Current Events
More on Adjuncts: Thanks, Kevin Carson, for Further Evidence on My Behalf
Kevin Carson recently called me out on Twitter: “Here’s one of those adjuncts that Jason Brennan says could “easily quit and go to Geico” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/good-people-dont-get-good_b_5935690.html …”
Two things wrong with this:
1. First, you can’t disprove a general claim with a few individual counterexamples. If a person claims “Generally, As have Es,” you disprove that by showing “Most As don’t have Es,” not by showing that this one A lacks an E.
2. Second, the person profiled here is evidence on behalf of my claims, rather than a counterexample. You definitely don’t disprove the claim “Generally, As have Es” by providing an instance of an A with an E. But that’s just what Carson’s done.
As Phil Magness neatly summarizes, the adjunct featured in the article made many mistakes:
- She took on 90K in debt to get a Ph.D. You shouldn’t take on debt to get a Ph.D.
- She didn’t try to publish in grad school but spent her time working to get the best grades she could.
- She tried to get a Ph.D. in English, which everyone knows (or easily could know) has terrible placement rates.
- As far as the article indicates, she’s been focusing on perfecting teaching rather than publishing in the best journals.
- She seems to have no research.
- Further, she claims she is getting paid very poorly per hour. As Magness explains here, in the “Myth of the Minimum Wage Adjunct”, if that’s true, then she must be spending a ridiculous amount of time outside the classroom prepping for her classes. Since she’s presumably teaching introductory classes, this is even more inexcusable.
- UPDATE: Ben Powell noted that she also seems to be looking for work only in a small geographic area. (The academic job market is at least national, and really more international for R1-type professors. Hardly anyone, even the top players, can just pick a city and hope to get a TT job there.)
Further, the article doesn’t provide good evidence that she’s tried hard to quit and get a better gig with full benefits in a different field.
My evil twin Jasper asked me to relate the following view: “I’m not saying that we should eliminate the welfare state. But the reality is that state budgets are limited. Every dollar spent on welfare services has an opportunity cost–it’s not money spent on some other valuable thing, like building a new children’s hospital or school. So, Jay, you’re really being too easy on these people. If they choose not to take their exit options, but instead choose to accept social insurance, then they’re choosing to divert resources away from other vital state interests in order to support their unproductive academic hobbies. What would Peter Singer of ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ fame think of that? These people clearly violate the Singer Principle. The people you’re criticizing aren’t merely ‘victims by choice,’ but are quite literally yanking resources away from deeper concerns of social justice when they didn’t have to. They may talk the hard leftist talk, but their actions indicate they care more about themselves than they care about social justice.”
Jasper is a jerk and tends to overstate things. Still, you can see where he’s coming from. Of course, I’m a bleeding heart, and don’t agree. I don’t want the profiled adjunct’s kids to go hungry.
I kinda like Jasper 😛
I suppose you would agree that anyone who told her she was doing the right thing is also culpable, here.
Yes, if that person should have known better.
And what if everyone told here she was doing the right thing, in a language louder than words?
This is the non-academic here with a question: the article says she presented papers at conferences. Is not the same thing as publishing? Don’t papers presented at conferences usually get published, or are going to be published and hence that’s why they’re at the conference (as a sneak peek, maybe?)
Again, I’m just not an academic and don’t know how these things work.
No, presenting papers isn’t the same as publishing. Most papers presented at conferences don’t get published, and it’s not that hard to get a paper accepted for presentation. Indeed, in some conferences, all one has to do is submit an abstract.
Even publishing isn’t that hard, as long as you aim low enough.
Universities want to see people presenting at conferences, or, better yet, being invited to give talks at peer institutions. But in end, all that really matters for research is publications in good journals.
In fact, lots of presentations without publications looks bad. Imagine two Ph.D. students, Jane and Kate.
Jane finishes her Ph.D. in philosophy in 6 years. She’s presented at the APA Eastern, Central, and Pacific 18 times. But she has no publications.
Kate finishes her Ph.D. in 6 years. She’s never once presented at the APA. But she has an article in Nous.
Kate looks awesome–she has an article in Nous! Amazing. Jane looks kind of *bad*. She looks like she starts projects but can’t finish them or see them through until the end.
Thank you for explaining this process. It does help put things in perspective.
Perhaps this controversy boils down to a couple of simple questions: does the current system of hiring and compensating adjuncts violate some right held by them? If so, what right is it, and how should it be vindicated?
There really is more to it, although the riches of this debate are not about to be mined but the likes of Kevin Carson or anyone else who’s got Billy Bragg playing in his head.
My argument from the earlier memory-holed threads was the best one against Jason’s position, and so far it’s gone totally unanswered. Runs like this:
1) We’re libertarians, and as such we’re supposed to be aware of price signals.
2) The various subsidies for grad school create a massively distorted price signal that says “Fuck GEICO, you should do this instead”.
3) The key decisions made in response to those price signals are made by naive young people, in the 22-28 range.
4) Such people naturally find it difficult to imagine that the entire grown-up world, including the coolest adults they’ve ever known, would be so corrupt as to create a system which at colossal expense manufactures 100 candidates for every job.
5) The messages contained in 2) and 4) are much more powerful than any mere speech warning kids off that path, because actions > words.
Well, I think you’ve set forth a reasonably accurate diagnosis of why we have this problem, if it is one, but if the answer to my first question is “no,” then I’m still left wondering what is morally suspect regarding Jason’s suggested solution. People make all sorts of bad decisions because they are unduly influenced by those they look up to or their peers. That’s why we say things like, “the young lad returned home older but wiser.” As a libertarian, I’m not about to advocate some paternalistic solution. Why is this so different than the lovesick guys who get a huge “Tiffany” tat on their chest only to be dumped by the young lady a week later?
No, I’m not saying young people are unduly influenced by their peers.
I’m saying prices, prices, prices.
Look, when the housing bubble collapsed, we didn’t walk around snarking at people for their “culpable stupidity” in paying $500,000 for a $350,000 house.
We say: “Of course people did that in droves. What else would anyone expect? The entire financial system was practically paying them to take loans.”
Same goes in this case, but stronger. Our entire society is literally paying these kids to take school. We’ve taken something that should cost money (or be carefully subsidized in individual cases based on hard evidence of future employment potential), and we’ve made it pay money.
You know…kind of like borrowing mortgages used to cost money, but then we made them so cheap it was like paying people to borrow. Just like that.
If I get what you’re saying, it’s that there are huge institutional and structural problems leading to the price distortions and the — let’s just call it this — non-free market. What we should be doing, as libertarians, are promoting reforms that fix these institutional and structural problems, get rid of the price distortions, and lead to a more free market. That’s not paternalistic, that’s just freedom. I think.
I feel like Matt said something similar to this in one of his Learn Liberty videos, but I can’t remember.
Yes, Matt. Where is Matt? I feel certain he would bring something to this.
Another simple way of putting my positions is this:
Does anyone imagine these adjuncts would exist in such numbers in the absence of the subsidies which put them through grad school in the first place?
No. Okay great. Then why in the hell can’t we all agree on THAT as problem number one?
I was never one “walking around snarking” at people who took out bad mortgages, but I don’t feel particularly sorry for them either. They bear at least some responsibility for their situation. And, I think the analogy is less than exact. Most of the mortgagees we are speaking of had minimal financial literacy, and were dealing with a somewhat complicated financial instrument. On the other hand, I think there is less excuse for adjuncts thinking they were going to beat the odds. It is hardly a secret that TT positions are few and far between.
Of course the relative number of tenure track positions was low, and known to be so, on an aggregate level.
Doesn’t matter. That’s the power of prices. People can know that and STILL get confused on an individual level, when someone says “here, you, take this bunch of money and go to grad school”.
People in the housing bubble knew something was fishy when post-war cracker boxes with one bathroom started going for 3/4 of a million bucks. But it didn’t matter, because that knowledge was less powerful than the price, on an individual level.
This is such a core belief of libertarians, really of all economically literate people, that I really can’t believe we’re arguing about it.
Shit, if you could just walk into a room and spin out some tough love about the job market and thereby OVERPOWER the most important signals in that market, then prices would be meaningless, Hayek would be wrong, communism would have worked, etc.
Sean, with all due respect, at any one moment millions of people are confused “at the individual level” about a lot of things (see, e.g., my tat example). I’m sorry, but if this is your point, it seems pretty trivial to me.
Think again. You’ve missed it.
Sean, I’m not sure what you mean about the price signal question. Yes, they get paid to go to school, but they can also see other price signals, such as the differences in pay between TT and adjunct faculty. Further, they can see that only about a 10% of Ph.Ds end up with TT jobs.
As for getting bad advice from their mentors: I agree that people receive this kind of advice. Some of my colleagues at Brown gave bad advice (e.g., don’t worry about publishing) to their grad students, to the grad students’ detriment. That said, I think there’s still sufficient evidence available to grad students such that they are culpable for taking this advice. Consider:
1. They can see which of senior grad students get jobs, and they’ll notice that the ones with pubs get jobs, while the ones without pubs don’t.
2. They can see that the people their own department hires have pubs in hand.
3. They can ask younger professors about the current job market, and the younger professors’ views are more reliable.
4. They can look at the various data-bases to see who gets jobs, and, with a bit of math and looking at CVs, determine that pubs matter the most.
I would expect someone planning to dedicate 5-10 years of his or her life to school to put in some due diligence.
Here’s what I mean about price signals. Imagine someone is trying to decide whether grad school is right for them, and they have three sources advising them:
The first is you, telling them just how long the odds are and backing it up with data.
The second is their mom, telling them the one thing everyone agrees on from the President of the United States right down to Uncle Sid is that more education is always a good idea.
The third is a grad school saying “Yeah, here’s $50,000 in tuition and stipend money that says you should sign up.”
My point, simple as I can make it, is this: you can blame someone for listening to mom and Uncle Sid instead of you, but you can’t blame them for thinking that $50,000 means something.
That’s the price signal in this game, and it’s more powerful than anything you or anyone else can range against it.
It’s always possible that I “missed it,” but I don’t think that’s true here. Return to my tat case. Suppose that the market price for having a huge “Tiffany” inked on your chest is $3000. Now, as a result of some stupid government policy, the price drops to $300, so that a lot of lovesick guys who wouldn’t normally do so, have tats of girlfriends done. Well, I’m still not going to feel sorry for them when their girlfriends dump them, because even at this price, it is a stupid thing to do. Acting on distorted price signals does not automatically make you a “victim.”
How odd. So if the government subsidized tattoo prices by 90%, you would NOT expect people to get more tattoos?
If people DID get more tattoos, you’d say…what exactly? That they all just got culpably stupid at the same moment, and by some strange coincidence in the same way?
That’s what you’d say?
Of course many people would jump at the discount tattoo. And yes, I would say that those who did are not entitled to any special sympathy, and that the many who declined, used good judgment. Just as I would say very similar things about those who did/did not take out unsustainable mortgages. What you seem to be missing throughout this entire conversation is that people are not billiard balls in some Newtonian thought experiment, but rational agents. Thus, many people who might have become adjuncts wisely decided NOT to. This is undeniable, so if you concede as you should that they exercised good judgment, why should we cry about those who didn’t?
Okay, now that you’re in bullet biting mode, let me close it up.
If you’e willing to say that people who bought houses in the bubble were culpably stupid, I have no stronger dose of lead to feed you.
I’m a little curious, though, to hear what you think prices actually do? Because clearly you disagree with the standard account.
I mean, if you’ve figured out a way for people to KNOW what a house is REALLY worth independent of its price, shouldn’t you be practicing your Nobel acceptance speech right about now?
I didn’t say they were “culpably stupid,” as I’m not even sure what “culpably” means in that phrase (should be punished?). What I said was that they don’t deserve any special sympathy.
As for prices, you are confusing economics and philosophy. I know what price signals do, but as I argued before, responding to distorted pricing does not automatically make you a victim, or demand my sympathy, which is the point at issue.
I’m going to reserve my sympathy for those arrested (or worse) for drug crimes, those who are condemned to a grossly inferior education because their parents are denied school choice, those who can’t self-employ because of licensure laws, etc. You know, real victims of the state. If this makes me a heartless, callous person in your eyes, I guess that will just have to be my cross to bear.
Boy, this debate is really bringing out the worst in people who aren’t me.
You speak of reserving your sympathy as if were scarce, but of course it’s not. You can feel sympathy for misled grad students and imprisoned drug users. One does not preclude or diminish the other. Nor indeed does it matter that each deserves a different degree of sympathy. To say that under-employed adjuncts deserve less sympathy than imprisoned drug users is not to say that they deserve none.
The victims of one bad system don’t stop being victims just because we can name another group of even worse victims from another bad system.
A subsidized academy that cranks out hundreds of PhD. holders for every plausible job is a bad system, and it produces many victims: ordinary people who get taxed to support the scheme, sincere intellectuals who get turned away from scholarship by the resulting bloat and sleaze, and yes…young people who receive faulty price signals about their chances for an academic career.
I’m not an especially sensitive person, Mark, and yet I find it easy to feel sympathy for each of those groups, in proportion to the harm they’ve suffered.
If I can do it, anyone can.
“Look, when the housing bubble collapsed, we didn’t walk around snarking
at people for their “culpable stupidity” in paying $500,000 for a
$350,000 house.”
How broadly do you define “we”? Because lots of people were doing that exact thing, and at least some of them self-identified as libertarian.
If you’re doing it right, your only large cost for going to grad school should be the time that could be spent doing something else. Most PhD programs fund their students with full tuition + a livable stipend. If you can afford the time (and granted some people can’t or shouldn’t) you won’t emerge with any substantial monetary debt. That’s far from getting a bad deal, or being hoodwinked by a corrupt system.
OTOH if you are paying to get a PhD, you probably shouldn’t be there in the first place.
Snap
Please forgive me, but I’ve been away from commenting for a couple weeks and I forgot how willfully thick people can be. I’ll speak slowly and clearly…
THE FUCKING STIPEND IS THE VERY FUCKING PRICE SIGNAL I’M FUCKING TALKING ABOUT.
Of course these adjuncts didn’t pay for grad school. Everyone knows that.
That’s why the signal is so powerful. When a 23 year old kid gets told “join this program, WE’LL PAY YOU to do it”, that’s called a price signal. Specifically that would be a labor price signal, but let’s not overwhelm you so early in the morning. And like I said, those signals are massively distorted by subsidies.
If the price system were working correctly, most of these kids would NEVER have gotten money for grad school. Not stipends, not loans.
In which case they would nearly all have figured out that grad school was a bad idea for them. Because there would have been a big scary price staring them in the face, saying “DON’T FUCKING DO IT!”
So, the only large cost for going to grad school is the opportunity cost of four to six years of foregone earnings and professional career development?
Nothing to see here, I guess.
Re 2) It’s hard to tell whether she received such a distorted price signal. Jason thinks she racked up 90k of debt by doing the PhD, but the article is not clear enough to tell. It just says she had a 90k student debt at the end of the period – could have been a legacy from her undergrad.
Jason is entirely correct you should certainly not do a PhD at all if you have to take on debt. Total craziness.
But let’s imagine she did get a full ride – I still don’t think the distortion is that large. They pay you, not very much, to study and eventually TA. The amount you make is almost always less than what you could get if you took a full-time job at GEICO. So even then, there’s already a financial incentive to exit, but people opt for lower pay in return for the chance to sit around, read books, talk academic talk with friends/enemies for 5-6 years. I don’t know what you think the price signal *should be*. That work has value to the university – TAs are cheap, cheaper than graduated PhDs, and paying a stipend is worthwhile to the university. What are these various “subsidies” you speak of?
“I still don’t think the distortion is that large. They pay you, not very much, to study and eventually TA.”
I just knew someone would make that mistake. Someone always does. Here’s why it’s wrong:
The value of the subsidy = Tuition + Stipend. Recall that in theory tuition is supposed to cost money, so start with that amount. Let’s say it’s $25,000, which she does not have to pay. Then add the stipend, let’s say it’s $18,000. That part she gets in cash.
That puts the total value of her subsidy at $43,000. Which is indeed quite a massive sum for a 23 year old whose only job skill is something like “transgressive hermeneutics of gender”.
I have a strong feeling you’re confusing the issue, but I also suspect you feel equally strongly that the confusion is mine, so I don’t really want to get into the weeds unless you’re open to having your mind changed (and I am open in that way).
Of course I’m open to having my mind changed. But so far no one’s tried. The only responses to my price signal argument are:
1) Silence.
2) Idiots saying that prices can’t matter because people really shouldn’t borrow money for grad school. Which is idiotic because it’s totally non-responsive to my point.
2) Idiots saying that stipends aren’t very large and thus, abracadabra, they don’t count as prices. Which is idiotic because stipends are very large when taken with free tuition, and “compared to what”…when measured against what the job market will otherwise pay people to hang around and intellectually masturbate for 6-8 years.
(NOTE: Because the earlier threads were deleted, I’ve had to go over those two bits bit of remedial econ TWICE, with two different sets of idiots! Fuckin’ arghhhhh!)
So seriously RJL, at this point I would LOVE IT if someone made a half-decent attempt to change my mind.
All they have to do is answer this question: why would anyone expect a prospective grad student to put more stock in Jason’s spoken advice than they put in a grad school’s offer to take $50,000 and ignore that advice?
Answer that, and we’re getting somewhere.
RJL, that’s true about the debt, but then everyone also should know that you shouldn’t get a Ph.D. if you have 90K of undergraduate debt.
Agreed, certainly.
I really appreciate this free blog, but these posts on the details of compensation within one industry that I’m not involved in are worth just what I pay for them. I love the articles of broader interest though.
Immediately I dislike you.
Hi Charles,
For what it’s worth, I think there’s a deeper philosophical interest here and that this isn’t just naval gazing.
Consider the question of exploitation and sweatshops. As Zwolinski and various economists have asked, even if sweatshops are exploitative, are they workers’ best realistic option? Is it actually possible to give them a better option? Do workers ‘choose’ sweatshops over the other alternatives?
This case is an even more interesting study for people interested in questions of exploitation. As I said to KC, here’s an analogy. Suppose for the sake of argument that governments shouldn’t use mines (the weapon). Now suppose my government wrongfully appropriates a plot of beachfront property and uses it as a mine testing site. Suppose the property is enclosed by a fence and has clear warning labels. Now, suppose that even though I have plenty of other beaches to walk on, I choose to walk on the testing site beach and get my legs blown off. The question of culpability is interesting here. Sure, the government ought not to have put the minefield there, but I also shouldn’t have been walking there.
This is slightly off-topic, but I feel it needs to be said. Anyone considering a Ph.D. needs to answer the following questions:
1. Do you have a burning desire to publish research articles in scholarly journals? (If “no,” don’t get a Ph.D.)
2. Has this burning desire manifested itself into actual writing, whether it be a publication, expansion of seminar papers, or any other type of scholarly writing voluntarily completed *outside* of assigned work? (If “no,” you probably shouldn’t get a Ph.D.)
3. Are you a self-promoter? Or do you see yourself as above all that, as too aristocratic for such vulgar activities? (If you’re not a self-promoter, you’ll need to learn to be one in order to succeed in today’s academy. If that gives you the willies, think twice about getting a Ph.D.)
The days where getting good grades, being smart, thoughtful, and a good teacher meant you could get a TT job somewhere are gone. In my opinion, that sucks, because a lot of these people would be better teachers and mentors to undergraduate students than the people who actually get TT jobs these days. But that’s reality.
My own profession of law has taken a similar tack, at least in the realm of law firms. In the old days, a lawyer might be kept around as a partner at a prestigious firm if he was smart, skilled, and liked by the other lawyers. Nowadays, if you don’t bring in business to the firm, you don’t make partner, period. Some of the best lawyers, and best people, in the legal profession were these so-called “service partners.” Now, if you don’t bring in business, you either get fired or kept in purgatory (“of counsel”—kind of like being an untenured assistant professor for your entire career).
The firms and the profession are worse-off in some ways for not having service partners (the equivalent of the thoughtful philosopher who everyone likes but who doesn’t publish). The outsized egos and influence of the “rainmaker” partners in law firms (the equivalent of well-known tenured professors) is grating and distressing. The ability to do one thing well like woo clients or place articles in fancy journals (both of which depend in large part on self-promotion and a willingness to sacrifice one’s personal life) is not really indicative of overall skill in the profession, let alone fitness for leadership of the profession. It sucks for everyone except those at the top, but that’s the reality today–better that everyone goes in with their eyes open than self-deceive about the noble professions or some other nonsense.
Good comment. Especially the part about self-promotion. That too should be fairly uncontroversial: the more otherwise qualified applicants who flood a given selection process, the more important ruthless self-promotion will be in sorting winners from losers.
When you meet a dermatologist, for example, you can safely bet you’re meeting someone who approached the match process like a succession crisis in Game of Thrones.
This caused a bit of upset when I said it last time around, but more and more when you see a tenured prof you can safely bet you’re looking at someone whose surest skill is negotiation of the tenure process itself. Of course I don’t meant to suggest that’s their only skill, just that it’s the one which marks the difference.
This is a VERY hard thing to teach a young person who still thinks the academy exists to find and spread knowledge.
As I read it, she’s not looking for academic work any more.
Jason – let me offer this comment in the spirit of reconciliation:
I don’t have any adjunct friends, but if I did the advice they’d get from me wouldn’t be very different from the advice you’re giving them.
I, too, would tell them to cut their sunk cost losses and give something else a try. Maybe even GEICO.
I, too, would tell them it’s stupid to march around mimicking early 20th century trade unions, in an effort to make universities behave more like mid-20th century egalitarian states. Hell, even when that works…it doesn’t.
In other words, I would encourage any adjunct friends to abandon the losing game and take control of their futures. If I happened to catch someone on an adjunct trajectory while they were still in grad school, I’d send them your way for advice on how to and when not to.
The only difference is, I would never tell them it was their fault for losing the game. I’d tell them the game is inherently dirty, and that it works in part by the Ponzi method of luring in more new recruits than it can ever hope to pay off. I’d tell them about the distorting effect of subsidies on prices. And I’d tell them that in my book young people can be forgiven for failing to understand just how grubby the world of grown-up rent-seeking can be. Especially when those rent seekers appear to them in the guise of passionate intellectual role models.
That’s it. That’s all I’m asking.
Looks like a lot of complaining that people are not rational calculators, but do things like believe what they are told or fail to fully research everything at all times before making any decision. You know, things Austrian economists are supposed to be best at taking into consideration.
I think many people are misled about grad school and the situation after graduation. This would point to institutional problems.
Also, it’s easy to defend a game you’ve succeeded in. But that doesn’t make the game fair or good.
http://zatavu.blogspot.com/2015/04/those-who-defend-rules.html
Three things: the academic job market is worse now than just 5 years ago, so I don’t see how people entering into programs which require 7+ years to PhD should have been expected to know that.
Second: Jason should know that most people go into academia because they’re passionate about the subject matter and are hoping to make an okay living studying and teaching it (but with no expectations of a lavish living). In this respect it is similar to being a professional musician or artist, which fields I’m sure have even lower success rates than academia.
If I heard someone took ten years out of their life training to become a professional musician because music was their passion, but at the end of that ten years they were unable to find any way of making a reasonable living at it, I would certainly feel sorry for said person, even though they surely knew the odds were against them when they started. The fact remains they put a huge amount of effort in hopes of a career doing something they loved and they failed. The fact that they should have known they had a good chance of failure doesn’t make them any less worthy of sympathy.
Lastly, as a tenure-track professor at a top university himself, Jason simply cannot express this opinion without opening himself to criticism because the probability is simply too great that, had he not been successful at finding a good job, he would not now be arguing this case. I am as much in favor as anyone of judging an argument based on its merits and not its source, but the fact remains that he’s a “winner” arguing against sympathy for “losers” (in this system), and that’s a tough hurdle to jump.
As an academic reading this, some of the details are cringe-inducing: she is proud of straight As in grad school, conference presentations, putting effort into teaching and organizing events. What jumps out at you is the conspicuous absence of “original research” or “publications” in that list. That her advisors were telling her that good people get jobs while letting her get away with such an awful set of priorities is downright unethical (if she was exploited by anyone in this story it is by the schools and the advisors who took her money for such self-serving “guidance”).
The most charitable interpretation is that she said something very different and the journalist adapted it out of ignorance. Perhaps the journalist thought that “straight As” would sound good. Maybe it does if you don’t know academia, but it comes up as a red flag if you do. The possibility of taking interesting courses during a PhD and conference travel is more properly seen as a perk of grad school, not as the main point (that would be research and publications). Saying that she took full advantage of the perks in her previous job is not the best thing on your résumé if not accompanied by actual accomplishments.
Vaguely related: As a former grad student who thinks this adjunct justice movement is a bit ridiculous, I am disappointed by the extreme focus on research over teaching in most grad programs. I taught classes at an elite university, but had zero oversight whatsoever. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to think that teacher quality is any better at elite universities vs. state schools vs. small liberal arts schools vs. whatever. It doesn’t help that being a good researcher and being a good teacher don’t seem to be skills that are correlated to any great extent. No doubt many adjuncts are hoping their positions are a way to get back into the TT research professor game, but there really is no place for people who just want to teach and focus on teaching at the undergraduate level. Being an adjunct certainly isn’t that. This is probably just more evidence that education is more about signalling than learning.
My apologies to Gracie for attracting this slimeball’s attention (and Magness’s) to her. Apparently trolling the Precaricorps Facebook page wasn’t fratboyish enough for him.
Kevin, since you read the Twitter posts before I did, you are no doubt aware that the Precaricorps people first posted my pic all around Twitter, and then sent me a bunch of harassing emails. Only after they did that did I post a link to the GEICO career page on their Facebook page. I didn’t even write a mean message. I explained to them that quite literally I think it’s a better option and they should take it.
Kevin is well aware that the first tweet of your meme–with YOUR words and picture–did not come from PrecariCorps. So much for your discernment. And the tweet was only in response to your 2/25 blog posting, equating adjuncts as losers and yourself as a winner of the Tenure Track game. Thanks for your apology to Grace, Kevin. Sorry to see it deleted, as so many comments on this blog have been in that last hour or so.
N1Academy, your post is not counter evidence. You clearly didn’t read Magness’s breakdown. In order for her to be making less than minimum wage, she must be spending about 310 hours prepping/grading for 45 hours of classroom contact. That is an absurd amount of time to spend outside the classroom on one class.
If you need to spent 310 hours prepping/grading/meeting with students to teach an intro class, you are either 1) so tremendously inefficient at this line of work that it isn’t for you, or 2) working far past the point of diminishing marginal returns.
So, despite your snide tone, I am once again not merely right, but obviously right.
And gosh darn it, people like you!
Says the guy who was harassing me while I was at a birthday party with my kids.
There’s a difference between walking into a boxing ring and getting attacked by boxers when you’re at the mall.
If you could make such fundamentally obvious distinctions, Bob, you’d probably have a TT job.
Dear self-proclaimed genius: I suggest a good dictionary, as “bullying” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Ahhh. I am sorry. Twitter and Facebook and comment sections are still very new to me. If I remember correct the issue raised was about contracting, yes?
Robert, is this your book?
“This is an aporetic text, one which presents ways of hearing (and speaking from within) the silence of being-an offering that continues to ask Heidegger’s essential question, “Why is there any being at all?” Itself challenges us to get over ourselves so we can finally start thinking and living without the melodramatic longings for metaphysical unity. From within this space of infinite possibilities, Baum offers formidable readings of Heidegger’s “The Turning” and later works as well as timely remixes of continental philosophy. He also retraces ereignis to show how being reveals itself to itself (a double negation) on its own terms, disclosing an aggressive infiltration of the Cartesian cogito to show how itself gives (life). DJ-like drop beats and whole interludes discuss media and popular culture in a way that moves the discussion of ereignis beyond the confines of yet another Heidegger study toward an intense meditation designed to radicalize philosophy (itself).”
Is that what you consider good writing?
Robert, you’ve literally offered no evidence against any of my counterarguments, and you write in the raving style of crazy person.
Robbie, I’ve literally covered this a few times. I had a whole post on this very point. Adjuncts get a flat rate, which is meant to cover *all* of the in and out of class time.
E.g., I taught an off-load exec ed class last semester, and got paid $16,000 for 16 class sessions. But it was understood that this money was not just for in-class time, but for out-of-class time. It was up to me to determine how much time to spend out of class prepping and grading.
That’s how it works for adjuncts, too.
QED.
Robert, it’s pretty bullshit for you to try to pull that. My work is not sponsored by Cato, and gets published in the very best peer-reviewed outlets in philosophy, despite a weak bias against libertarians. Do you think the Koch brothers sent *Ethics* a check so I could get a paper in there.
And it’s not a good first book contract, either. It doesn’t count towards tenure where I work.
Well, we all know for sure that the Koch Brothers didn’t bribe the referees who awarded you that silver modesty pin. Excuse me, gold modesty pin.
Ironically, I also have one the best papers on modesty published in one of the best journals.
Robert, I suspect you’re missing quite a lot.
I’ve covered them like six times each.
My god, man, that was the BEST blurb you could come up with? Seriously?
You weren’t paying attention to Jason’s argument. The only people who should even try are those as talented as him. So long as they are also as self-aware of that talent as him, and can self-finance, without debt, the whole ride through. Jason can’t even conceive of a counterfactual where he didn’t make it to TT, or at least turned down a few dozen less TT positions.
Clarification: The contracts are negotiable–but by administration only. It says one has reasonable expectation of employment in the spring for classes or (a class) in the fall in order to keep an individual from claiming unemployment benefits over the summer when s/he is not awarded any classes. Then in the fall, it can drop the adjunct with any excuse or deliberate action, for instance– the class size can be bumped up in each section to eliminate the “expected” section. So sorry–your section didn’t make.
This was conversation to continue. It has been tampered with, yes?
Very much so.
Nothing to add here except that I find it telling Brennan saw the necessity of deleting comments that contradicted his viewpoint. If you can’t win by logic, win by defamation and volume. Nice to see open dialogue is so prized in these circles.
…
Prof. Brennan, I’m actually unsure of what your position is here. All that you’ve said amounts to: “Adjuncts are personally responsible for their current situations and thus should stop complaining.” This is not a very nuanced or sophisticated position to assert, especially when discussing an issue that is quite complex (far more complex that you have acknowledged in your commentary).
If obtaining a tenure-track faulty position is akin to winning the lottery, why hold those who did not hit the metaphorical jackpot personally responsible? Why is it not simply bad luck? Surely, we can all agree that there simply way too PhD’s out there, and not nearly enough jobs to accommodate them all. The market is completely flooded. So it seems safe to assume that, in many cases, universities are hiring people for TT positions from a field of equally and extremely-well-qualified candidates. It doesn’t make much sense to suggest that people who get the TT jobs are more well-qualified than those who do not; it could come down to looks, or body type, or sense of humor, or taste in music, or any other number or factors irrelevant to being a professor. Blaming adjuncts for not having a TT job is, in my view, an indirect route for you to sing your own praises. “I’m here because I’m smarter and harder-working than you; you are there because you’re dumb and lazy.” It is, at best, motivated reasoning and, at worst, gross narcissism.
You also hold that adjunct professors are not victims because they are personally responsible for their current plight, which they have the ability to change. I’m willing to agree with this, to an extent. While I believe that individuals are responsible to change the circumstances in their life they find unsatisfactory, I don’t think the options available to a PhD with a highly-specialized field of research are as vast as you suggest. Even if there are plenty of options available (which I do not think there are), it isn’t obvious that employers would want to hire PhD’s. Employers want someone who will sufficiently complete their assigned tasks for a pittance. It may often be assumed that PhD’s will demand a higher salary. In some cases, an employer may avoid hiring a PhD out of fear the overly-qualified candidate may undermine her authority or steal her future promotions.
But you also grant that the American higher education system is corrupted and flawed. Why, then, should we conclude that the adjuncts should all find other jobs (e.g. at GEICO)? Is it not equally logical to conclude that an attempt should be made to fix the corrupted system? Is there any reason to assume that the majority of adjuncts finding jobs on other sectors of the economy is an optimal outcome? Why would this result in a better outcome than adjuncts making an effort to reform a broken system and demand a living wage?
Which brings me to my final point. Your focus on the hourly pay of adjuncts is completely off-target. For the sake of discussion, I will grant that each course requires 135 hours (although I do not agree with this figure or the conclusions you draw from it). Most adjuncts teach, at most, two classes a semester. This would mean a salary of $12,000. It doesn’t matter if the hourly wage is above the national mean hourly wage because $12,000 is barely enough to clothe and feed oneself. In 2015, the national poverty threshold is $11,770. Spending money on things like entertainment is out of the question. Owning a car (or a home, for that matter) is an impossibility. One would be lucky for a salary of $12,000 to cover rent, utilities, and food. What the pay breaks down to by the hour is not relevant. At all.
“If obtaining a tenure-track faulty position is akin to winning the lottery, why hold those who did not hit the metaphorical jackpot personally responsible? Why is it not simply bad luck?”
I keep hearing people say this, but there’s little basis in fact. Faculty jobs are not randomly distributed. If it were a lottery, we’d expect to see that people who get jobs at Princeton are no more impressive on average than people who get jobs at Keene State University.
It’s another bit of bad faith among the madjunkt crowd that they’ve just lost the lottery. Alas, while the university system is not perfectly meritocratic, it’s far more like meritocracy than a lottery. People with terminal degrees from highly ranked institutions and with lots of publications in top journals get jobs. People who lack these things don’t.
When I say the odds are bad, I mean odds are low in the way that the odds of getting an MLB baseball contract are low. Academia is best seen as following a tournament model of employment, like baseball. (Apparently a bunch of people at Leiter Reports think this is crazy, but it’s the standard view among people who actually study this stuff.)
I hoped to return to continue this, Darth Vader. Do you have screen shot you can send me please on Twitter (@2050dbp)?
I think so. I’ll check. If I do, I will certainly send it via your Twitter account, DBP.