PRESTOPUNDIT

Blogging the Guild System. "She's the Invisible Adjunct. Or at least, she used to be. After five years of being an adjunct and a year after starting one of the most popular academic Weblogs, she is giving up and getting out. More than a decade after entering graduate school with great promise, she hasn't landed that full-time, tenure-track spot she dreamed of. So although she's unsure what comes next, she is quitting the academy and shutting the blog down .. About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing .. She believes that academe's cheerleaders should stop pretending that the Ph.D. is good preparation for other types of careers. It's not, she says. Being smart and stubborn enough to get through a Ph.D. program may mean you're smart and stubborn enough for lots of other things, but the actual Ph.D. is peculiar to an academic career. (She would, however, support redesigning master's programs to create practical graduate education for nonacademics.)

Speaking of programs, the Invisible Adjunct says there are simply way too many of them. Many graduate programs in many fields -- even beyond the humanities -- should be curtailed, and some should be eliminated entirely. "There's certainly a supply component to the problem," she says. "It's doing incredible damage to the profession. ... An undersupply of English literature Ph.D.'s would be the best thing to give them leverage."

She speaks passionately about the issues facing the academic profession, a profession she believes has allowed itself to fall into decline. Can't professors see that a system producing so many people who can't get jobs is not an indictment of the aspiring faculty members, but of the system itself? Or if you really think that these adjuncts aren't of high enough caliber to hire, then the graduate schools are failures, not the students.

The Invisible Adjunct, while sympathetic to those who demand labor unions for adjuncts, never embraced the role of activist. Sure, she says, anyone at the bottom of the economic system, like adjuncts, would be better off joining in collective action. But using that union to go from $2,500 per course to $3,000 is an incremental change that does not tackle the flawed structure.

"For all practical intents and purposes, the adjunct is a low-wage worker without benefits who can be hired and fired at will," she once wrote. "So in what way can the adjunct be an entrepreneur, except in his or her own mind?"

The trials and despair of the Internet's most famous run-of-the-mill adjunct highlight the vagaries of the two-tiered academic job system. (Whatever you do, don't call it a "market," the Invisible Adjunct would say.)

"We know that there are many, many good people chasing a shrinking pool of great jobs," Mr. Burke says. "There's no way to make room in the contemporary academy for all the people who would make great academics."

Perhaps seeing the failure of people like Ms. Adjunct might prompt the lucky tenured ones to get off their rhetorical high horses, he says. "One of my consistent feelings is that there shouldn't be anybody in academia that is too quick to regard their own position as a result of a meritocratic system," says Mr. Burke. "Anybody with a modicum of self-awareness knows there's a tremendous amount of luck involved. But that sits ill with our prevailing mythologies." More "Invisible Adjunct". Posted by Greg Ransom