My situation is this:
1. Benefits come from my PhD institution.
2. Money for bills comes from my adjunct position.
3. Fellowship money goes directly to savings.

Is adjuncting hard? Sure it is. I had an *8* class overload last year, which will never be possible with my PhD schedule, but my supervisor respects that and seems to work around it. But that overload, at $1500 a course? Oh yeah, that just paid for everything for my first year or so of school (books, supplies, computers, etc.) I wouldn’t change what I’m doing NOW for the world, but I won’t be doing it forever.

This also reflects larger problems in my state, which has among the worst K-12 education systems in the nation. One half of all incoming freshmen into the university I work for have to be remediated in BOTH math and english.

My state wants to educate an enormous population without paying for qualified professors and without providing adequate education for children before they arrive at the University gates.

The proletarianization of academic labor feels far too real to me. Adjuncts on one hand are being exploited for their expertise (although to be fair, the adjuncts at my university system unionized 10 years ago and are significantly more secure than at other places around the nation) and in my university are being used as leverage to manipulate and control full-time faculty. The man who runs the entire network of 30-some-odd campuses is a CEO (i.e., not an academic) and whose primary job is to save the state money. His explicit, public plans are to eliminate full-time faculty all together; these views are shared by our campus’s president, likewise a non-academic former businessman.

I feel like I’m living Max Weber’s and Karl Marx’s combined nightmares, as the faculty are made into cogs, the bureaucracy grows. The state is demanding so-called “accountability” of faculty for the “outcomes” on their student population. Instead of making students responsible for their own education (e.g., doing their homework), faculty will not hae their “efficiency” measured by the skills of their students upon completion of the course. All of this will be measured by standardized rubrics and rationalized examinations, outside the control of the actual professoriate, and instead administered by educational doctors (whom, somehow, I’m supposed to respect as colleagues).

I love being a teacher; and I love researching. The reality of the state of the profession and of academia in general is so far removed from what I saw as the lives of my older mentors that, I’d be lying if I said I was anything but disappointed.

This is in no way to denigrate the apparently very positive efforts made over there (I saw your name all over it, Kerim, including as regards Graeber’s situation – thanks for that work), but to ask questions that concern me, and apparently a few others.

BTW, I was part of the student unionizing effort in Seattle back in the late 1990s, and am extremely gratified to see that expanding as successfully as it has, despite the ongoing problems.

Warmly,

If you don’t like how these labor relations contribute to these conditions, then take some time off from all this autoethnographizing and organize.

interesting to see that there might be an academic version of the “fifteen-miles-each-way-everyday-uphill-both-ways-in-a-blizzard ” story to pass onto our juniors when they have the temerity to complain about how tough they have it.

but seriously, i think that the presumption that completion time is a reliable measure of anything relating to the intellectual process is a striking example of precisely the situation that Bousquet describes so trenchantly. assessing an individual’s intellectual project based on their “capabilities to focus and complete tasks” is exactly as ludicrous as measuring a child’s intellectual promise by considering solely their ability to sit straight and quietly in class and to be punctual in their return from recess. oftentimes being disciplined (in the multifaceted ways outlined by Foucault) is thought essential precisely because it is antithetical to any real, creative process. i know that i would much rather write a dissertation that satisfied my own intellectual curiousity than one which satisfied my department’s (totally unrealistic) guidelines regarding time-to-completion.

Given that this posting is also categorized under ‘labor,’ I’m surprised there’s been no discussion in the comments on the issue of academic organizing.

What unions (I don’t mean academic professional organizations, which seem to be completely uninterested in acting aggressively against their employers to secure livelihood and decent working conditions) exist for academics? This is a serious question. I am aware of only one (see the IWW page for educational workers) which really does so, but since it organizes industrially rather than by trade (so, janitors working for universities belong to the same union that the professors do), it would likely have little appeal to those who are more concerned with preserving prestige than improving overall working conditions. Any thoughts?

Warmly,

Should I have been clearer that abandoning my dissertation was not an option? Apparently so — that seems to be what folks ’round these parts are fixating on. But there, it’s as clear as I can make it — can we focus on the rest of the post now?

I think Oneman just needs to look at his posts more carefully to get a sense of how they read to people who aren’t Oneman.

Nice post, that Bousquet piece is great! For a psychedelic counterpoint, check out R. B. Fuller’s “Education Automation” published 42 years ago (http://www.bfi.org/?q=node/400), in which he predicts that “two-way TV” will function as a technology that enables truly universal liberal education, generates a public adequate to fulfil the promise of enlightened democracy, restructures the economics of the education industry in a way that “releases” scholars from professorial drudgery, and transforms the social values attached to education from bourgeois elitism to Aquarian communitas.

One wonders just where it all went so terribly wrong.

Jeff