Herb Childress, Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission

摘要

I carried Herb Childress’s Adjunct Underclass, a book about the damage done to academia by the widespread adoption by universities of an unsustainable and exploitative model of human resources, with me on a commuter train heading to one of my two current out-of-town teaching contracts and to a negotiation of my union local’s collective agreement. When I was home it sat beside my desk as I read emails informing me that I had not made short lists for a tenure-track position (“we received a high number of exceptionally strong applications”), and as I pondered the expiration date of my attempt at an academic career. When I opened the book, I invariably felt interpolated in some intense way, sometimes (in the argot of the very online) seen, occasionally triggered, and very often personally attacked. Like Childress’s observation about adjunct email, that “all of the between-class contact with students, the casual coaching that shifts confusion into possibility, [takes] place over email,” such that “brief conversations [become] a series of carefully crafted writing projects of their own, adding more time to the week.” Similarly, the discussion of PhDs from prestigious programs who, having lost out in the market for the few elite positions available, out-compete people with less prestigious PhDs for jobs at lower-tier schools; and of how completing a PhD after 35 makes you less likely to end up in the tenure-track: all pretty bleak content, and highly relatable. (I got my PhD from Carleton at age 42). This is the level at which the book works best, and its effectiveness in capturing what is wrong with adjunctification and what being an adjunct feels like makes it worth reading, even if its analysis is weak.