Why are CHE articles like this still being written?

[polly_mer]

I want to be sympathetic to people who find themselves in bad situations.  I do.  However, I was reading the CHE yesterday (after catching up on some related fora reading) and read two articles in a row that make me wonder how anyone can possibly still be surprised, shocked, and many other negative feelings upon finding out their academic credentials don't translate to into a good-enough paid TT professorship with eager students in a place the aspiring professor wants to live.  In fact, with the current pandemic on top of the other problems in higher ed in the US, those folks probably aren't going to get to keep their current positions as adjuncts and year-to-year non-TT faculty primarily teaching in general education programs.

The first CHE article I read was framed as raising awareness to the plight of the first-generation PhD recipient.  However, the key facts were English literature PhD in New York City from a family background with zero social capital to move into a good middle-class, any-college-degree-required job outside academia.  No mention is made of where Dr. Gonzales studied and I didn't easily find it in the two minutes I had this morning to do a web search.  I did find multiple references to other people doing similar research using the same buzzwords that appear in Dr. Gonzales' profiles.

Dr. Gonzales writes "The consensus of warning is kind enough: Tell those considering grad school that most folks get caught in a loop of unsustainable adjunct teaching. " and "I remember, back when I was applying to doctoral programs, sitting across from one of my white tenured professors. They tell me that I am not ready for graduate school. "  Yet, when the very likely happens to this particular individual, the frustration centers on mere lip service to diversity with no acknowledgement that what it really meant when people wrote more than 10 years ago: Just Don't Go to Graduate School in the Humanities..  No acknowledgement is made of the 1970s/1980s trope of people with PhDs driving taxis in New York City due to a lack of academic jobs then.  At no point in my lifetime, and I'm now comfortably middle-aged, has earning a PhD in a humanities field been a "guarantee of full-time employment".

I've written many times about the distinctions between:

* a professional fellow who is part-time faculty embedded in the curriculum of a given major teaching a required class or two on a rotation while employed full-time elsewhere using their education in the field.  This person is not adjunct in the sense of being extra; this person is a valued part of the curriculum for specific expertise and usually is helping the curriculum stay in tune with what graduates with the given major need to be competent professionals with their bachelor's degrees.  Often, this fellow will form the first node in a professional network for the students.  Examples are teaching criminal law in a CJ program as a sitting judge, community nursing as a nurse at a local hospital, or thermodynamics as a practicing engineer.

* a full-time non-TT teaching-track professor who focuses on the huge intro classes so that other professors can focus more on their research and teaching a 2/1 or less to upper-division majors and graduate students.  These folks tend to exist at large research institutions and have a pretty stable job, even though these folks are technically contingent, with some service required, but generally no research except perhaps discipline-based pedagogy.  An example is the  Physics 101-102 coordinator responsible for 30-50 TAs/LAs/tutors as well as 1000+ enrolled students.

* an adjunct picking up the occasional necessary extra section or filling in during leave for a full-time faculty member

* armies of interchangeable cog warm bodies (some of whom are death-marching trying to make multiple terrible part-time jobs be a full-time job with zero benefits) carrying the general education program that should probably be changed not to need those armies.

The second CHE article focused on the inequities between various categories of faculty with fears of what COVID-19 will mean for many faculty members in the summer and fall.  The initial focus is indeed novel: what about all that extra work on short notice with no extra pay?  However, embedded in the article are "The university has now made it abundantly clear that it does not value the health and well-being of nearly 3,000 of its employees and those with whom we work." and "Having recently earned her Ph.D. in musicology, she has been looking for full-time work but had skipped applying for jobs that would take her outside the classroom — positions at nonprofit groups and arts associations — until now."

The most polite response I can muster is along the lines of "You armies of interchangeable, warm body cogs, stop being Milton from Office Space!  You don't really have a job and should leave now while the leaving is good!"

[marshwiggle]

The first CHE article I read was framed as raising awareness to the plight of the first-generation PhD recipient.  However, the key facts were English literature PhD in New York City from a family background with zero social capital to move into a good middle-class, any-college-degree-required job outside academia.  No mention is made of where Dr. Gonzales studied and I didn't easily find it in the two minutes I had this morning to do a web search.  I did find multiple references to other people doing similar research using the same buzzwords that appear in Dr. Gonzales' profiles.

One of the quotes from the article that I found odd:

My parents still believe in the ideal of meritocracy — that if you work hard, get the highest degree possible, and do everything by the book, you will make it in America. They believe this creed the way so many of us have been taught to believe it.

The strange implication is that "merit" seems to be completely decoupled from the job market. Just because someone is qualified for a sepcific job doesn't mean there aren't many equally qualified people competing for the same position. No matter how high the required qualifications are, the actual number of positions is an inescapable reality.

[pigou]

No mention is made of where Dr. Gonzales studied and I didn't easily find it in the two minutes I had this morning to do a web search.  I did find multiple references to other people doing similar research using the same buzzwords that appear in Dr. Gonzales' profiles.

Dr. Gonzales writes "The consensus of warning is kind enough: Tell those considering grad school that most folks get caught in a loop of unsustainable adjunct teaching. " and "I remember, back when I was applying to doctoral programs, sitting across from one of my white tenured professors. They tell me that I am not ready for graduate school."

Narrator: and it turns out, the tenured professor was right. There are many, many reasons to believe academia is not a meritocracy. But people failing to find jobs when they have a PhD but seemingly no public profile... not one of those reasons.

[mahagonny]

Well, here's the first sentence, which I find a little odd:

'They hear the news and entertain their fantasies: the fancy new car, the big house, the pool in the backyard. No more working in the fields. No more getting down on one's knees to scrub the floor in a stranger's house. No more daydreaming while breaking one's back.'

The author, Gonzalez, is talking about her Puerto Rican immigrant parents and what she says is their thought process. As if there's nothing in between a job scrubbing floors and a big house with a pool in the back yard. How about just a decent job that isn't unskilled labor, a good-enough home where you can pay off the mortgage and kids who can get braces on their teeth.

Speaking for me, I wouldn't/didn't borrow lots of money to get a fancy degree, and if I had, a stable living would have surely been part of the plan.

However,

The first CHE article I read was framed as raising awareness to the plight of the first-generation PhD recipient.  However, the key facts were English literature PhD in New York City from a family background with zero social capital to move into a good middle-class, any-college-degree-required job outside academia.  No mention is made of where Dr. Gonzales studied and I didn't easily find it in the two minutes I had this morning to do a web search.  I did find multiple references to other people doing similar research using the same buzzwords that appear in Dr. Gonzales' profiles.

One of the quotes from the article that I found odd:

My parents still believe in the ideal of meritocracy — that if you work hard, get the highest degree possible, and do everything by the book, you will make it in America. They believe this creed the way so many of us have been taught to believe it.

The strange implication is that "merit" seems to be completely decoupled from the job market. Just because someone is qualified for a sepcific job doesn't mean there aren't many equally qualified people competing for the same position. No matter how high the required qualifications are, the actual number of positions is an inescapable reality.

As Wahoo points out, it's not just the competition for the jobs that factors into the predicament. It's the higher ed culture's fiction of a win-win scenario in which, fact, the jobs themselves have been intentionally decimated, divided up into stupid fragments, low paying gigs that management wishfully thinks (or pretends to think) are a great fit for a million or more Americans with plenty of money, spare time, and a desire to donate labor and expertise. So why are these articles still written? Maybe to shame the people who did this, wherever they are. (Good luck with that.) Politics. Or maybe to call out those who, stunningly, still defend the current arrangement and try to deny that it's a winner/loser pyramid scheme.

[Hibush]

Why doesn't Sports Illustrated run articles like this? There must be hundreds of thousands of decent writers who could tell the tale of a childhood and early adulthood dedicated to ultimate achievement in their sport only to find themselves undrafted. Where is my big automobile?? Where is my beautiful house???

[mamselle]

Because the sports mythology's timelime is so far behind the educational field's mythology timeline that they'll still be catching up in 2040.

If politics is downstream of culture, sports is 'way downstream of that.

M. 

[mahagonny]

Well, do pro sports hire people extendedly who are then made to feel like imposters, as adjunct faculty are, while the institution gets to maintain its facade? Not too much. So there are no secrets, not that much deception. It's a hard hustle, and most will only get so far, but it's a relatively honest transparent thing.

[mahagonny]

I want to be sympathetic to people who find themselves in bad situations.  I do.

But don't worry. Your sympathy or absence thereof are not more important than anyone else's.

[marshwiggle]

Well, do pro sports hire people extendedly who are then made to feel like imposters, as adjunct faculty are, while the institution gets to maintain its facade? Not too much. So there are no secrets, not that much deception. It's a hard hustle, and most will only get so far, but it's a relatively honest transparent thing.

There are all kinds of minor leagues in sports, with the "promise" of a shot at the big leagues someday. For someone in the minors, they have to assess how long they'll keep trying before moving on to some other employment that may not be "living the dream", but will do a better job of paying the rent.

[mahagonny]

Well, do pro sports hire people extendedly who are then made to feel like imposters, as adjunct faculty are, while the institution gets to maintain its facade? Not too much. So there are no secrets, not that much deception. It's a hard hustle, and most will only get so far, but it's a relatively honest transparent thing.

There are all kinds of minor leagues in sports, with the "promise" of a shot at the big leagues someday. For someone in the minors, they have to assess how long they'll keep trying before moving on to some other employment that may not be "living the dream", but will do a better job of paying the rent.

Oh brother. You are just not gonna get it.

[marshwiggle]

Well, do pro sports hire people extendedly who are then made to feel like imposters, as adjunct faculty are, while the institution gets to maintain its facade? Not too much. So there are no secrets, not that much deception. It's a hard hustle, and most will only get so far, but it's a relatively honest transparent thing.

There are all kinds of minor leagues in sports, with the "promise" of a shot at the big leagues someday. For someone in the minors, they have to assess how long they'll keep trying before moving on to some other employment that may not be "living the dream", but will do a better job of paying the rent.

Oh brother. You are just not gonna get it.

There are two distinct issues here:

• The splitting up of full-time into part-time positions means that aren't as many good full-time positions as there might be.
• Even if there were none of that happening, the numbers suggest that there would be more PhDs in certain fields than all of the good jobs that could be.

I'm not denying the first issue; I just am bugged by the way writers (like the one in the article) completely gloss over the second.

"Meritocracy" <> "entitlement to the job of one's dreams", no matter how hard you work.

[mahagonny]

Well, do pro sports hire people extendedly who are then made to feel like imposters, as adjunct faculty are, while the institution gets to maintain its facade? Not too much. So there are no secrets, not that much deception. It's a hard hustle, and most will only get so far, but it's a relatively honest transparent thing.

There are all kinds of minor leagues in sports, with the "promise" of a shot at the big leagues someday. For someone in the minors, they have to assess how long they'll keep trying before moving on to some other employment that may not be "living the dream", but will do a better job of paying the rent.

Oh brother. You are just not gonna get it.

There are two distinct issues here:

• The splitting up of full-time into part-time positions means that aren't as many good full-time positions as there might be.
• Even if there were none of that happening, the numbers suggest that there would be more PhDs in certain fields than all of the good jobs that could be.

I'm not denying the first issue; I just am bugged by the way writers (like the one in the article) completely gloss over the second.

"Meritocracy" <> "entitlement to the job of one's dreams", no matter how hard you work.

Whereas, if one just accepts that higher ed employment is not a meritocracy, and one is happy with it not being one, because one is doing OK, there's nothing much to be bugged about. Long way of saying  methinks one protests too much. If one needs for it to be a meritocracy because one is doing well in it, there may be too much ego investment.

My uppity opinion, the PhD is, if anything, overrated in some of the fine arts fields (and maybe others) where training in the field happens more in the workplace, should you have the goods to get on the scene in the first place. Not all fields work the same. But I guess that's another discussion.

[marshwiggle]

There are two distinct issues here:

• The splitting up of full-time into part-time positions means that aren't as many good full-time positions as there might be.
• Even if there were none of that happening, the numbers suggest that there would be more PhDs in certain fields than all of the good jobs that could be.

I'm not denying the first issue; I just am bugged by the way writers (like the one in the article) completely gloss over the second.

"Meritocracy" <> "entitlement to the job of one's dreams", no matter how hard you work.

Whereas, if one just accepts that higher ed employment is not a meritocracy, and one is happy with it not being one, because one is doing OK, there's nothing much to be bugged about. Long way of saying  methinks one protests too much. If one needs for it to be a meritocracy because one is doing well in it, there may be too much ego investment.

There are at least two different issues regarding "meritocracy"; in hiring, and in assigning ongoing responsibilities.  The writer seems most concerned about the former; from past comments I think you are more concerned about the latter.

In principle, hiring is less complicated to deal with, although it becomes more complicated as more regulations come into force regarding diversity and other things not directly related to qualifications.

Assigning ongoing tasks is much more complicated with considerations of seniority etc. which are typically high priorities with unions, so managers often are limited in their discretion.

My uppity opinion, the PhD is, if anything, overrated in some of the fine arts fields (and maybe others) where training in the field happens more in the workplace, should you have the goods to get on the scene in the first place. Not all fields work the same. But I guess that's another discussion.

If a PhD (i.e. "highest qualification") isn't synonymous with merit, then this illustrates the difficulty with objectively defining exactly what constitues merit.

[mahagonny]

There are two distinct issues here:

• The splitting up of full-time into part-time positions means that aren't as many good full-time positions as there might be.
• Even if there were none of that happening, the numbers suggest that there would be more PhDs in certain fields than all of the good jobs that could be.

I'm not denying the first issue; I just am bugged by the way writers (like the one in the article) completely gloss over the second.

"Meritocracy" <> "entitlement to the job of one's dreams", no matter how hard you work.

Whereas, if one just accepts that higher ed employment is not a meritocracy, and one is happy with it not being one, because one is doing OK, there's nothing much to be bugged about. Long way of saying  methinks one protests too much. If one needs for it to be a meritocracy because one is doing well in it, there may be too much ego investment.

There are at least two different issues regarding "meritocracy"; in hiring, and in assigning ongoing responsibilities.  The writer seems most concerned about the former; from past comments I think you are more concerned about the latter.

In principle, hiring is less complicated to deal with, although it becomes more complicated as more regulations come into force regarding diversity and other things not directly related to qualifications.

Assigning ongoing tasks is much more complicated with considerations of seniority etc. which are typically high priorities with unions, so managers often are limited in their discretion.

My uppity opinion, the PhD is, if anything, overrated in some of the fine arts fields (and maybe others) where training in the field happens more in the workplace, should you have the goods to get on the scene in the first place. Not all fields work the same. But I guess that's another discussion.

If a PhD (i.e. "highest qualification") isn't synonymous with merit, then this illustrates the difficulty with objectively defining exactly what constitues merit.

Sure there's difficulty in defining merit, but that's kind of a moot point when you consider that there's also a conspicuous absence among higher education policy in making an effort to behave like a meritocracy. A meritocracy values merit and fosters its workforce's opportunity to develop/demonstrate it and be rewarded for it. It doesn't maintain a dead end job/low as possible pay contingent and then look for suckers who will accept the terms because they haven't realized they should move on.
Teaching and research are valued when done by tenure track faculty. Neither teaching nor research is valued when done by part-time faculty.
Higher ed managers who think like one or two of our frequent posters here are disingenuously posing as wanting the best for everyone. What's obvious is they are addicted to cheap, disenfranchised labor and will beat the bushes to find it, when necessary, including hiring the poor. Of course, they do have a problem.

[jerseyjay]

However, the key facts were English literature PhD in New York City from a family background with zero social capital to move into a good middle-class, any-college-degree-required job outside academia.  No mention is made of where Dr. Gonzales studied and I didn't easily find it in the two minutes I had this morning to do a web search.  I did find multiple references to other people doing similar research using the same buzzwords that appear in Dr. Gonzales' profiles.

Of course, it would be a good idea if you spelt his name correctly: Marcos Gonsalez. It is an uncommon spelling, but it does make it easier to find information. (Although, while I found his  personal web page, it does not say what school he got his doctorate from.)