Invisible Adjunct

There's an interesting article about the same problem in the Univ. of Chicago alumni magazine, August 2000 (I believe it's online). Title is "Death in a Tenured Position," and author is James Shapiro.

This phenomenon is nothing less than a metaphor for the transformation of academe, at least in the humanities. Not only is this generation of professors aging and dying, so is the profession they inhabit. In another twenty years they will all be gone, and what they represent will go with them. What will replace them? A cadre of well-educated, poorly-paid contingent workers, if current demographic trends hold true. Yes, there will be a few like them who follow, but they will not be representative.

This is the true scandal of the situation in academe. Five young, bright individuals are sold on the dream of the tenured life of the mind as embodied by these senior scholars, and at most one of them will achieve it. The rest will--what? Teach as adjuncts? Leave the profession? The latter will be the best choice for them.

But I wonder--what will become of the profession when those who "profess" it are no longer? What will happen to knowledge in the humanites if there are no young scholars left to energize the research paradigms? Already, in English, one sees a timid sifting of the methodology of the older generation by the young generation now coming into tenure, as a recent anthology by Peter Herman demonstrates. This timidity is driven largely by professional insecurity--a reluctance to offend the gatekeepers who still hold the keys to their professional future. And this is the full-time, tenure-stream cohort--what represents the best and the brightest of their generation!

I do not even want to speculate what will happen because of the loss of my generation, "Generation X," those of us in our thirties. Sheer stubborness allowed me to publish three books by the time I was 32, but it counted for nothing except my own satisfaction. What of those who are teaching six courses at three different campuses? What of those who simply drift away in frustration to earn a living elsewhere.

I was inspired by dynamic teachers and scholars as an undergraduate. They were largely what led me to graduate school--not just because the life of the mind and research seemed so exciting, but because I wanted to be able to inspire younger students as I had been inspired. Well, I never got the chance to do this. Teaching required writing courses to bored freshmen who didn't want to be there, and then juggling a teaching schedule with a retail job and final academic job search left me unable to do any more than punch the clock in the classroom.

Is this what my two sons will encounter in college? Will they have the opportunity at all to study with a bright, dedicated teacher who enlarges their mind? In the end that is what it is all about--not about recruiting more students for the professoriate, although I would have been happy to do so (in a better world). The loss of that opportunity--to be a teacher and to broaden a few students' worlds--is what I mourn the most about my own stillborn academic career.

What I fear is that my sons will be taught mostly by harried adjuncts and greenhorn teaching assistants. Certainly these individuals can be dedicated teachers, but the odds do not favor it. I am pessimistic that my sons will have a college experience anything near as rich as mine. That world is aging, day by day, with the senior faculty referred to above. By the time my sons go to college in fifteen years, it will probably be completely gone.

Shapiro is turning a structural, political issue into one of personal ethics. Let us imagine that kindly older profs step aside from the goodness of their hearts and committment to the vitality of their fields. OK? Done that? Now, do you see that vast choice adjunct jobs opening up? Lovely, eh?

If these trends continue, is there not a danger that there will be an increase in the already large divide between the top colleges and universities and the more affordable ones? I just don't see high-ranking institutions following the trend of the overreliance on adjunct labor. Places like Northwestern, though they use adjuncts, still understand the necessity of supported, full time faculty. To go too much toward part time labor (and this is not to imply that part timers are less "scholarly"...they aren't...they are just more exhausted!) means a reflection on the quality of scholarship and teaching. If a school does not have enough full time faculty, tenured or not, it isn't equipped to cope with the challenges that today's students bring (remedial coursework, non-traditional needs, etc.). An excellent teacher is irreplaceable, especially if he or she can reach the more difficult students (the attrition rate for freshmen is pretty high!). But excellent teachers and researchers need support or they burn out fast.
The less expensive colleges are rushing to hire more adjuncts, not considering that doing so will create an even bigger gulf between the haves and the have-nots in terms of institutions. The top-ranking ones will not sacrifice their reputation, but the middle to low tier ones will keep thinking bottom line.

While I am reluctant to defend the senior generation's tenacious hold on their tenured positions and all of its benefits, the overall down-turn in the economy, instability in the stock market, and the woeful state of the medicare program all go a long way toward explaining their reluctance to retire. As a strictly economic issue, retirement on a pension and/or some sort of annuity has to be weighed against the income level one can maintain by remaining in a tenured position. I may be incorrect, but on the face of things the latter seems the better option. And when the comprehensive medical coverage that typically comes with a senior tenured position is factored into the equation, I can well understand why retirement is a less appealing alternative.

All things being equal, I suspect that the demands of teaching a 3/2 or 3/3, or even 4/4 load, after having done it for 30 years or so, are not that difficult. At the very least, one would have to concede that it is a less taxing job than working for a corporation 9 to whenever, 5 days a week, with a two-week paid vacation. Coupled to the issues raised above, the rhetorical question 'why retire' makes sense to me.

These remarks speak to the issues faced by the senior generation. With respect to the issues faced by the middle generation of academics in their early to mid-50's, the following anecdote may suffice. When I first moved here I was an adjunct at a large private university, and when I inquired about the availability of Summer teaching I was told that all of those classes were already staffed. 'Who did you get for those classes' I asked. The answer was the existing tenured faculty. The Chair went on to say that for the most part the junior faculty take the Summer off to work on their writing, but that the tenured faculty, especially those whose kids were grown, always took the available sections of Summer courses because it was quick, fairly easy money.

Huh. I remember reading the Shapiro article several years ago, but it must've been in the original magazine, because his report on the sorts of comments he received is new to me. Voluntary retirement won't cure all academia's ills, of course, but I don't think it's unreasonable to see both disciplinary and institutional benefits coming from his suggestion. On the one hand, I've certainly witnessed job searches which were quite seriously endangered or compromised by faculty too out of touch with current trends or even language in their supposed discipline. On the other, it might just help the profession if tenured faculty follow Shapiro's plan and retire from tenure and other limited-consumption positions (preferably with a spot of mild extortion to ensure that they will be replaced in kind) somewhere in their 60s; if I am still in a tenured position at that point, I plan to be retired by 70 at the latest.

Anecdotal evidence: in my decidedly privileged graduate department, a whole generation of research stars (including most of my mentors) has just or is currently retiring, precisely in order to finish writing the books on their antemortem to-do lists. They're being replaced with tenured faculty or tenure lines, but it's taking the department an average of two years per position to find Just The Right Person, so they may not be caught up till 2010 or so. Still, it seems to be a step in the right direction for all concerned.

This high-minded ethico-moral talk about the betterment of the profession etc. is laughable. Perhaps I am overly cynical for one so young, but do you all really care that much about the state of the "profession"? The fact that you are wiling to entreat the elder generation to pack it in -- all for the betterment of the profession -- is as much a sign of cynicism as my 'I don't give a shit about the profession, I just want a decent job'. Do you really want the elder generation to retire for the benefit of those of us shut out of the tenure track like Kafka's "man from the country," or is it so that you may have access to those senior positions vacated by the soon-to-be-retired elders?

Hmm ... who do I have more contempt for, self-serving tenure track junior faculty, i.e., the cloying pre-professional epigones I went to grad. school with who now refuse to take my calls, or the old codgers who know a good deal when they see one?

At least I can respect the latter.

I know of a case of a very eminent historian who was forced to retire at age 80. He was still in good health and doing good work. His motive was that he knew that he would not be replaced by someone in his own abstruse and difficult specialty, but either by a more generic historian or by and adjunct. Someone capable of replacing him spent 5-6 years trying to a get a job (there or anywhere else) and then left the field. So encouraging old guys to quit won't necessary help the profession from the research end, though it might ot might not help the next professional generation.

Abstaining from comments to comments, I agree with IA that it is only logical to find a balance between ages and experience among faculty. Both are needed.

A naive thought.

Why not job share? Senior faculty go part time and the junior faculty go part time re the tenured track job.

It never worked in Australia---the universities never took it up seriously. A two tiered labour market was more to their liking. Hence we have deadwood senior faculty clogging the system up.

Of course all of the above comments presuppose that humanities disciplines are worth saving. Are they all? Should every university have an art history discipline?

I'd better interested to know what historians think of that kind of history; and whether the assumptions made that history is a good thing apply to art history.

Regardless of the special situation in history probably enhanced by the demographic, I would guess that this sort of thing happens or is happening in many fields from time to time. Ziska's story of the 80 yr old professor, and thinking of the tendency toward hyper-specialization, and logic would suggest that more often than not you have 1000s of positions, but it isn't a job market, it's 1000s of tiny markets for several specialists.

A colleague of mine suggested that we are headed toward a large general downturn driven by age demographics. Basically, we have this population bubble, the "baby-boomers" who are now all in their late 40s or 50s, and when they start to retire in large numbers, there won't be nearly enough people with experience ready to take their place. If he's right, this sort of thing would be going on across the economy, from the academy, to the working class, to the managerial class, everyone.

Few people realize how much or our economy is dependent on small to mid-sized companies (SMEnterprises), and no doubt the vast wealth of "human knowledge capital" of our dynamic economy is contained and generated in these enterprises. If a large percentage of SME's don't care to train their replacements by making enough good positions for junior entrepreneurs in each mini-market in the economy, then the collapse that my friend envisions doesn't seem as speculative as it did at first.

Seems to me that what you are talking about in the historian profession is the pre-cursor to a future collapse. Demographic wave ... glut of experienced workers in many categories ... no good jobs for next generation ... glut starts to retire ... ??? Seems to me that if we don't do something about this as a society, we will fall off the cliff in the next 20 to 30 years.

Personally, at 43, I'm at the tail end of the boom demographically, and really it ain't no picnic here either. In technology, particularly in the commercial world, there is also a dynamic to push older workers out the door quickly, so you have to have a long term personal strategy to survive. The kids learn the new tech very quickly, and they can write a lot of exellent code quickly on twinkies and cola. There are a lot of short sighted managers and companies that don't see the value of having a good mix of junior and senior members of all functional groups in their enterprises and think it is in their best interest to hire a much bigger percentage of younger quicker minds and push the geezers out the door.

My strategy has been to remain a generalist with a lot of hands on work in development and operations. We may never know if this worked since as my path unfolds, although I am at the brink of making the transition to "management", and I think I could make a nice profitable career of that, I am likely to take another path. That direction has a lot more uncertainty, but I try to have faith that the path of heart does not always have to be a financial struggle for security, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Cat wrote "is there not a danger that there will be an increase in the already large divide between the top colleges and universities and the more affordable ones?"

Contributing to the already existing divide: the practice of the top institutions (in name) never awarding tenure to people hired for supposedly tenure-track assistant professors. They don't get tenure; they are merely adjuncts with longer contracts.