Ghosts in the Academic Machine [View all]

[KamaAina]

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1070-ghosts-in-the-academic-machine

It’s been more than a year since I’ve been in a college classroom, and the three-and-a-half years I spent at the head of one now feel like a past life, dimly remembered. I was an adjunct, teaching four or five classes a semester between two campuses, and I made roughly $13,000 a year doing so. It wasn't so bad, until it was. And then it was awful.

To the readers of Vitae, I know my story is depressingly unexceptional. Indeed, I would wager that most people reading these words can tell a similar hard-luck story, if not one far worse. I have read enough "quit lit" to know that the reasons for ditching academia are manifold, but mine were simple: I had a family now. I could no longer wait around for a full-time position that may never come, and I had no desire to continue scraping by on my meager earnings, family support, and government aid, if I could help it....

It was, of course, messier than that: a series of desperate, futile applications and failed interviews, each one more heartbreaking than the last; months spent tapping into my swiftly dwindling reserve of unemployment compensation; and, finally, a last-ditch effort to kickstart a freelance writing career (the modest success of which I would readily ascribe to providence, were I a believer in miracles). It was an emotional journey, and one I would have traveled in complete anonymity had I not chronicled it in bits and pieces online. Countless adjuncts do the same every day, as they are methodically flushed out of higher education, once they have given up the academic ghost.

We feel compelled to write even though we have little material incentive to do so. And no matter how eloquently or thoroughly we argue our case, we have grown accustomed to being dismissed as "whiners" or advised to seek other employment (as though that thought had not occurred to us). We’re used to having our CVs ruthlessly scrutinized for any evidence of academic impurity. That way, those who benefit from our cheap, disposable labor can consign us to our fate with a clear conscience.