Secrets of the English Department: The Dream of Authorship and the Supply of Adjunct Labor

It is no secret that colleges rely heavily on the labor of adjunct professors, some more heavily and exploitatively than others.

Back when I did some research into the topic I found that, for example, adjuncts in areas like business or engineering were often working professionals in those fields who had elected to teach a course, and were probably motivated by factors other than the monetary compensation--but English departments generally employ full-time part-timers who really do rely on this for the whole of their income.

Of course, one may wonder why people with advanced degrees are so often prepared to endure such conditions. One reason, not the only one, but I think an important one, is that many of those who do so see their teaching as just a "day job," teaching as others may drive cabs or wait tables as they pursue a writing career, in part because if there are many disincentives, like minimum wage-level compensation, and the lack of benefits and on the job protections, they have more control over their time. When they do not have to be in the classroom, when they do not have to do office hours (and many have no office hours obligation), they can be elsewhere. That does not mean they are not working full time. The rule of thumb is three hours outside class for every hour inside class--preparing lectures, grading papers, keeping records, answering student e-mails, etc., especially given the kinds of classes adjuncts in English tend to get. (One finds, for instance, that the burden of teaching grading-heavy first-year composition courses falls disproportionately on them--as against, for instance, the literature classes usually monopolized by the more senior staff.) Still, if they do the work (and my experience is that, contrary to the claims of those political hacks who so love to demonize teachers, they do tend to be conscientious about it), they do not have to do it in a particular place, under the eye of a boss, and have some flexibility in organizing their time, more than they would in just about any other white collar job likely to be available to them. That measure of freedom is not only hard to give up when one has it, for anyone, but offers at least a hope of getting more writing done than would otherwise be the case.

Alas, as anyone even slightly alert to the realities of publishing knows, very few "aspiring" writers from any walk of life ever score the book deal, let alone get to the point where their work income lets them quit the day job. They are in fact so few that holders of graduate degrees in English who do not land permanent positions in their field, and have not yet made the decision to head elsewhere, are plentiful enough to keep English departments in a plentiful supply of adjunct labor, with those who gave up and decided to make a living some other way (as they lament the crushing of their dreams and the loss of their youth) replaced by newly minted graduates with the same aspirations.

Or at least, that was the case until these past few years. After all, fewer people have been getting English degrees, implying a reduction in the stream of such labor--while at the same time fewer young people have been going to college for any reason. One can picture a situation where there is less demand for those more advanced English classes making it harder for more permanent and senior staff to avoid teaching sections of composition, for example, as the decline in college attendance generally means fewer students and sections so that there is less call for adjuncts to teach them. Meanwhile there may well be fewer underemployed English graduates looking to pay the bills this way--because, along with the humanities-bashing STEM propaganda and the greater caution about picking majors that so much reduce the pursuit of English degrees, the shift of our culture away from the written word has progressed to a point at which far fewer young people read and write and thus dream of being authors than before, and thus looking for day jobs they think will be conducive to their writing.

If anyone has any knowledge relevant to any of this, you are of course quite free to share it in the comment thread below.