After reading in November’s “Noteworthy” column of Perspectives about the continuing decline in history majors and history PhDs, and then advancing to Clayborne Carson’s terse (and depressing) analysis of hiring patterns of historians, I found myself going back again and again to the sentence that succinctly describes my own little niche in the academic firmament: “There are still many recent PhDs looking for first jobs or more permanent academic employment.” I don’t know how many of us there are out there, but that bald statement doesn’t begin to explain what it is like to be holding on with nails and teeth to a career in academe.
I am one of the 616 doctorate recipients in history for the academic year 1982–83. My university is not on any of Professor Carson’s lists; perhaps that means I should have thrown in the towel already. But I have not chosen to do so, nor do I expect to. For the forseeable future at least, I have chosen to hardscrabble my way to “more permanent academic employment” by mak ing my way through what I call the adjunct jungle, a half-world of part-time teaching at peculiar hours at schools of dubious academic rigor and repute. The jungle is populated by PhDs and ABDs struggling to publish that first article and hoping that “the pressure on the academic job market will be some what abated” before they reach retirement age.
Being based in New York City, has certain advantages for a new PhD, not the least of which is the large number of adjunct positions available. The other side of the coin, of course, is that many of the positions are at institutions whose academic standards and facilities leave much to be desired. One four-year college where I taught lacked almost every conceivable support tool for effective teaching. Maps were non-existent, the use of A/V equipment was discouraged due to the difficulty in borrowing hardware from the art department (the history department owned none of its own), and the main school library was twenty-five miles away.
Consequently, books, I was told, could be requested from the library, but the process took four to six days. Upon receiving my class schedule, I inquired how my office hours should be arranged, but was told that office hours would not be required; I was not being given an office.
The office shortage was, in turn, caused by the fact that nearly all of the history courses (there was a two-semester history core requirement) were being taught by adjuncts. There was, in fact, only one full-time history faculty member on that campus. This plethora of part-timers simply swamped the available office space. Offices were awarded on a basis of seniority: a curious concept for adjuncts.
This example underlines the fact that younger and less experienced PhDs are placed in situations that preclude quality teaching. It is a buyer’s market, and an adjunct who complains about conditions can easily be replaced. Yet applicants for full-time positions at reputable colleges are expected to have teaching experience. Where else can that experience be gained, except by adjuncting? Most PhD programs in history offer teaching fellowships of one sort or other for their senior graduate students, and this experience can be valuable. But the courses taught are almost always freshman Western civilization or world history surveys, often covering subjects far distant from the graduate students’ specialties.
. . . how is the young PhD supposed to gain teaching experience? How is he or she to demonstrate the “commitment to excellence in teaching” mentioned in so many EIB notices?
William J. Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, noted in a recent report print ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education and reviewed in Perspectives [February 1985] that most humanities core courses are taught by very junior and part-time faculty: the faculty members he sees as least qualified (by their lack of experience) to teach such vital courses.
If this is true, then how is the young PhD supposed to gain teaching experience? How is he or she to demonstrate the “commitment to excellence in teaching” mentioned in so many EIB notices? If we are not to teach lower-division courses, how are we to learn to teach upper-division electives?
At the risk of sounding like Rodney Dangerfield, as teachers, adjuncts get no respect. To Joyce Appleby, writing in the pages of Perspectives [Sept. 1984] many of us are “. . . part-time Evel Knievels who put together a living wage by aggregating courses at campuses covering a fifty-mile radius” rather than “. . . hapless, talented victim[s] of the vagaries of the academic marketplace.”
Though she has statistics to support her views, I remain unconvinced. How many of her (presumably) motorcycle-mounted adjuncts, speeding from campus to campus, have simply given up the search for a permanent position, or haven’t the time to do their own research and publish when faced with the necessity of finding that living wage?
As Professor Appleby goes on to note, we are isolated from the mainstream of collegial activities; isolation breeds contempt, and contempt breeds indifference. It is all well and good to encourage adjuncts to attend and participate in scholarly meetings and ongoing research, but what can we do when we are denied, as I and my acquaintances have been, access to departmental facilities, libraries, and even the simple courtesy of a mailbox? As long as we are considered to be second-class citizens, or part of “. . . a vast army of underpaid flunkies,” (I quote University of Chicago Professor Wayne Booth’s 1982 Presidential Address to the Modern Language Association), who can be surprised if we become bitter and disillusioned?
A colleague of mine, while adjuncting at a four-year college, requested maps for his general studies class. He was told that the maps were only for the use of day-session faculty. What standards of excellence this will breed can only be imagined.
The statistics mentioned by Professor Appleby may demonstrate a prevailing trend, but for those of us living in the “hapless victim” portion of her bell-shaped curve, academe is a tantalizing, frustrating dream.
The pressure to earn some sort of a living leads to strange bedfellows. I have been teaching sociology (as an adjunct, of course) in a two-year college off and on for the last few years. Occasionally I even wonder about the young sociology PhD whose job I have presumably stolen. I don’t know that my students are suffering (though my approach to sociology is suspiciously historical), but somehow this is not what I had in mind as I labored over my dissertation. For one brief and shining moment last spring, I was teaching four different courses at three separate schools in four subject areas—none of which was my speciality. It is getting to the point where my area of expertise is the only area in which I have not taught.
To make ends meet, one begins to look elsewhere. Part-time administrative positions in general studies or continuing education, summer programs, grant-writing, counseling, “needs assessment,” and whatever keeps you on campus for a year or two. At the end of each semester it may be back into the pool. Last summer I administered a senior citizen education program that required that I live in the university dormitory with 200 students over the age of sixty. I arranged their classes, meals, accommodations, and after-class activities and entertainment. I even grilled hamburgers at their barbecues and drove them around in a van. The program ran well; I enjoyed it tremendously (except when I had to explain to the seniors what I did, or rather didn’t do, the rest of the year), and the college was pleased. At the end of the summer, however, I was unemployed.
I am not alone in this predicament. My fellow unemployed are told, of course, that the way out of our situation is to publish. That is considerably easier said than done, but not just for the obvious reasons. The day you are given your diploma you lose your library card, and suddenly access to sources becomes a constant battle.
Most university libraries are cooperative to “visiting scholars” from other schools, but adjuncts or, far worse, recent PhDs without academic affiliations, may lack sufficient identification to gain entrance. Why bother to make an expensive computerized photo ID card for a here today/gone tomorrow adjunct? It can be hard enough to enter your own school’s library; access elsewhere becomes a nightmare. Some schools allow a visitor an arbitrary number of access days per semester and then charge an exorbitant access fee for additional time. Some libraries simply refuse admission at all.
If this barrier is breached, however, suddenly you find yourself alone. As a student, it was easy to discuss works in progress with mentors, other faculty members, and fellow students. This all disappears. Mentors have the next crop of would-be employable PhDs; there is no time for you. Now I know how Egyptian tomb painters must have felt, laboring on masterpieces that no living eye would ever see. But ancient Egypt is not my period.
The conventional wisdom (no pun intended) is to attend scholarly meetings and discuss your work there. I am perhaps luckier than most, for I can afford a relatively large personal travel budget. No college will subsidize an adjunct’s expenses at a professional meeting. In the past two years I have attended meetings in seven states and Canada; I have delivered five papers. But the simplest things are not easy for the young PhD. Unaffiliated scholars are rarely welcome speakers. Adjuncts find that prestigious organizations are looking for “named” speakers. We do better in open calls for papers by regional conferences, but there we run the risk of being thrown into hodge-podge sessions of papers linked only by the most tenuous of themes: “New Approaches in British History.” At one recent conference where I read a paper, my commentator announced to the audience that he was unfamiliar with my period or my sources but nevertheless advocated a neo-Marxist approach to my topic. He then moved on to discuss the other papers, which were more to his doctrinal taste.
From such papers, we adjuncts are told, grow published articles, but the barriers are the same, only higher. I often wonder why journals don’t devote one article per issue to the work of newcomers. I doubt that this will occur, but when journals continue to fill their pages with only the work of famous or at least established scholars, how can we compete? We ask, not for miracles, but only for a chance to be heard, to have our work seen and evaluated by scholars in our own fields. Research can be a lonely and repetitive task, but why bother at all if no one will see the results? I find myself back painting tombs.
Do I sound just a bit shrill? That is because of the weight of frustration that I and my fellows carry. I was warned from the beginning that entry into the academic world was hard, but I am increasingly distressed by the double binds. I am tired of being dismissed as a third-rate teacher because I am an adjunct. I am tired of short-term pseudo-academic jobs with a life-expectancy of one semester. I am tired of being denied access to libraries and collections that are the tools of my chosen trade. I am tired of working in isolation and silence. I am tired of finding paths blocked that should be open to all of us. We 616 are the future of the discipline. If we give up, if we are forced out, what lies ahead in 1995? In 2005? That is only twenty years away.
I do not want to give up, and I have my compatriots, including those still in graduate school, who still hope to find a place in the profession. We do not ask for silver platters and easy guarantees. We ask only to be heard, to be read, and to be judged upon our merits as historians. That is the only job title I wish to have.
Stephen Greenberg is presently a part-time employee of three colleges and universities in the New York metropolitan area. He is also doing research on the political propaganda of Stuart England.
