Invisible Adjunct

One skill many adjuncts have is the ability to teach and to teach well. Adjuncts are the ones who are assigned the intro courses packed with unmotivated business majors who "have" to take history, philosophy, etc. Honestly, the adjuncts I have known can teach circles around most tenure-track and tenured faculty any day, simply because they have had more real-life practice!
But I guess the ability to teach doesn't count when we're talking about not being as "good" as the hallowed ones. Having been an adjunct, I find the assertion that one is professionally inferior just because they bear the label of "adjunct" to be insulting, if not somewhat amusing. Because I don't have the time to produce an assembly-line article filled with jargon that only a select few will read, that means I am not as "good" as someone with tenure? Oh please.
It's amazing that people will worship a system like tenure, look down on the part-timers, thinking that they are part of the crowd when the truth is that tenured faculty are into self-preservation, and that the worshipers (several of whom are adjuncts) are as much in danger of being eaten alive as the very folks they despise!
It's kind of like poor people belonging to the republican party...you gotta ask "why?"

Absolute delusion as to who benefits, and who loses. Tax cuts for the rich presented as "it's your money" in one case; many grad students/adjuncts believing that they'll get tenure in the academic case.

I don't think I buy your argument that his argument implies that actual hiring paterns imply worth. He's not arguing from the data on hiring, he's arguing abstractly from the nature of the job. He's saying the nature of the jobs are, indeed, different, so we ought to see different people in them. This is an entirely different issue from continued gender discrimination in hiring.

Just a side note: in my experience, net sexual discrimination in academic hiring is in favor of women. This was openly admitted by the professors in my humanities PhD program and my brother has experienced the situation in full force. If you're not aware of the advantages a woman has in seeking a professorship, then you're not paying attention.

Wow JT, I admire your willingness to crawl out on that limb. I agree with you, by the way. And I'll join you on an adjacent limb. Anecdotally, I have witnessed more younger male t-t faculty willing to openly raise the issue of adjunctification and critique it than female t-t faculty.

But what I especially enjoyed was the time the Indian woman, the self-annointed specialist in postcolonial literatures and theory in my dept., stayed utterly silent on the issue when it arose during a faculty seminar. But maybe she was just being subtle, and as an inferior non-t-t faculty member, I'm just not able to fathom the inner radicality of silence.

Adjuncts are generally considerably younger than tenured faculty. There are a lot more female graduate students than there used to be. In the total absence of discrimination, you would expect females to make up a higher percentage of adjuncts than of tenured professors.

"If you're not aware of the advantages a woman has in seeking a professorship, then you're not paying attention."

I believe I am paying attention. Among other things, I am attending to the available data on the demographic makeup of the history profession. If anyone can offer statistical (not anecdotal) evidence pointing to an advantage for women, I will duly attend to this data.

"In the total absence of discrimination, you would expect females to make up a higher percentage of adjuncts than of tenured professors."

Yes, this is probably a factor. And I think the point about a generational divide in expectations also works against the idea that adjuncts just aren't as good.

IA: this discrimination in favor of women is a recent phenomenon -- say, the last 15-20 years would be my estimate. Given the job situation, using numerical breakdowns of all tenured professors, many of whom were hired before 1980 -- a time when I am fully prepared to acknowledge discrimination worked in favor of men -- is suspect.

One area of enormous difference in expectations is between the taxpayers / students' parents et. al. and the professoriate and U. admins. The commoners actually believe that teaching is the primary role of the university. Except for immediately applicable stuff like medical research, they scarcely care about research.

There's a [possible political ally here, though this can be a double-edged sword because taxpayers also believe faculty are overpaid and underworked, and plenty of them would be happy to apply the "market model" to the U. system.

JT,
That is a good point. Especially since full-time history faculty as a cohort are apparently the oldest of all humanities faculty (over half are over the age of 55). No question about it, there are many more men than women in this over-55 set. But if women now enjoy an advantage, how to account for this, which covers a 20-year period:

While the proportion of men employed part-time increased almost five-fold over the past 20 years, the proportion of women employed part-time has increased almost six-and-a-half times over the same period.

By the way, I suspect that women do enjoy an advantage in certain "hot" areas (perhaps, eg., in postcolonial studies). But I'm not convinced that this is representative of the profession overall.

Seems to me like there's an epistemological question in comparing overall worth of adjuncts and the tenured - the job environments are so different that I wonder how we can expect to recognize particularly great talent in the midst of sucky conditions, and in particular to recognize it reliably. There may be an answer, but without some sort of framework for compensating for the circumstances, I'd be leery of any claims of overall worth comparison.

We seem to be coming perilously close to a situation where all the actual undergrad teaching is done by untenured unbenefitted helots while the tenured faculty do only research and minimal teaching ("two different jobs").

One thing this does is eliminate whatever advantage there is for an undergrad to attend a prestigeous institution. It also destroys a lot of the rationale justifying the university to parents and taxpayers.

Recently, I was reading about a regional bank which was acquired by new management. The new owners noticed that in each branch there were two senior people. The #1 person (usually male) didn't seem to do much, except to look impressive and to occasionally greet important customers. The #2 person (usually female) did all the actual management work and was typically paid significantly less.

They decided to get rid of all the #1 people and let the #2s run the branches...

Well, I suppose I should explain myself.

-Yes, I think that female faculty are inferior to male faculty, just as women are inferior to men in everything. That follows logically from everything I said.

-My point about 'better' is that T-T people are almost always better for T-T jobs than adjuncts. They should be because the qualifications for the jobs are different. The search process, the questions they ask and the things they look for are all reasonably different. At all but the most exalted places T-T people are expected to be able to teach intro classes competently. They are also expected to do other things. The way the job market is departments can and do ask for people who can teach basic classes, publish, be pleasant to be around and tap-dance for T-T positions. Lots of adjuncts are not -really- adjuncts in the sense that they are only qualified/interested in being adjuncts, but that is what they are hired for, and on average (especially here in the boonies) that is what they are. This is particularly true as time goes by. Yes, some senior people are deadwood, but most people get better at the job as they go on. Anyone who was good when they started will be better 5 years later and better still 10 years later. Adjuncts of course are tossed out just about the time they are getting good at the job. Adjuncts also don't have offices, support staff, have too many students in their classes etc. A student getting their education entirely from adjuncts would almost certainly be getting a worse education than one getting it entirely from T-T people. I don't mean this as an insult to anyone in particular, or to deny that some adjuncts are better than some T-T people (me included) but as a statement of how I see things in general.

-Once you get adunctified of course, then you become less and less qualified for a T-T job as time goes on. This is in part because they always want to hire someone new, but also because you have not been doing the things that will get you a T-T job. Partially this is publishing but also taking students abroad, teaching cool topics classes , etc. You get typecast. It works both ways to some extent. Fail tenure at Madison and Oshkosh may well not consider you because you have spent 6 years doing things they are not as concerned with. This is, as a number of posters have pointed out, not fair.

-The obvious two-tier system is, however, good if there is any hope at all of fixing things. As Zizka points out, a two-tier system is being created, but administrators are telling parents, trustees and students that adjuncts are just the same as T-T people only temporary. That is not true now in many cases, and if things go on like this it will become even less true. If there is hope it lies in convincing the people who pay for education that they are getting gypped by this system and should demand better. Here the needs of IA as an individual are divergent from the needs of adjuncts as a whole. The more IA makes herself look like a T-T person stuck in an adjunct's job the more likely she is to get a T-T job. On the other hand, the more all adjuncts are portrayed as that the less need there is to convert them into T-T jobs. If you can get people just as good for 1/5 the price why not?

To get a really good sense of what's going on here, we need some numbers. For instance: what percentage of applicants for adjunct positions are women? and how does that compare to the percentage of applicants for t-t jobs who are women? Discipline-by-discipline breakdowns would be even better. Not knowing those percentages, I'm left with just the personal impression (as a tenured member of an English department at a liberal-arts college) that we get far more women than men applying for our adjunct positions -- whereas for t-t jobs there is more gender balance. A reasonable explanation for this phenomenon (if it really exists) would be that there are still a lot of marriages in which the woman's career is considered supplementary or secondary -- which would increase the likelihood of her following her husband's career and settling for adjunct positions. But I don't know whether this happens often enough to account for the disparity our friend IA points to.

"-Yes, I think that female faculty are inferior to male faculty, just as women are inferior to men in everything. That follows logically from everything I said."

If you know enough about the academic job system to declare that adjuncts are not as good as tenure-track faculty, then you must know about the well-documented gender gap. Or, if you don't know about this gender gap, then you probably do not know enough about the system to be able to back up your claim that adjuncts are not as good.

I may be wrong about this, but it seems that the math alone in the passages belies the point, if read carefully. First, note that there are 2x as many men as women (M=2W) employed as faculty in either track. The total number of women employed W=w(t.t.) + w(p.t.) 59% are tenure track, 41% part time (if I read this right). For males, M=m(t.t) + m(p.t.), 71% are t.t., 29% p.t. But since there are twice as many males as females on the faculty, then there are more male adjuncts than female! 0.29*M =0.58*W (M=2W), which is greater than female adjuncts in number, if not in frequency. Most likely, all of this reflects generational shifts. More women are getting Ph.D's than before, and seeking tenure-track jobs than before. Older faculty are mostly male (and tenured), younger faculty are perhaps evenly split (perhaps not), but certainly more likely to be adjunct.

I think Ayjay has hit on part of the problem--the woman is very likely going to be the "trailing spouse," Paul Krugman aside.

In English, there are anecdotal gender differences in terms of field, some of which I've noticed myself at conferences, but I don't know if there have been any studies done. Women always seem to outnumber men in anything related to 19th c. studies, whereas just the opposite is true in 18th c. studies. It's not clear what's going on. I'll have to ask my friend in comp/rhet what the situation looks like in her field, but I strongly suspect that it's very female-dominated as well.

IA, have you looked at any of the CoHE colloquies on women's career choices, especially when it comes to childbearing? The opinions expressed therein are very revealing, and not in a good way.

Ssuma: What about when an adjunct goes to an MLA interview? Do they just ooze adjuncthood, and thus discount themselves?

And what do you have to say about those caught on the Visiting Assistant Prof. track? Are they essentially "inferior" to t-t's as well?

Chris,

No, when someone who has an adjunct job goes to AHA or MLA they are getting the same questions as anyone else, but the longer they have been adjuncting the harder it is to give answers that will get you on-campus. They don't get the research support, they have not been teaching upper-division classes, developing new programs, editing journals, re-designing curriculm or supervising thesisi. All this is true as well, if less so, of someone stuck on the Visiting Assistant track. I've watched myself 'ooze adjuncthood' at interviews. When I am applying for a teaching-ish job I can talk about what I would be like at your teaching school and get offers. (I seem to do well with the 'how will you avoid intellectual death if you come here' questions.) When I interview at a research school I can claim that I understand the life of someone with a 2/2 load and gobs of money, but I'm lying and apparently it shows. The jobs you have had mark you just as much as grad school did.

This is also true for someone trying to go from T-T at Oshkosh to T-T at Madison. The things you have to do at Oshkosh are quite different from those at Madison, and at the least you will find that the Madison people regard much of what you have done as at best beside the point. Have you been teaching courses in your secondary field? Oshkosh regards that as vital, Madison could care less. My point in saying this is not to personally insult the people on this board, but to claim that there are actually several job markets, and that the best chance for improving the situation is to point out to people that matter (which is not us) that these parts are not interchangeable.

"I may be wrong about this, but it seems that the math alone in the passages belies the point, if read carefully."

I'm not sure what point you think the math belies. Townsend doesn't say that female adjuncts outnumber male adjuncts in absolute numbers. Rather, he reports that a higher percentage of women than of men are found in adjunct rather than tenure-track jobs. Moreover, he also reports that the proportion of women employed part-time has increased over the past twenty years. As the proportion of women faculty has increased from just under 20 percent in 1979 and 1989 to about a third in 1998 -- which increase Townsend claims is roughly comparable to the increase in female history PhDs -- the proportion of women employed part-time has increased almost 6 and a half times. Meanwhile, the proportion of men employed part-time has also increased: almost five-fold over the same twenty-year period.

"Most likely, all of this reflects generational shifts. More women are getting Ph.D's than before, and seeking tenure-track jobs than before."

Yes, Townsend's data reflect generational shifts. As he puts it, "The growing use of underpaid and undersupported part-time faculty, and the waning of tenure lines poses a difficult problem for all new and prospective history PhDs." The proportion of faculty (both male and female) holding part-time rather than full-time positions has increased over the past twenty years.

"IA, have you looked at any of the CoHE colloquies on women's career choices, especially when it comes to childbearing? The opinions expressed therein are very revealing, and not in a good way."

Yes. I want to believe that these opinions are not typical or representative, ie, that the colloquies attract people with strange axes to grind.

Can't this thread be illuminated from other points of view?

1. Adjuncting is a dead end, not a stepping stone to anything (not even a stepping-stone to Oshkosh). Rightly or wrongly, someone hired as an adjunct has been judged inferior by the profession as a whole, and the person hiring the adjunct is not in disagreement with the profession.

2. Even an adjunct who is not originally inferior will be in a poor position to maintain and improve his/her skills and motivation, and will quite possibly degrade.

3. Adjunctification is an aspect of a historical change in the professional structure. Tenured people are older and more likely to be men. Adjuncts are younger and more likely to be women.

I do not agree with ssuma that most faculty get better as they go along. It depends on whether they love teaching and research. In the two quite different schools I attended I saw both extremes, but there were many tenured faculty who either were crippled by personal problems, or else were very obviously using their job to finance an exciting non-intellectual lifestyle.

Ssuma: when you say of adjuncts that what precludes them from consideration for t-t jobs is the fact that "They don't get the research support, they have not been teaching upper-division classes, developing new programs, editing journals, re-designing curriculm or supervising thesisi," I am inclined to agree. But at the same time, I think you (or the profession as such) ought to take a look at the set of criteria you list off as prerequisite for consideration for a t-t job. It's an imposing, and increasingly unrealistic list of prereqs, I'd say. But I must disagree when you extend your ist of the opportunities adjuncts are frozen out of to VAP's. You write that "[a]ll this is true as well, if less so, of someone stuck on the Visiting Assistant track." I would say the emphasis is on the less so. I've been a VAP for several years now, and have directed around 10 senior thesises, 2 of which last year were judged to be prize winning. I've also developed and taught a slew of my own courses, and not just straight-forward traditional surveys. I've certainly done, and continue to do, the traditional service courses, but I have also developed and taught precisely the kinds of courses you say only the t-t person can do. (examples: South African lit. and drama; lit. and film of the "troubles" of Northern Ireland; a senior seminar on Joyce and Rushdie, a survey of 20th c. Irish writing, etc.).

I used to think the institution where I teach was affording me an amazing, and fortunate opportunity to design and teach all these courses. Now, however, I see that I have simply been taken advantage of because there is no pay off whatsoever for this work I've done. They're not going to hire me on a t-t, and they won't keep me on as a VAP indefinitely. But what's worse is that having this seemingly invaluable experience teaching upper-level, as well as intro and intermediate courses, has apparenty discounted me for other t-t jobs as well.

To the issue of this thread -- adjunct labor and gender -- I find myself unable to confrim the findings. My experience has never born out what the statistics keep saying, namely, that a disproportinate number of adjunct labor is female. At every place I have been an adjunct the division has been very close to 50/50. I'm not sure why this is the case (and I'm not taking issue with the stats). Maybe it's because (this is the only thing I can come up with) I've always been located in urban centers rather than rural or otherwise more remote places, and perhaps that is a factor.

"But what's worse is that having this seemingly invaluable experience teaching upper-level, as well as intro and intermediate courses, has apparenty discounted me for other t-t jobs as well."

Quite. You should be in a much stronger position than a newly-minted PhD with far less teaching experience (whether at the level of undergrad survey or specialized upper-level course), no experience supervising theses, and so on. Ssuma writes that adjuncts and VATs "don't get the research support, they have not been teaching upper-division classes, developing new programs, editing journals, re-designing curriculm or supervising thesisi." But neither has the new PhD been doing these things in graduate school, though he or she may have quite a bit of experience teaching lower-level surveys. So what is it that makes the new PhD with less experience more attractive than the adjunct or VAT with more experience? I'd say it's the stain of adjuncthood. As the two-tier system hardens into a kind of class or caste system, actual experience is seen as a disqualification rather than a qualification.

"Adjunctification is an aspect of a historical change in the professional structure. Tenured people are older and more likely to be men. Adjuncts are younger and more likely to be women."

Just to make my point clear: adjunctification is happening to both women and men, but at a higher rate for women. In the discipline of history, it's not that adjuncts are more likely to be women (they're not, because men still outnumber women in absolute numbers), but that women are more likely to be adjuncts.

"At every place I have been an adjunct the division has been very close to 50/50." Here we would need to know the proportions of men to women overall. If, for example, 70 percent of PhDs in your field are men, and 30 percent are women, then a 50/50 split at the adjunct level means that a greater proportion of women are being adjunctified (ie, if adjunctification levels were equal, then you should see a 70/30 divide at the adjunct level). If, on the other hand, 50 percent of PhDs are men and 50 percent are women, then obviously both women and men are being adjunctified in the same proportions. And if 70 percent of PhDs in your field are women and 30 percent are men, then a 50/50 split at the adjunct level means that men are being adjunctified at a greater rate than women.

I disagree with Ssuma but I think the actual situation makes it worse for adjuncts. From my experience, the average teaching ability of the part-timers at my school is roughly the same as for the tenure track faculty. If there is no difference, then why not use part-timers, since they are cheaper.

I think the (non-research) academic job market is characterized by a large supply of a non-differentiated product. It is no surprise that prices (wages) are low.

IA: Point taken, and I just cannot say more because I do not know what the percentage breakdown is of English Ph.D.'s over, say, the last ten years or so.

From this and other threads we come up with still another statement of the basic problem, from the point of view for the individual in the system:

People considering academic careers think of the PhD as the goal. You get into grad school, work, sacrifice, show your abilities, put up with a lot of BS for 5-10 years, and finally you get the brass ring, the PhD.

They do NOT think that getting this brass ring only amounts to entry into a whole new even tougher competition. They thought of the PhD as success, which it isn't. After the PhD has been attained, there still stretches a series of tests -- t-t hiring, tenure, and after that, promotion to full professor. It's sort of like a Grail novel or kung fu movie where the first series of ordeals only leads to the next series.

And seemingly the post-doc test immediately after the PhD is the most pitiless of all. Because the PhD's who don't get tenure-track positions in the first 2-3 years are apparently doomed. They would have been better off (objectively $peaking) hanging out and having fun for a few years and then spending a year studying the latest computer applications.

This does NOT apply to those who thoroughly enjoy their time in grad school. But in many cases, if the right hand doesn't get you, the left hand will. There's a lot of dissatisfaction with the grad school experience too.

Gee, is there really, zizka? Never woulda guessed.

(sorry, some bait I just can't keep from biting at...)

Thanks for your email, btw.

I used to think the institution where I teach was affording me an amazing, and fortunate opportunity to design and teach all these courses. Now, however, I see that I have simply been taken advantage of because there is no pay off whatsoever for this work I've done. They're not going to hire me on a t-t, and they won't keep me on as a VAP indefinitely. But what's worse is that having this seemingly invaluable experience teaching upper-level, as well as intro and intermediate courses, has apparenty discounted me for other t-t jobs as well.

Yes.

What's particularly bad is the tension about being made to feel "stale" at just the time I'm about to get a book out and begin a new research project. I feel like my career/growth as a scholar is just getting started, and to be told I'm already a has-been (at age 33, no less!) is terribly disheartening.

I'm seeing a surprising ommission in the comments above. One standard (sometimes predominant) explanation of gender inequities in academia, as elsewhere, is the gender inequities in family life. Women are generally more burdened by family obligations (whether partnered or not -- care of parents falls on them as well) than men. This is usually true even if her spouse is "supportive" -- the evidence is fairly clear that "enlightened" husbands still do far less of the domestic work. Moreover, if a woman desires children she will likely be engaging in the sort of time consuming activities necessary to obtain this end (say, building a partnership if she wants a family or caring for a child on her own if she does not...) during the precise period in which new PhD's are also trying to build a record (average age of new PhD's in the humanities is, if I remember correctly, around 32). Men are less likely to be so burdened, and have the luxury of delaying family life until it's professionally convenient.

How does this effect the adjunct disparity? I can use my own experience to ilustrate. I didn't get a t-t position out of grad school, but I was willing to take any job and work anywhere (no family or partnership obligations, you see). I ended up adjunting in a terrible part of the country, but didn't care -- a job was a job. I spent every single free moment researching and writing, managing to build a record of publications that was extremely competetive with my peers on the t-t. This, after 2 years, got me a VAP position at another crappy school in another terrible part of the country, where I did the same thing again. I finally got a t-t position on the basis of this record. But note the cost. I had no family, no social life, no meaningful connection to the community, and really no interaction with anyone or anything that wasn't directly related to work. I was deeply in debt from multiple moves and paying conference travel costs. I had lived in hovels and eaten ramen for 3 years; in fact, I was better off financially in grad school. This is not the behavior of a person with a family. And, were I a women, the timeline would have put me at the long end of safe child bearing. And it would also have been held against me by at least some people as abnormal or unfeminine.

It seems completely likely that women are more likely, then, to be stuck on the adjunct track, or at least have far more obstacles to getting off it, and that these barriers a gender based. It surely indicates that women have to "act like men" (work obsessed, asocial, unconcerned with family until convenient), clear evidence of gendered problem. Add, finally, the difficulties women face once on the t-t, again related to family and child birth, and the problem should be even more clear.

IA,

You write, "If, for example, 70 percent of PhDs in your field are men, and 30 percent are women, then a 50/50 split at the adjunct level means that a greater proportion of women are being adjunctified (ie, if adjunctification levels were equal, then you should see a 70/30 divide at the adjunct level)."

This is true if there are only 2 alternatives: all PhDs either go to a tenure track or become adjuncts. But many people leave academia entirely (or go to a non-teaching part or try their hand at the high school/prep school/charter school level).

It is entirely possible that more males, upon not getting a tenure-track position, say, "Fuck this shit. I'm outta here." Thus can a 70/30 PhD split become a 50/50 adjunct split without any discrimination. We need to know what the gender breakdown of the newly hired tenure-trackers is. If it is greater than 70/30, then women are being disproportionally pushed into acjuncting. If it is less than 70/30, then men are being disproportionally pushed into adjunting--even if more of them then leave this particular rat race entirely, making the final new adjunct split 50/50.

And if universities were as concerned about "pushing back the frontiers of knowledge" as they say they are, these figures would be easy to come by. I'd love to be proved wrong but as far as I can tell, they are not.

Get a gender breakdown of new PhDs, a gender breakdown of new t-t hires, and a gender breakdown of new adjunct hires. A little arithmetic tells you who is going disproportionately where, and how much "leakage" there is out of the system.