Tower Tuesday: The adjunct caste system

 This article, from The Chronicle of Higher Ed, discusses the evolution of the economic and academic tier system inside higher education. One's economic stability (or instability) as an individual, it argues, contributes to whether one has free time and funds to go to conferences that, ultimately, make one a better professor. Adjuncts who are trying to break into full-time faculty positions may be economically prevented from attending conferences, even ones at which they can interview for the faculty jobs they so highly prize, by the fact that their pay is so low.

One of the comments on the article reads this way:
"Looks like we have reached a tipping point, finally. It wasn't too long ago that Mr. Croxall's paper would have been considered career suicide. Admin would have viewed him as a petulant whiner. "Take it or leave it" would be the official response. He would have been ignored or shunned by his peers (other contingent faculty), who had hope still that things would get better, at least for them. The appalling statistics can no longer be ignored. Folks have been silent too long--universities can no longer claim to be forwarding social justice when contributing to increased social injustice for the majority of its faculty."

As someone who has taught as an adjunct and a GTA for the better part of six years, I can attest to the economically abysmal conditions that exist for higher ed teachers who can't break into full-time faculty positions. The systemic answer is: "You chose this for yourself -- with all of that schooling, you could have been a lawyer or a doctor." And that's true.  There is a difference, though, between hitting the top of the economic food chain and finding yourself, in a professional sense, at the bottom.

Admittedly, the increasing difficulty new PhDs are having finding their first job has contributed to my less than rational malaise about completing my dissertation. I don't know whether that's just personal reflection or a trend felt by others.