Invisible Adjunct

Ok, since no one is jumping in here:

grad student, postdoc, non tt instructor, tt instructor, tenured.

You could have done a poll to see what kind of poll to do. And I'm looking forward to a "how many people do you think will respond to this poll" poll.

"You could have done a poll to see what kind of poll to do."

Hey, I considered it. It would have given me the chance to ask about soap (bar or liquid? anti-bacterial or botanical?)

My suggestion: six categories:
1. Persons Without Doctorates (grad students, MAs on contingent appointments, etc.)
2. PhDs on Part-Time Contingent Appointments (mostly called adjuncts)
3. PhDs on Full-Time Contingent Appointments, Not Indefinitely Renewable (Visiting Asst. Profs, sabbatical fill-ins, post-docs, etc.)
4. PhDs on Full-Time Contingent Appointments, Indefinitely Renewable ("full-time adjuncts", contract faculty, etc.)
5. Tenure Track (Asst. Profs)
6. Tenured (Assoc. & Full Profs)

There's a lot of variability of terminology.

You can change Doctorate to Terminal Degree if you want to pick up MFAs.

Ivory. Because it floats.

If you want accurate responses from "international" academics, you will need to stay away from using the various "Professor" titles to distinguish the tenured and untenured, because in Australia at least you need to be fairly high up the tenured food chain to use any of them. I'm not quite sure what the post-tenure promotion ladder is, but it's something like: Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader (sometimes), Associate Professor, Professor.

Of course, that begs the question of IA's international readership. Most of the active posters do seem to be in North America.

and if you go with jam's categories, where does a tenured assistant professor who is ABD fit in? in my system, promotion to assistant always comes before tenure.

or do community college profs not count?

How about high school teachers?

Cindy,

Titles were meant to be illustrative. Tenured is tenured. Tenure track is tenure track.

But, of course, your suspicion is correct. I wasn't thinking of community colleges.

As these comments make clear, there is no way I can design a poll that would cover everyone (20 responses is the utmost limit). I think I will ask the reader to select the response that comes closest to his or her particular situation.

Cindy, community college professors do count. But I have asked for advice on the assumption that any reader who is kind enough to respond will make suggestions based on his or her own perspective. I don't think it's fair to hold any reader responsible for covering all possible categories.

It isn't entirely common, but the hole in Jam's categorization is that I don't have a PhD but I am tenure-track. I showed up to a tenurable job and said "Guess what, I don't have it yet", and have been there for nearly 3 years now, making tenure-track pay, with tenure-track responsibilities, and with the contractual stipulation that if I do finish I immediately convert over to the title of Assistant Professor. Of course, if I don't finish in another six months, it's "So long!", but still, reading this blog makes me very glad I kept the humanities a hobby.

I think that you should have about 4-5 categories with a comments box. You can report any commonalities you find in the comments (e.g. "adult education on death row", "helping a 'Nelson Rockefeller' with his art-history research", etc.).

Actually both ABD Instructor's example and Cindy's can be made to fit. Tenure track and tenured, respectively.

Clay Shirky wrote a nice piece a couple of days ago against the so-called semantic web. He made a useful point: to propose a categorization is to assert a view of the world: "The designers of the Soviet library's cataloging system were making an assertion about the world when they made the first category of books 'Works of the classical authors of Marxism-Leninism.' Charles Dewey was making an assertion about the world when he lumped all books about non-Christian religions into a single category, listed last among books about religion." And I am making an assertion about contemporary academia when three of six categories are various plights of people who, although they've been awarded a PhD, have failed to attain a tenure track position.

Naturally, people in the reverse position don't fit well.

Well. Um. And then there's me.

I'm a graduate student, but in a pre-professional school, fully intending to stop *stop* STOP* with the MA. In IA's last poll, I called myself an ex-academic, because that is very definitely how I think of myself vis-a-vis academia (and, in all likelihood, how academia thinks of me when it bothers to at all).

Oops.

jam and IA,

I guess I sounded a little defensive there. It wasn't meant to be an attack on jam. Maybe I'm hypersensitve to my ABD, community college status even though it is what I chose. We spend a lot of time fighting the stereotype that we are just glorified highschools or vocational schools.

Dear IA,

I like jam's 6 categories, but with a qualification: FT temporary positions (like the Visiting Asst. Prof) are importantly different from full time adjunct positions in terms of salary, benefits, office space, and access to travel or other expense budgets. For me at least, the distinction is huge. I taught 3 courses one year as an adjunct, then the following year got a FT temporary job teaching 4 courses for the year. I was paid about $5500 for the first year, with no benefits and an office I shared with about 15 other people, and about $38,000 for the second, with full benefits and a travel budget. Maybe my experience is extreme, but usually FT positions come with benefits and something approaching a regular salary, where the adjunct positions have neither.
Another problem with jam's categories is that it is often not clear whether a temporary position is renewable. ABD instructor's/Cindy's point can fit in as you suggested. How about:

1. Persons without doctorate/terminal degree in temporary or adjunct teaching positions
2. Persons with doctorate/teminal degree teaching as adjuncts
3. Persons with doctorate/terminal degree teaching in FT temporary positions
4. Persons in a tenure track position
5. Persons w/ tenure

Here, the distinction between adjunct and FT temporary is that adjuncts are hired by the course, and FT temporary are hired full time for at least a semester.

I use Ivory soap, but as little as possible. I agree in principle with William Blake, who used none at all, but I am more cowardly than he. Without the soap, probably I would have been a great poet, alas.

It might be helpful to distinguish between the various classifications of grad students, as well. For instance, I'm ABD in American lit (hope to finish next year), but after finishing my course work, I gave up my slave wages as a graduate teaching assistant to take a full-time IT position at the university.