Of the 50 respondents to the post-adjuncting survey, 32 now hold tenure track positions. Of the 13 that provided answers to clarify what kinds of jobs they currently work in, most were in full-time research, consulting, or non-tenure track instuctorships. Of those same 50 respondents, the vast majority adjuncted as their principle means of income for four years or less (43); the other seven have all been adjuncting for six or more years, with two respondents doing so for 10 or more years. (Based on the data, it looks like the two long-term adjuncters are half of a two-income household, which might explain why they have continued to adjunct for so long.) When compared to the current adjuncts, the numbers are pretty similar. Of the 36 respondents who provided an answer to how long ago they received their Ph.D.s, most were in the five years or fewer category (31 of 36). The other five are all in the nine years or more category.

Taken together, it looks like the window of opportunity for getting a tenure track job is the first five years after the awarding of a Ph.D.

Yes, we have a small sample size – only slightly over 100 between the two surveys — but might it be representative? Is there a logic to this five year window?

Except in unusual circumstances, the economic ability for someone to survive on adjuncting salaries alone is five years or fewer — especially if they’re the sole source of income, and particularly if there are student loans involved. After five years (or four is what our survey shows), people might simply muster out of the discipline or seek out non-tenure track jobs.

Along with that dire economic situation, there’s also the window of intellectual impact. Some dissertation topics — which might find their mooring in responding to something current during one’s coursework —  might just fade in being of general interest to anthropologists. This is difficult to gauge, but it seems like a possibility.

And, finally, if a job-seeker is having a hard time publishing, that might be the real closing of the proverbial window. If someone is out for a year or more and is competing against more recent graduates with one or more articles, the odds might be growing longer by the year.

There aren’t any hard and fast answers here, but it’s worth thinking about: when should you throw in the towel and give up looking for a tenure track job? And, if you refuse to throw in the towel, what can be done to get onto the tenure track?

This post is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.

It is said that when the Indian cricketer “iron man” Sunil Gavaskar announced his retirement in 1987, he observed that it’s nicer by far to quit when people still ask “why?” instead of “why not?”

I’d like to think that I quit the tenured position that I’d held for a decade at a similar juncture. Not simply because my research and career trajectories were pointing upwards, but because institutionally things were stable—or should I say, stable enough. Anthropology was accepted as a valued service department key to maintaining multiculturalist credentials; our graduate program was growing organically—enough to justify a new faculty line. And yet it was on a crisp sunny fall 2008 day that a container with most of our belongings left our home in Houston for Pondicherry; the implications of the subprime mortgage crisis were just beginning to manifest themselves, though an increasingly anxious buzz was the only sound on the airwaves. Our Dean was soon to retire, and with him was to go the system of benefaction we’d so long worked with just fine. Big changes were ahead, though we could hardly have predicted their impact at the time: close-to-bone cuts in legislative funding, new initiatives to measure faculty productivity both within and without, new drives to measure the value of service programs like Anthropology by majors enrolled rather than by semester credit hours taught, an apparently new proactiveness from State educational policy-makers that determined, more than ever before, the fates of individual programs.

These are not just idiosyncratic details, specific to our school or to Texas, but rough measures of the sort of dubious “stability” that exists within the public university and that creates spaces for scholarship: “secure” only until the next (financial) crisis or push to fiscal efficiency. This is a condition that probably doesn’t need much elaboration for Savage Minds readers, but I want to pin it as a point of contrast to what we see then as life off the precipice, in the abyss of adjunctdom. The fear of falling, as Barbara Ehrenreich might have described the feeling one gets looking down.

It’s an academic commonplace that a life of adjuncting ain’t no fun at all, for anyone with professional career-building aspirations; indeed it can be downright exploitative. We know full well that adjuncts or contingent faculty teach well over half of all college-level courses, that the contributions of adjunct faculty are critical to the functioning of many programs, particularly smaller ones—but for all that adjuncts are poorly compensated, poorly supported, and poorly recognized. For a long time there we dared not call it outright exploitation, for fear of admitting that we, too, could be complicit in upholding structures that we would otherwise subject to brutal critique. But times have changed and the numbers are now such—“Adjunct, contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities,” wrote MLA president Michael Berubé just this past January—that the issue is no longer consigned to its former invisibility. Data freshly being gathered about adjunct numbers and pay, as also about University presidents’ salaries is both tool and sign of building awareness. Badly paid, written out of University governance, with practically no access to University travel or research funds, with no healthcare or other benefits, always that much less credible than colleagues on the tenure track, and yet present in such numbers, the centrality of contingent faculty to the normal functioning of the University and therefore the problemof contingency in the academy has never seemed clearer. Or worse.

I cannot generalize beyond a point, and I certainly do not want to rationalize the corporatized, Higher Ed Inc. market-driven academy model that feeds on adjunct work while increasingly driven by for-profit motivations. And yet I want to say that there’s sometimes a trade-off in accepting one’s position on the adjunct margins, at least in the cases I’ve seen and now myself represent: considering one’s prospects over that of the spouse/partner with a job in town, considering life with new babies, considering the need for teaching experience to get out of graduate school with some, considering the prospects of being able to keep one’s ties to the academy and life-as-one-once-knew-it from as far off as India. It’s a terrific price to pay, one that’s sufficient to nurse lifelong bitterness, but there are also at times compelling reasons why we’re willing (or have no choice but) ultimately to pay it.

The question for us, however, is: What happens to research under such conditions? One of the less discussed but very significant shifts that comes from going adjunct (aside from but obviously connected to labor precarity) is that there’s literally no pressure to do research of any sort. No graduate advisor breathing down one’s neck. No Chair or Dean demanding annual reports. No periodic review process; no institutional guidelines for performance and no pressure. No support—and therefore also no pressure. Writing it out this way, it seems this sort of reprieve ought to be liberating (and I’ll get to some free play elements in later posts), except that it’s hard to imagine that anyone seeks such reprieve in adjuncting. Au contraire, if next year will be the year to get back into the market and adjuncting is a stop-gap measure, then the pressure to keep oneself alive scholastically is that much more terrific. In other words: I have no compulsions except those I levy on myself to remain an anthropologist any longer. [Hence perhaps the credibility issues adjuncts face?]

The result is something of an existential crisis, at least in my case. So many conversations with family on the value of doing any writing work at all—the present narratives for Savage Minds included—alongside so many other conversations about keeping academically current just-in-case. A stubborn will not to let go of the argument about research value made so routinely to administrators: that good teaching, even at the freshman level, draws much from the currency of research. And yet, the realities of working in isolation, which is in my case compounded greatly by physical distance and mediated only by email and the internet—being cut out of conversations, with only personal money to attend conferences (but again, no clear justification for that sort of expense!), and few possibilities of networking besides, leave alone the task of fingering the pulse of new approaches and new research.

A dear friend remarked, when I told her of our imminent move years ago and expressed concern about what would happen next: not to worry; people will be on you like white on rice; can you imagine having a collaborator in India? Needless to say, the proposals haven’t exactly come pouring in, not the least because that sort of writing-thinking-conceptualizing work takes time and a sort of organizational marshalling that I, for one, struggled to find even with full institutional support and impetus. The thing about being adjunct, too, is that one is rarely ever just adjunct: it’s usually one of several jobs one has going in this just-in-case and because-I-love-it model of existence. I still know colleagues who take summers off in their field-sites, though as I recall that was easier by far if the fieldsite was Mexico then when it was India. As an adjunct now, I’ve also traded away my summers: it’s time faculty cordon off for their research, so the courses available to teach are more. There’s hardly any time for ethnography in the conventional/classical sense.

So, what sort of ethnography is possible? My next posts will take up this question in somewhat more detail, coming at “ethnography” from the realities of what fieldwork becomes, under such conditions of constraint, and the possibilities that writing and analysis open up.

Deepa S. Reddy is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She blogs on food, culture, and gastronomical life on Pâticheri: Ethno.graphic.Food