently I've decided that if worse comes to worse, I can always teach high school. Secondary education suffers from a shortage of qualified teachers, remember.

And last, the whole idea that no one "will pay for" our knowledge. Aside from the consumerist ideas inherent in that statement (that IA has had many opportunities to tackle), I'd like to remind Laura Vanderkam that most professors are never paid for having gaining some esoteric knowledge set and shutting themselves in their offices, never to be seen again. They are paid, rather, to use their respective fields to teach students to think critically, write well, and communicate effectively.

Geez. And I woke up this morning feeling good about my career path.

R.

"I can assure that I am now well familiar with "reality," and I am willing to plead "guilty as charged" -- and without even mentioning the fact that you talk of "the system" while blaming the individual -- if you will just promise to stop lecturing at me."

A-Men.

It never ceases to amaze me what deep pleasure many people seem to get from shaking their finger at other people. Just ignore the bastards, and make the choices that are right for you.

"In graduate school, they experience the rare privilege of devoting themselves fully to learning what they love."

More often than not, this "love" rhetoric is a basis for abusing teachers, among many other kinds of "useful fools" (nurses, police officers, firefighters, and so on). Humanists cannot use "love" to describe feelings for their family or their country without raising suspicion, but somehow we are required to rhapsodize about how much we "love" our work. It doesn't take a theorist to see whose interest this serves. I'm beginning to think everyone in the academy should swear an oath never to use the word "love" to describe our feelings about the hard "work" we do.

A few comments.

IA: “They think that a) they are different, better than the rest and will beat the odds, or b) the entire monolithic university system will change to meet their expectations (i.e. create more jobs).”

I recognize the value of the statistics indicating otherwise but no one would ever live up to any expectation if they just quit based on the fact that the odds were slim to nothing. If we all just sat down because all the “data” said few would succeed, no one would ever have the satisfaction of at least pursuing their dream. And no would ever achieve it.

IA: “Yes, graduate departments need to warn students and/or limit their admission numbers. However, if these policies were aggressively enacted, do you think the potential graduate students would see the reasons behind such efforts? No way! They would interpret the warnings or cap on admissions as coming from a bunch of jealous, paranoid, full-timers who are trying to keep out the ‘really talented and deserving people.’"

I have very recently been on the receiving end of rejection letters from graduate departments that DID cite the need to cut their enrollees based on the depression of the market so it most certainly is aggressively enacted in some areas and I most certainly did recognize the validity of the statement and didn’t chalk it up to them not recognizing my supposed priceless advantages.

Also, I’d like to address that ridiculous “bus-driver” analogy by Vanderkam:

“The year after Ellen Paul earned her Ph.D. in European history from the University of Kansas, she drove a school bus to make ends meet.”

I’d like to think that if I am lucky enough to do what I want to do for a few years ONLY that afterwards I could get a job doing something besides driving a bus. It’s not as if I have no other skills and I find it hard to believe that someone who went through graduate school had no gumption to do anything else. I’d like to know the facts behind Ellen Paul’s fall to bus-driver status. Perhaps she decided to stay home with her kids and drive the bus. Who knows? It was a convenient and effective opening to an informative article but the value was only just that: shock.

If I emerge with nothing, at least I’ll know I tried and not spend the rest of my life wondering. And at that point, I could always go back to the meaningless legal assistant job that I now have which pays the bills and buys me a vacation several times a year. If that’s all I wanted, I’d still be there now. (Well, I am but I’m out soon.)

Finally, to address the idea that secondary school education is a worthwhile alternative: only for those who truly feel called to it. I don’t see it as an equivalent and it should not be offered up as one. I’m not interested in anything lower than university level. I don’t like kids as a general rule and suspect that teenagers would be a major pain in the ass for a perfectionist freak such as myself. I definitely don’t want to deal with parents. In addition, secondary education varies greatly region to region. My region is riddled with problems and if I had the ability or the gumption to take it on, I’d be a powerful CEO rather than an aspiring English professor.

-- MP

Michelle,
You seem to attributing Cat's comments to me.

If graduate English departments are cutting back on new entrants, this is all the good and long overdue.

"thinking about disparate pieces of data"

desperate pieces of data, thinking about nothing

Michelle -- of all people, gamblers are the ones who have to think about odds. I'm in favor of taking chances, but there are good bets and bad ones. And if you gamble on a long chance, you should have a backup plan.

Limiting admissions is fine, but a lot of grad departments should just close down. A friend of mine has a PhD in anthropology from the U. of Oregon. UO ranks 45th among grad anthro departments (based on faculty quality). And yeah, this guy is driving a bus, and he regrets having gone to grad school.

Zizka, I'm not a gambler. Not sure what back-up plan you were referring to - am exercising in my current grad school back-up plan. If you were talking about life in general as a life back-up plan, I think mentioned I have skills which current earn me an income. (Otherwise I would never have been on this endeavor.) I'm not sure what your point is.

IA -- I didnt' read Cat's post.

Sorry, I was mistaken. I did read Cat's comments. Still, some of the direct comments were unaddressed.

Separately, why did you not know that some of the English Depts. are cutting back? You seem so well-informed.

I'm really sorry -- I should have known better than to attempt to post at that time. I am so sorry. After dinner is a crazy time around here and I got off somehow on the page while reading and I apologize to both IA and Cat.

Michelle -- No biggie (not to me, at any rate). I'm not well-informed, just looking for explanations. I don't know much about English lit., my field in history.

I think Zizka is right: there are good bets and bad ones. And yes, some grad programs should shut down altogether.

"Actually, I'm amazed that a mainstream publication like USA Today is featuring this sort of story. It's about time the public becomes aware of what is happening."

Note that the tone of the article is to blame the grad students.

"Yes, graduate departments need to warn students and/or limit their admission numbers. However, if these policies were aggressively enacted, do you think the potential graduate students would see the reasons behind such efforts? No way! They would interpret the warnings or cap on admissions as coming from a bunch of jealous, paranoid, full-timers who are trying to keep out the "really talented and deserving people.""

Some would, some wouldn't.

Instead, what we have is BS like that study of job in the history field mentioned on this blog (or linked; can't remember which). The study compared the number of 'positions' each year with the number of graduating Ph.D.'s each year, to show a rough equality. They counted all positions as 'a position'; including part-time and one-year positions. The publication in which the study appeared refused to print that critique, which leads me to believe they are practicing deliberate fraud.

-Posted by Cat at May 20, 2003 07:12 PM

Michelle: I was responding to this, which is recommending a bad gamble:

"I recognize the value of the statistics indicating otherwise but no one would ever live up to any expectation if they just quit based on the fact that the odds were slim to nothing. If we all just sat down because all the “data” said few would succeed, no one would ever have the satisfaction of at least pursuing their dream. And no would ever achieve it."

What I said about backup plans was not addressed to you personally, but was a general statement.

There's a lot of class weirdness in the air. Bus drivers get paid about as well as legal assistants, at least around here, so I don't know why the bus driver story is ridiculous.

My solution was to continue my studies in a non-professional context while working various jobs more or less equivalent to legal assistant. But this is a big cultural dilemma, not just a collection of unfortunate personal situations, since it seems that the next generation of humanistic scholars is going to be weakened.

A lot of this is established people bullying new people. Part of it is a general contempt for the humanities.

"There's a lot of class weirdness in the air. Bus drivers get paid about as well as legal assistants, at least around here, so I don't know why the bus driver story is ridiculous."

Yup. Wondering about that myself. You should have heard the to-do in Madison a couple years back when it turned out the highest-paid city employee for the year was a bus driver who worked unbelievable overtime.

Were they worried about the safety of working that many hours? Nah. It was the mere *idea* that a bus driver should make serious money.

Hell, as a carless bus-dependent person I thought it was great, myself...

A couple of comments:

1) About assigning blame, I think both the grad students and their departments are to blame for the grad students' predicament. But at least the grad students are hurting themselves while the departments are hurting other people. I draw a sharp moral distinction between those types of actions.

(I don't want to rant so don't get me started on those periodic "studies" that come out projecting huge shortages of university teachers a decade in the future. RICO anyone?)

2) Is the conflation fellowships encourage is actively harmful? Fellowships combine a job (teaching or grading) and an educational program (studies, writing dissertations). If the two components were separated, the decision for many grad school applicants might be clarified. Just an idea.

3) Clew's "market failure" argument is a laugher: you have to be way more rigorous to show something like that is occurring and even then it is debatable. As it stands, it is a self-serving argument for gov't subsidies.

Honestly, I don't see how it's the fault of graduate departments if they let people in who then have to compete for few jobs. It's not like this information hasn't been widely available for 25 years or more. George Will and Thomas Sowell, among others, have been writing about this for years, for example. It's hardly like USA Today is making a shameful secret well known.

Frankly, there are a lot of people in PhD programs who haven't given much thought to their future careers. Many are content to hang on for years and years until their assistantships run out. A sizable chunk of them are hiding out from reality in the only environment in which they feel safe.

I do think the "I'll beat the odds" factor is a key part of the explanation for why so many take this gamble. It applied to me, certainly. Eventually, I managed to beat the odds with a tenure-track job, albeit at a rather crappy school. The crappiness eventually got the best of me and I'm now doing something else--not driving a bus--for more money.

Quite a few journalists have PhD's (Eric Alterman, Josh Micah Marshall, some local people in Portland). I think that a PhD. can sometimes be used to shoehorn oneself into some other line of work.

At some point we get into the libertarian questions of whether the parties of a contract have the obligation to to fully inform each other of information that they should be able to get for themselves, etc. But signing up for a PhD. program seemingly should be a bit more communitarian than buying a used car.

An additional problem is the fact that many depts. are dependent on cheap PhD candidate labor. A relative of mine believes that she was kept on as a T.A. PhD candidate for a year or more after they had decided that she wouldn't get her degree at all.

Maybe Brad DeLong will kindly explain the value of education provided by public monies.

Personally, I think historians defending the provision of history could come up with something more grandly narrative and 18th-century. Unless that would damage both your surface integrity as non-popularizers and your actual integrity as people who "appreciate the seriousness of the challenges to the tradition which they seek to defend"?

(which last phrase I really like.)

I’m making a big effort to be extra-special careful. tip-toe tip-toe…

Zizka – re: bus drivers being paid as well as legal assistants, my only beef with that (aside from the obvious slant that legal assistants and bus drivers are equivalent and that you and I live in that same space which apparently we do not) is that the originating article said she was a SCHOOL bus driver:

“System wastes Ph.D. brainpower
By Laura Vanderkam
The year after Ellen Paul earned her Ph.D. in European history from the University of Kansas, she drove a school bus to make ends meet.”

Driving a school bus is different from, I think, what you were talking about – driving a city bus and therefore not comparable to being a legal secretary (which is bad enough without being compared to a bus driver.)

I guess if EVERYthing were about money…

“A lot of this is established people bullying new people. Part of it is a general contempt for the humanities.”

Would you care to expound on that “bullying” comment? I’m not sure I understood that.

PS apologize to IA for taking up her space. Feel free to email me w/your comments, Zizka.

No need to apologize, Michelle. I welcome comments and discussion.

I have to agree about the "class weirdness" here. It's tricky, because to say that someone with a PhD shouldn't be driving a school bus is to lend support to a snobbish class hierarchy. And yet I do want to say that it makes no sense to spend 5-7 years in pursuit of a specialized degree in order to end up as a school bus driver.

I see no reason to assume this woman lacks "gumption." Is she doing it to support children? That's possible, but not likely. Relatively few women have children while in graduate school: a graduate stipend can barely support one person, let alone two or three, and in any case, having a child signals "lack of seriousness" to many faculty mentors, who would then withdraw other, less material, kinds of support. Of those few women who have children in grad school, most are married with income-earning spouses. This is a generalization, there are obviously exceptions.

It could be that this woman is trying to figure out an alternative career path, but in the meantime, has to pay rent and buy food and keep body and soul together.

This is an all-too-common scenario. If you are seriously considering a graduate degree in English, I would caution you -- no, I would strongly urge you -- to read up on the fate of English PhDs. There's a lot of material out there, though you won't find it on departmental web sites. It's not a pretty picture. You may decide to take the risk regardless, but please don't go into this without being aware that the odds are now stacked against you.

IA, thanks for your comments. I researched graduate schools for about a year before applying and am well-informed on the fate of English Ph.Ds (including a telephone conversation with a prof that sent me links to articles and said he never took anyone in that didn’t comprehend the climate.) I ultimately decided to move forward anyhow. Now that we have that out of the way…

I cannot address the academy's position towards mothers since I am just entering this arena, but I corresponded with numerous graduate students while researching and asked questions about the meshing of the two roles (as I am a mother). One woman advised that she left a program and transferred to her current U because of her dissertation advisor's dissatisfaction when she became pregnant, but she was quite well-received there, baby and all. Down side: she had to transfer. Up side: she found out early on what a jackass someone could be and relocated to a program more suitable.

Perhaps it is only because I am married with children that I assumed the Bus Driver was driving the School Bus just to help out her district/children. But as to your comments about social hierarchy, back to the original article. It opens with the line that she drove a school bus to make ends meet which reinforces your thought that maybe she was doing it to “pay rent and buy food” (not necessarily, however, to “keep body and soul together”; we really don’t know anything about her, do we?) The point of saying that she was a Bus Driver was simply to drive home the notion that she spent 5-7 years working toward the doctorate and was now driving a bus, and the implication is she’d rather not be. It was a good hook line and the reason is because of the social hierarchy inherent in that opening line.

As to the “gumption” comment I made earlier, I’ll stand by that. If she’d rather not be driving a bus, she should find something else to do and anyone that gets through graduate school (from what I’ve heard anyhow) should be capable of that and if they don’t, they lack gumption (unless perhaps they’re soul-searching as you suggested). Obviously, the reason this strikes a nerve for me is because the article suggests that there is no other recourse and failed Ph.Ds are doomed by the system to a life of bus-driving. My original comment was simply that if I fail, I can always go back to being a legal secretary.

Or apparently a bus driver.

Ah, Michelle, it's so wonderful to be naive, to be able to make declarations about what other people should do, to say that you'll have no qualms about going back (your words) to being a legal secretary. My undergraduates are proud and noble like this too; they look upon us as failures, not knowing the struggles we survived, and what they with all their "gumption" will one day face.

To clarify (and then I'm done with this, I swear):

You're probably right re: my naivete. I've seen no one here that I classify a failure, though and apologize if ANYthing I said even remotely indicated that or if I sounded heavy-handed about what people "should do". I have no professors that I look upon as failures and would not want to project that. Also, I hope never to return to legal secretarial work and probably would not - it was simply a statement set forth to demonstrate my practical means.

I think what folks are saying is that while we don't want to make people feel like they are any less of a human being for driving a bus (or working at any other job that has traditionally required less training), that doesn't belie the fact that such an existence, tends to, for a lack of a more gentile way of putting it, suck.
I remember my grad school days when it was cool to brag about how far you could stretch a buck to make ends meet or exchanging cool ramen noodle recipies, but that was when I was in my mid 20's. Life is fun and funny when you are in your mid-20's and a grad student. Poverty is oh-so bohemian! However, ramen noodles and stretching a buck loses its "charm" so to speak, once you hit your 30's and you see no end in sight to this existence (especially when all of your former grad school friends are buying their first homes). As someone who has experienced her "ramen years" and who now has a house, I'll take having the house any day. And that doesn't mean I think less of those who are still struggling. It just means I will do everything I can to stay away from that sort of situation. In other words, there is nothing wrong with wanting what the majority of the middle class (and some of the working class) have: a home, some $$ in the bank, and a decent job. You aren't betraying anyone by wanting a "normal" life.