Invisible Adjunct

I couldn't have done it without my mother and Jesus.

But don't we want our economist to be qualified? An adjunct in humanities is a much closer beast to a Humanities professor than an outside-academia-"economist" is to a real economist.

erp

Come on, economics is everything and everything is economics. An economist can analyze anything, not
needing to know anything about it.

The best comparison to the academic system might be the entertainment industry. Not just the actors waiting tables for a decade, but the vast number of writers and production people. They pour in every year in large numbers, looking for glamour jobs, creativity, etc. Then they get used as fresh meat, worked, abused discarded.

That's the future (and the present, and the past for 30 years) of academia in the humanities and social sciences. There will always be more new Ph.D.'s than the academic system needs even if the tenure system holds up, and even if most Ph.D. programs shut down.

Hooray for cynicism! I couldn't agree more with Barry. I see no shakedown. I see no Phoenix (U) rising. I see the continuing grind of the system as it stands now and individuals within that system either doing well or doing badly.

I've had a chance over the last few weeks to talk to some of those coming into a Ph.D. program. They know full well that most people do not get jobs in academia, and those who do are rarely in the tenure-track, and those who do manage to gain a tenure-track job tend to be at smaller teaching institutions. They know that *any* job they get will pay significantly less than they would earn outside of the academy. But, they say, fairly predictably, "I'm not most people." Many people who get doctorates are driven, intelligent people, but they also tend to have inflated egos (present company excepted, I suppose).

One of the several majors I had as an undergraduate was acting. During our sophomore year, in a program that was easily top 10 or top 5 in the US for acting, it was made very clear that the chances that a single graduate in a year could make a living wage as an actor were vanishingly small. And the scales fell from our eyes and we all became accounting majors--not!

I think incremental changes can happen that ameliorate the situation somewhat. But I certainly do not see a crisis. That may just because I am not in the humanities, but I doubt it.

Barry: So, in other words, the future of scholarship and research is not likely to be a decline, but the likelihood that those who are doing the majority of that work are less likely to make a living from it? Did I get this right?

Alex: It seems to me that it's a bit less damaging to spend four years "screwing up" before you're 22 (which is at least partly expected) than to spend 5-9 years doing so during the time when most of your cohort is getting on with their lives. (Not that some people don't ask for this, but it's not just the students who reinforce this attitude -- in my case, I was the one with the doubts (among a broad collection) and it was my advisors and classmates who assumed -- and told me, after I survived the first year -- that I would be one of the ones who was going to beat the odds. Surprise!)

One of the reasons I'm so wary of the system is that one of the disappointed PhD's I know of did fantastic work in a very difficult field --his PhD dissertation, plus 3-5 very dense, ambitious articles which were new stuff not derived from the dissertation. Yet in 25 years or so he's only been employed for maybe 3 (he now works for Microsoft as a techie).

I thought of the comparison with film or with sports too, but one difference is that in sports at least, if someone doesn't make it you can have a pretty good idea that they weren't quite good enough. In the case I'm thinking of you can't say that.

The guy I was speaking of might have a difficult personality, which would explain a few things. But then, so do I.

Alex,
What is the reason/purpose/rationale for training people for nonexistent positions?

Rana - I expect some decline, as the system makes scholarship harder. But I expect that the system will continue to be very well fed with entrants. Both because of institutional factors keeping that up, and people wanting to enter the system (largely in delusion).

And with increasing intellectual property awareness on the part of universities and corporations, I wouldn't be surprised if this hit most of academia in the next couple of decades. The physicists, biologists, chemists, engineers and software people might be laughing at the humanities and social sciences now. But that will stop when it becomes normal for universities to treat discoveries of professors the same way that corporations do now - as property of the institution, not the individual.

Here's me in bullet-pointed devil's advocate mode:

* A job's paid what it's worth to its clients. Adjuncts are, by definition, not underpaid. As long as there are those willing to pick up a class for $1,500, the market will set the price there. Why do we need more complex economics than that?

* The Ph.D. isn't "training," it is (or aspires to be) education. I really don't think the Ph.D. gives you marketable skills. You can get a Ph.D. without ever learning to teach or how to write, or indeed how to research. It does, however, often put you in an environment where such skills are valued and available.

* Given all of this, I say caveat emptor. People who get graduate degrees are assumed to be smart: you don't think they knew the chances going in? I certainly did, as did those who went to school with me. Among my cohort, some better students got worse jobs and worse students got better. It's a combination of sweat and tears and a roll of the dice.

Don't get me wrong: I sympathise; especially when adjuncts get jerked around. Our adjuncts, now unionized, have at least a minimal amount of protection against this. But as long as there are others who are willing and able to take up your position and who administrations are willing to hire, the price is what it is.

Is it unfair? Probably. Is it less fair than any market driven employment market. Heck, no.

"Adjuncts are, by definition, not underpaid."

By what, or according to whose, definition? And how far would you extend this logic? Will you argue that sweatshop workers earning a dollar a day are not underpaid because there are workers desperate enough to work for those wages?

Anyway, I don't think the academic job system works like a free market. Call it a closed shop union, call it a labor monopoly, but it's not an open market. An open market would require the abolition of the guildlike institution of tenure.

To me the big issue is two-tier hiring, in which more and more of the actual work is done by low-paid, benefitless proles who, furthermore, will never, ever, get tenure. Furthermore, in other cases of two-tier hiring, the top tier is eventually abolished entirely by attrition. That won't quite happen, but the long-term effect will be to reduce more and more faculty to junior-college contract-teacher status.

Questions of fairness to individuals aside, there is a problem with regard to the long-term future of the profession. Perhaps the humanities just overexpanded and will, over a decade or two, contract down to a size where there are fewer graduate schools, fewer research universities, and more teaching universities mixing undergraduate college with various sorts of career training. All this, again, amounts to a movement in the junior college direction for most.

A widespread lack of respect for the liberal arts / humanities is part of what we're facing. Not only the obvious right-wingers, but most "practical" people have some degree of contempt for or indifference to the humanities. All this makes a political solution unlikely.

Alex leaves out most of those points, but what he does say is more or less right on its own terms. The one thing I would quibble with is:

"The Ph.D. isn't 'training', it is (or aspires to be) education".

That sounds high-minded and noble, I guess, but it's bullshit. If people didn't hope to get jobs from their PhD's, PhD programs would dwindle to insignificance. How many people would live on ramen for years and go deeply into debt knowing with absolute certainty that it "wasn't training" and didn't lead to any job at all? For individuals, the PhD is a bad gamble, jobwise, but most think that it will lead to something.

From the point of view of people in the system right now, I'd have to be pessimistic. The only way the situation will improve is if a lot of adjuncts get out of the system and fewer new people enter in the future. Even then, it would take a decade or more for there to be improvement. And of course, that's no solution at all for people now already in.

My own experience and research tell me that this problem, while getting worse, is new only to the entering crop. (The book "The PhD Trap" is 15+ years old.) Wising up the next generation should be the goal, but it will be hard -- the "PhD Trap" author had to self-publish because almost all legit publishers have university connections.

Excuse me for shouting.

NO, ALEX, MOST PEOPLE GOING INTO GRADUATE SCHOOL WITH INTENT TO OBTAIN A PH.D DO *NOT* KNOW WHAT THE JOB PROSPECTS ARE AFTERWARD.

For Pete's sake, the *professors themselves* don't know, as Bousquet demonstrated with regard to the Bowen study. How are gullible 22-year-olds supposed to know?

Isn't the two-tier problem in principle separate from the salary problem? And shouldn't the latter problem be easier to address?

When I adjuncted (1998, Eastern Michigan University), it was for $2,000 per course (with, naturally, no benefits). My current employer, however, pays the occasional adjunct that it hires roughly $7,000 per course (I'm not sure about benefits). Okay, that's a wealthy private college. But my impression is that some public universities pay adjuncts $7,000 as well.

$7,000 per course is more than incoming assistant professors are paid at state schools with a 4-4 load. Whereas $2,000 per course is roughly minimum wage. (I remember cuttting some time-consuming corners with the thought, "I refuse to let my salary fall below minimum wage!")

Shouldn't organizing and bargaining for better pay (and benefits!) be the first priority? It's still a bad thing for the academy that there are these two tiers, only one of which brings any real career stability. But that would address the most egregious problem.

(I think the Eastern Michigan adjuncts unionized and went on strike the year after I left, but I don't know the results.)

Yes, Eastern Michigan adjuncts did unionize, as you can read here. And here's a list of schools where adjuncts have joined the UAW.  (I know I'm rediscovering the wheel.  Still, I thought the links might be useful to somebody.)

Anyone: Has unionizing done much good?

> NO, ALEX, MOST PEOPLE GOING INTO GRADUATE
> SCHOOL WITH INTENT TO OBTAIN A PH.D DO
> *NOT* KNOW WHAT THE JOB PROSPECTS ARE
> AFTERWARD.

I guess I can only say that among those who went to school with me, there were few who were oblivious to the market for tenure-track jobs. (I may not have my finger on the pulse of grad students in general, though.) Students at the institutions I attended may not have known what the job prospects were coming in for the MA, but by the time they went on to the Ph.D. they had a pretty good handle on it.

The same is true of the program in which I teach. We place most of our Ph.D. students in tenure-track or research jobs, though certainly not all of them. Among our current students, there is a pretty good understanding of the job market, and the steps necessary to compete.

I guess one of the reasons for this is that in order to get a job you really have to be thinking about it from the day you enter your program. I realize this may be different for some of the humanities, where scholarly communication is measured in larger chunks, but in the social sciences, you are often painfully aware of what competitive candidates look like, and what kind of success they are having in seeking out jobs. You know that someone with less than 2-3 publications will never get an on-campus interview, and so you work toward publishing. You see the candidates come through for job talks and realize how some of the most trivial things end up hurting their chances. You know because you know you have to know.

In other words: if you don't know how tough the market is when you apply for the Ph.D., you certainly do within the first semester or so. If you *don't* know how competitive the market is during your first semester, it is unlikely that you will be preparing yourself to be competitive.

> That sounds high-minded and noble, I guess,
> but it's bullshit. If people didn't hope to
> get jobs from their PhD's, PhD programs would
> dwindle to insignificance.

You are stating the case in pretty extreme terms. For those of you who took a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature or (gasp!) History: do you mean to tell me that you were unaware that asst. profs in your field make less than K-Mart management trainees? Or that a biochem Ph.D. might be more marketable.

Even if you somehow were blinded to the fact that few grads get a tenure-track job in a top university in the city of their choice--even if you thought that such a job was a "sure thing"--you had to know that you weren't going to live a lavish lifestyle by attaining such a position.

Getting a Ph.D. is not a viable economic decision. We do it because we like it. We might also do it because we think that it is a good way to make the world a better place. I simply cannot believe that people go after Ph.D.s--especially in the humanities--because they think it will get them a high-paying job.

Yes, we need to pay the bills: we are monks, not saints. But we also know that there are other, more lucrative ways of spending our time.

While we are blaming the system and the professoriate for this ideology that suggests a successful dissertation leads automagically to a tenure-track job, what part of the blame do we reserve for the student naive enough not to research the market before taking the plunge into a Ph.D. program?

Alex, the system as it exists could not function at all if a lot of people weren't suckers. There's a structural deception in the system.

Now, from an economist's market analysis, the sucker has it coming to him. One of the functions of the market is to punish bad choices. Fair enough.

But this wreaks havoc with the idealistic, communitarian images of the university, which not coincidentally are part of the bait drawing the suckers into the trap. At a certain point a lot of unlucky PhD's come to realize that you can't trust used car salesmen when they run universities, even if they talk about Socrates and the life of the mind.

As I've said, thinking of the university in market terms is pretty tricky, since the buyer, seller, funder, and product are all pretty confusedly and poorly defined. Except in junior colleges, there's little quid pro quo, but rather these complex ovelapping systems.

From what you have said it seems that the system has worked for you, and that your benign / cynical view is colored by that. Just as the unhappy adjuncts' views are colored by their experience, of course.

Alex: A few responses, since your comments touch on a number of things that have affected me personally (I will try to be polite while IA is away):

For those of you who took a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature or (gasp!) History: do you mean to tell me that you were unaware that asst. profs in your field make less than K-Mart management trainees? Yes, I was. I knew they made less than your average CEO or sales professional, but not this. All my experiences with my professors -- young and old, tenured and untenured -- suggested that you would be able to have a house, a decent if not stunning car, a family, and be able to travel. That is not a "lavish" lifestyle, and I knew that, but I assumed that I'd at least have health care and not have to worry about paying the rent on a one-bedroom apartment, ya know?

Getting a Ph.D. is not a viable economic decision. We do it because we like it. We might also do it because we think that it is a good way to make the world a better place. I simply cannot believe that people go after Ph.D.s--especially in the humanities--because they think it will get them a high-paying job. It might not be "viable" but it is an economic decision. I believed that with a BA in history the only way to do anything professional with it was to get a doctorate. How is that not an economic decision, albeit perhaps a bad one?

in the social sciences, you are often painfully aware of what competitive candidates look like, and what kind of success they are having in seeking out jobs. You know that someone with less than 2-3 publications will never get an on-campus interview, and so you work toward publishing. You see the candidates come through for job talks and realize how some of the most trivial things end up hurting their chances. You know because you know you have to know. Actually, how many people do realize these things? I only began to learn them when I became faculty and was therefore allowed to look at the candidates' c.v.s and be privy to the discussions of why they failed. This comment also doesn't address the two-fold problem of (1) the majority of grad students continue to believe that they will be the exception, especially if they play by the rules, unlike that dope who wore the bad tie. (2) Even if they play by the rules they may still not get a position -- yes, we can see the 3-4 candidates who come to the interview and judge them -- but no graduate students, I believe, are allowed to look at the 100+ files rejected for those positions, which, I would argue, contain a number of candidates who are at least as impressive on paper.

"An open market would require the abolition of the guildlike institution of tenure."

Bingo. Just as an open market in taxicabs in NYC would require the abolition of the "medallion" system. This won't happen because the current holders of medallions (allowing them to run taxis) argue that opening the market would "dilute the value" of their medallions (the same argument, mutatis mutandis and obviously with less evil attached, that slaveholders used to argue against abolition). Distorted markets are bad markets, and the "market" in academics is so distorted by any number of factors it can be talked about only with endless cautions and riders.

Which Alex is not doing. I too will try to play nice while the Adjunct's away, but Alex, guy, you sound about one step away from Montgomery Burns rubbing his hands together and hissing "Excellent!" Ah, those naive students, hoping to do something worthwhile with their minds, get jobs in academia, and pay the rent, all at the same time! If it doesn't work out for them, it's their own damn fault because they should have done the economic research in advance. Doesn't it occur to you that if they thought in those terms, if they were the sort who sat down with the Wall Street Journal and the federal employment statistics and compared probabilities, they would not be going into academics in the first place? (Assuming you don't count MBA territory as academics.) Nobody I knew in the linguistics grad program thought in those terms, and I assume in the English or classics departments they were even more head-in-the-clouds. If you want to be all social-Darwinist and say the hell with 'em, of course that's your privilege, but why are you wasting your time with this discussion when you could be doing something more economically productive?

Far be it from me to play Smithers to Alex's Burns (ooh -- bad, bad mental image -- never mind), but I think he has a point, if not a solution. The humanities aren't so very different from the social sciences in requiring a successful job candidate to plan ahead from at least the point s/he enters the Ph.D. program. Students who don't know their way around at that point are lessening the already poor odds of their success. Me, I had a five-year plan going in (complete with self-deprecating jokes about Stalin and the gulags). I also had a very good idea of what assistant professors make (of course, my father was in a related field, but the information's available from many disciplinary organizations) and had looked at any number of candidate resumes (my program makes our job candidates' abbreviated resumes available in print and now online; I also volunteered to be on a couple of search committees so I could collect CVs, and nowadays plenty of people have theirs online). People who do not pay attention to those things -- who don't think about their CV or attend workshops on "The Job Search" until they're halfway through their dissertation -- are at a huge disadvantage.

That said, we don't want to write those folks off as hopeless. Since academia isn't an open market and since I for one think tenure has a few things going for it, why not turn to the guild system for relief? Make the "masters," the advisors, responsible for ensuring their "apprentices'" success -- reward good placement records with raises, reduced teaching loads, awards, what-have-you. (This should also discourage advisors from taking on too many advisees.) Throw in a required one-credit course on career planning for entering Ph.D. students, and make it a prerequisite for taking qualifying exams. Also, consider adding a question about career goals to the application into the Ph.D. program to weed out the wildly unrealistic. Our institutions can do more than most of them currently do to ensure that people don't get past a certain point unawares; that strikes me as a better step toward reform than abolishing tenure.

I like those suggestions, Naomi. They're too late to be of use to me -- as most of such are -- but they should be of benefit to someone if they can be implemented.

I would like to reiterate one of my points, since it didn't seem to get picked up and is an important counterweight to these suggestions, is that the odds would still be against most of those informed, well-prepared grad students, even if those changes were put into place. This doesn't mean that they are not appropriate or needed, but that they are not a cure-all, either. The disease is larger than that.

I don't want to say that you and Alex got to where you are by luck, because I can see your talent and I know you worked hard for your success, but I saw enough candidates go through our small college's search process who were quite wonderful by anyone's standards but who still failed to get a job at the end of it. There's something wrong with that, and it has little to do with the cluelessness or ignorance or lack of preparation evinced by some grad students.

I admit that I am largely talking from my own limited (and no doubt skewed) perspective. I may be looking for reasons to explain my own failure that don't require me to view myself as a stupid, ill-prepared naive ignoramous, for example. I therefore would appreciate any solid figures on whether success -- getting a tenure-line job (whether by prepared students or not) -- is the norm or the abberation. I haven't seen any.

Oh, and I didn't want that to look like I was singling out Naomi for my criticism; most of that post is meant to be addressed to the group at large.