Invisible Adjunct

I have just stumbled across this blog via an article in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER ED. The insights of the IA are superb, particularly her reminder that the deprofessionalization, via cheap labor, will ultimately infect the whole guild.

In 1976, I wrote a piece for the ADE Bullettin outlining my despair over the job situation. I was an ABD, weary of excuses others gave for the lack of jobs, and deeply cynical as a result of of hearing my "mentors" so blithely rationalize this scarcity of positions. Ultimately, i finished my degree, held several part time positions, until finally securing a tenure track position. I was just plain lucky; I tried to do what I could at my small private college to make the teaching of composition and intro courses staffed by full time people; I met resistance, much of it from colleagues who refused to see that this exploitation of part time workers was wrong for reasons readers of this know all too well. I got into lots of trouble trying to argue that it was our responsibility as faculty to create as many full time positions as we could, especially at private colleges where tuition was so high. I failed and my cynicism grew, especially toward tenured radicals in English who talked a nice "radical politics" game, but acted otherwise when it came to thinking about their own complicity in a system that was, and still remains, exploitive.

I took early retirement, and was fortunate to be able to do so. Economically, I still need some dough, and I do still love teaching, so I'm really semi retired, teaching, alas, as an adjunct at two different schools. One has a Masters in English program, and I'm stunned at how many young graduate students still don't get the picture. (A friend back in the '70's compared those who still kept coming to lemmings. . . and I'm just amazed that the metaphor still applies after all these years of job deflation or proletarianization of Academe.)

A final note: I have an 18 year old who's just finished her first year of college. She's a gifted musician and loves philosophy. She thinks an academic life would be great and I listen as she spells out all the virtues she, in her innocence, it embodies. It seems like Eden. I've just turned 60 and have to find a way to break the news to her without breaking her spirit as well. Perhaps some of the IA's cogent remarks, quoted in the article, will serve. (Like her, I feel in many ways most alive in teaching, and my 1976 article echoes many of her concerns.)

I don't know if anyone will read this or respond, but having had this concern about
the future of academic life threaded through my own life since around 1975, I needed to write this.

Bon Voyage. Loved your interview in the Chronicle, and was delighted that you chose to remain annonymous. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have 100 blue books to mark up. (laughter)

I'm so sorry to read this is going down.

I do hope you archive it and perhaps consider selling it on CD in the future.

Time to print out huge parts of this site for future reference. There's no better place to send naive would-be graduate students.

One day, scholars will be writing to each other to see if they can assemble a complete run of Invisible Adjunct (including the vanished entries on Benton's 1 in 5 column). Nicholson Baker, are you reading this?

I'm sorry to hear IA is going down, too. It has been a great forum...

I guess I'd better start reading fast!

I told someone that I plan to go to grad school after finishing my undergrad degree in a couple of years and that my first choice of occupation is professor.

They just laughed at me and gave me this URL.

I hope I read enough to understand their reaction before it all goes away.

Thank you for producing this resource.

You've done a wonderful thing here - and kept many of us company with your insight and presence of mind. Thank you - and I wish you all the best, wherever the future will now take you. I am sure that good things are in store for you.

Seconding Lil -- we'll be thinking of you.

I'm making a mirror of the site for local viewing with wget right now (the commandline is cribbed directly from wget's manpage: wget --verbose --page-requisites --mirror --convert-links --backup-converted --html-extension http://www.invisibleadjunct.com, if you want to make one yourself). Assuming it works right, I'll send a tarball to anyone who wants.

Assuming IA doesn't object, that is.

Why take the site down? Because it costs something to keep it running? It seems like a very useful resource to keep online, and it would be a shame for all the comments and discussion to be lost. What would you think of keeping one or more mirrors up (with new comments disabled)? I'm sure it would be easy to find volunteers to host them for free.

I don't like the suggestion from #3 above about selling it on CD. That would be inconvenient, and also awkward because much of the interest comes from the comments (and it's not clear that it's reasonable to sell them).

Please don't simply take it down. You can pass it on to a web organization to host it for you for free while you keep your anonymity. Please! Why throw it away?

I agree, there's stil good stuff to be found here that might not have been found yet.

If anyone wants a copy of the site, I have mirrored it just as ben wolfson has and can senda copy to anyone that asks. Thanks ben, my wget mirror didn't do the convert links thing and was quite annoying.

For a copy, simply mail andrew at andrewvc.com

Well, I haven't heard from IA. If Andrew's making his copy available, I'll make mine available, too. It's here, until that webspace gets taken down in, uh, maybe a month or so.

I lied. The archive is here.

If you haven't heard from her (it is a holiday, after all), you might want to hold off on making the archive available.

Per IA's request I took it down.

Publish it as a book instead, and it will still be available 500 years from now.

Per IA's request I took it down

Surely this doesn't mean she wants the site to vanish forever? What will happen to my Weekly IA Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence (No Cash, Just Glory) -- perhaps my proudest online moment? Say it ain't so!

Mr. Hat: she says she's undecided about mirroring and will think about it.

I have only just discovered this site, too, and hope that IA is not the Seb I know collegially; if so, more's the loss to academe.

As I've said elsewhere, and vocally, the academic hiring process is the most demeaning, soul-battering trial I have ever encountered (having come to this world with 28 years of successful experience in industry). It is appalling -- mind-boggling -- ego-crushing, and from everything I can determine, is consciously and deliberately so. But if you love to teach, IA, perhaps you should just take a vacation from it, rather than swear off the profession forever. No one is having a good time of it, job-hunting right now in the humanities. Being an independent scholar represents a certain kind of freedom, too: no faculty (whine and cheese) meetings.

Hang in there. We need you.

InvisibleTwo

Dammit, this can't simply be erased.

Hmmm, you're right ogged. No one's mailed me yet anyway, so I havn't distributed any copies. I'll wait to hear what IA has to say regarding this, of course I want to respect her copyright.

This issue really bothers me. From a legal point of view IA is entitled to do whatever she wants with the site, but I think the right thing to do is to leave a copy online. I believe the comments form the bulk of the site overall (correct me if I'm wrong), and that much of the value comes from the conversations that took place under IA's supervision. In some sense she's not the "author" of the site, but rather the caretaker of an online community. She played the fundamental role of organizing the site and leading the discussion, and is clearly in charge of the web site. However, it would be terrible to see all these conversations and discussions erased forever, without even any explanation of why.

Please don't let them vanish, Invisible Adjunct. If you post a request, it will be easy to find people who can keep a public archive of the site, unchanged, for free and without knowing your identity. I really wish we knew which issues were bothering you, so we could offer advice or at least so we could understand why you seem to prefer that all this information vanish without a trace.

i'm not sure how many archival copies there will be, but i've made one for future research purposes. i'd be happy to provide access to it, should ia grant that, through the archives section of my research center, else, i'll likely just burn it to dvd like a few other little bits of history that have come and gone.

Whatever IA decides to do with the site, I wish her all the best in her future endeavours -- no doubt in a job that values her. But I still miss her insight.

I came to this site just about a month ago and have not had time to read all the archives yet. I gave academia the finger after only a semester of grad school and now have a real world job. Great job...not so much time to read online.

Please give us latecomers a bit more time, or release the blog to one or more of the guys above, OK?

It would be a shame to lose all the information here. Someone in a college management class (as in 'how to manage a college without being a total dork') might find this site to be really useful. I've looked for ia on the wayback machine and they don't have it all archived (much less the comments). See New York Times this week on grad student at Princeton who milked New Yorker fiction for data to report on how editors chose work. You never know what this site might give rise to with regard to someone's research. Or, you never know how beneficial this site might be to the cause--i.e. decent pay for righteous work--academia is the real world (this is your brain on job of work--skillet empty and melting, vs. this is your brain on job of love--no skillet just sizzle); wouldn't it be great if we could all participate in it as colleagues on equal footing? . . . hope . . . hope

Dear IA:

I first came across your Blog by means of the _Chronicle_ and was both moved and disheartened by it. You see, I am one of those naive would be graduate students to whom your voice seems to have been calling out to. Unfortunately I came too late, that is, the experience of reading your Blog for me is now one of solidarity, sorrow, and hope. I am a philosopher in the so-called Continental tradition of philosophy. The academic atmosphere of most (not all) philosophy departments to this is tolerating and warm at best, with the exception of those seemingly fewer and fewer schools that stand up for it. Unfortunately I have felt the viciousness of just the political atmosphere you have described first hand - from insipid comments to rejections from departments due to my "lack of philosophical breadth." An ironic statement given that personal interest is somehow equivocated with lack of knowledge, which is not the case.

Since a very young age I had decided to be an academic and it has been my guiding pursuit throughout most of my youth until now, my mid-twenties. But now I have decided to leave the Academy and try, desperately, to not leave philosophy too. The angst that accompanies this decision is made more difficult by the seeming loss of identity to which you have referred in your own case. I am an academic and will be one always, but for now I will be an academic without a voice or the possibility of recognition within the only institution that grants philosophers the authority to speak.
Thank you for your insights and I can only hope that you please will publish this site for the aid of future academic ex-patriots.

Thank you.
Sincerely,

Christopher D. Merwin
http://apotropos.blogspot.com

If it's smart (and/or reckess) the Chronicle will devote an entire issue to reproducing the contents of this site.

I'll second the remarks of others here urging IA to permit a mirror somewhere. These conversations will be timely for some time to come--for people who haven't yet found the site, and for past participants and readers who want to dip back into the archives to find something memorable.

I add my encouragement for a permanent archive.

Just last week I heard from a cousin with a new BA that she was that she was aiming for graduate school in the humanities, with the happy encouragement of her professors. As I don't think that she -- like Jane Bast, and so many others -- has a clue about the risks involved in this choice, I tried to use my own career path as an example. That didn't seem to take. Perhaps she thought I was exceptionally thick or perhaps unlucky. But at least I could then dictate this site's address to her, for her sake, to read some other sobering viewpoints.

Please don't let this site go!

I liked the IA site as much as anyone, and have always appreciated the amount of time people spent reacting to it. A great deal of good sense, and no small amount of wisdom, accumulated on this site.

But it's time to let the site go. Everyone who wants to should make their own copy, and I hope it circulates in digital samizdat form among graduate students and young Ph.D.s for years.

Keeping the site alive, and maybe even keeping it online at all, would freeze something that, when live, was very good, but of a particular moment-- and, unintentionally, would also freeze a public identity that its author wants to move beyond.

Just visiting, thought I'd drop a quote from Lieter on philosophy programs and placement:

quoting:

A REALISTIC PERSPECTIVE ON GRADUATE STUDY

Students beginning graduate study in philosophy ought to have a realistic sense of what awaits them. You need to realize that job prospects are uncertain, that jobs at top departments and elite colleges are hard to come by, and that many who start PhD programs do not finish them. The following data may help provide some perspective--though it bears noting that this data is culled from a “top” graduate program; it is likely that data from less prestigious graduate programs is even more sobering. Students should check with particular programs for detailed information on matters like rates of attrition and completion.

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, long one of the leading departments in the nation (ranked in the top ten for most of the 1980s, in the top five more recently), makes available extremely detailed and informative information about job placement over the last decade at www.lsa.umich.edu/philosophy/placement.html. Of the 48 students who completed the PhD during that time period, 13—or slightly more than one-quarter—have not secured tenure-track appointments. 3 of these 13 first entered the job market since 2000, and so may very well secure such appointments, as might one or two of those from before 2000. At the same time, 11 graduates (or almost one-quarter) secured tenure-track (in some cases now, tenured) appointments at highly ranked departments (in philosophy, law, and political science). Since attrition in philosophy graduate programs is often as high as one-half the entering students (and one-quarter is not atypical even at top programs), it would not be misleading to say that, even at a top graduate program, only one out of ten entering students will end up teaching in strong research-oriented departments, while perhaps as many as two out of ten will be unable to find permanent academic employment. In addition, 4 of the 18 graduates from the above list who have come up for tenure decisions failed to get tenure; three of them secured other tenure-track or tenured academic employment.

For 1995-96, there were 341 PhDs awarded in the United States and Canada, as reported by the Review of Metaphysics. Of these 341, just 17 were offered tenure-track jobs (or the equivalent) in top 50 Ph.D. programs or their foreign equivalents. Of these 17, six were graduates of Princeton, three of Pittsburgh, two of Michigan, and one each of Rutgers, Stanford, Iowa, Minnesota, Notre Dame, and Texas. Of these 341, a mere six were offered jobs at top fifteen programs. Of these six, two each went to Princeton and Michigan, and one each went to Pittsburgh and Rutgers.

A further warning: the vast majority of the Michigan students who had tenure-track offers from top ten departments during the 1990s spent 7-10 years in graduate school. There is a sobering message in this: the kinds of skills needed to land a entry-level post are now the kinds of skills someone thirty years ago would have acquired after three years as a tenure-track assistant professor! The ferocious competition for jobs creates an incentive for students to spend a very long time perfecting their work.