Who Ends Up Teaching Composition at Our Colleges?

It is a truism that, as Harold Coyle once quipped, "necessary and important but unpleasant duties" are, within large organizations, customarily "given to the most junior" member, with this "passed off as being part of [their] development," when "in fact it is nothing more than passing off a dirty chore to someone else."*

Certainly this has applied to college teaching, with the "necessary and important but unpleasant" duty so passed commonly including the teaching of first-year, general-education courses (because few want to deal with inexperienced students often resentfully satisfying general-education requirements they see as merely an obstacle to getting the credits they really need to get so that they can get the job they are after), especially insofar as they are particularly tedious or laborious (for instance, because the subject matter is dry and the burden of grading heavy).

English composition famously fits that profile--with the result that in universities with graduate programs the job is handed off to graduate "teaching assistants" (unlikely to get to do any assisting, or apprenticing, before they are put in charge of a classroom), while everywhere it falls disproportionately to adjuncts.

What this means, of course, is that instruction in composition, already afflicted with problems ranging from the gap between quite logical college requirements and the actual preparation K-12 instruction provides; and some badly flawed thinking about just how instructors could go about providing what corrective one or two 15-week courses plausibly can (like the Karate Kid nonsense I have discussed in the past); one sees those people teaching the course drawn from either the least-prepared and experienced of the potential instructors, and more generally those who are most overworked and distracted. This, too, takes its toll on the quality of the result.

* The remark is to be found in his novel Sword Point.

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.

Teaching as a Day Job

Not long ago I remarked my suspicion that one of the factors that has kept English departments supplied with low-cost adjunct labor has been the number of holders of advanced degrees in English whose real goal is to write literature someday, not teach it--and teach English as other would-be writers wait tables to make a living, as a "day job."*

It is understandable that many should take that course in their lives--the hope at least existing of making some money while enjoying some control over their time. Still, it is a far from ideal arrangement, in ways that go even beyond the unattractions of teaching on an adjunct basis. The fact that as adjuncts they are likely to draw the least attractively scheduled courses--the early morning courses, the late courses--and may find themselves forced to spend many hours shuttling among multiple, widely dispersed, campuses to string together enough payments for enough courses to cover the bills permitting even the most meager existence--will diminish the actual control over their working time that they hoped for.

One can add to this that introversion is far from unknown among writers, and the front of a classroom is not a comfortable place for an introvert--especially the kind of classes that they are likely to draw, full of first-year students uninterested in the subject, who have that much less willingness or ability to hold up their end of a class discussion, who will constantly subject their instructors to difficult situations as they press them for a better grade, or even attempt to brazen their way through the course.

There is also the subject matter of their course itself--with its associated duties. Spending all day promulgating "one size fits all" rules to practitioners of an activity where One Size Never Fits All ("Never use passive voice!") and nit-picking other people's writing (as they grade paper after paper), seems all too likely to stifle rather than nurture a writer's creativity.

Alas, problematic as it all is, so are all the other choices available to writers constrained to work a Day Job.

* I would like to be clear here that this does not make them bad teachers any more than being aspiring writers makes those who wait tables bad waiters.

Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing in 2024

Recently I discussed the odds facing the would-be self-published author in 2024. A writer's odds in the marketplace have never been good--and a self-published writer's odds were always worse than that. However, as I recently argued it seems to me that the return on effort in the area of self-published books has likely fallen in the years since the practice exploded, because of the way the e-book has been confined to a very limited part of the market, and because of how the Internet's evolution has made the forms of low-cost publicity it afforded less effective.

Does that make it time to turn one's thoughts back toward traditional publishing? Alas, I see no evidence that traditional publishing has become any more open than it was before. If anything the opposite has likely happened amid its own hard times, as people are not just reading fewer self-published books or e-books, but probably reading fewer books of any and all kinds (as the collapse of mass market paperback sales suggests). The result is that the chances of anyone whose only alternative to self-publishing is the slush pile are probably as grim as ever they were--leaving those looking for publication faced not with a "choice," but a dilemma.

Promoting Books Online: Fiction vs. Nonfiction

I have heard it remarked that there is no "general" nonfiction market anymore, and certainly my experience of the (generally loathsome) content of the bestseller lists would seem to attest to this. We have sales in a few narrow lines--self-help books of the "success" and health varieties, and gossip of various kinds ("true crime," memoir, biography, arguably also political rant), both typically connected with the name of a celebrity, and not much else, the public's tastes very narrow indeed (and it seems to me, reflective of sad delusion).

The result is that the potential audience for any one nonfiction work is unlikely to be very large outside of a very small number of categories--while, again, those who actually get much book-reading are probably online less than most. Still, it is arguably easier for those of slight promotional means to get sales for a work of nonfiction than for a work of fiction through an online presence for the simple reason that a reader doing an informational search may, in spite of the ever-more perverse functioning of search engines, find their way to such a work should it contain the information they are looking for (especially if those promoting the book take some pains to make it "findable"). Thus commended to their attention they may peruse it, and possibly take an interest, and maybe even buy it.

There is no equivalent way for someone to happen upon a work of fiction--one reason why so much store is set here by the authors already having "Names" for themselves, a thing which matters infinitely more to the Dauriats of Park Avenue than the actual content of the books, and online as offline success so consistently goes to "the bigger battalion" rather than the worthier one.

Just How Much Sense Does it Really Make to Promote Books Online?

The post's titular question may seem counterintuitive given that today it is taken for granted that anyone who wants to sell anything has to have an online presence--and one might add, that the first truly great online retail success specifically began as a book-seller.

However, it also seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between the time people spend being online, and the time they spend reading books. This is not only a matter of people's disposable time being finite so that time spent on one thing is time not spent on the other thing, but the effect that actually staring into a screen as one copes with the ever-more aggravating experience of navigating the vile post-apocalyptic wasteland that the search engine optimization, cookie pop-ups, adblock blockers, autoplay videos, paywalls, clickbaiters, bots and other assorted Torments of the Damned has made of it (and in a different way, also its increasing transition from being text-based to audiovisually based, as vloggers replace bloggers, etc.) has on our reading faculties. Even those of us who have retained the reading habit, and even the capacity to cope with difficult reading material (and I think it necessary to admit that many have not), are likely to find that we do not get much long-form reading done on those days when we are online much.

Equally we may find ourselves surprised by how much reading we can do on those days when we steer clear of the Web.

The result is that if we are selling books those who actually read the most books are the ones least likely to be online at a given time--and those who are most likely to be online people who do no such reading. That does not in and of itself make online book promotion a complete waste of time--but it does suggest that the return on promotional effort will be that much lower, when already it would seem to be very low to begin with and steadily falling as the Internet becomes ever more of a ruin, with all this implies for those who are endeavoring to promote a book with very little outlay of resources, and very little help from legacy media, like the self-published authors I suspect to be those far and away the group most likely to interest themselves in the topic.

Punishment for Professors

In his book The Goose-Step Upton Sinclair discussed among a great many of the other evils of American higher education in his time the surveillance of professors on and off the job by forces not only inside but outside their institutions. The surveillance, if attentive to anything unseemly in said professors' private lives (like the slightest whiff of a male professor's involvement with a woman not his wife), was mainly political in nature--and misstep followed by retribution.

Said retribution was not always official. As Sinclair notes, the professor who fell afoul of the administration might find pay rises and promotions withheld (with all that means given the lousiness of the pay to begin with). They might find their room assignments constantly changed. And, to quote Sinclair, the professor might find themselves "teach[ing] large classes of freshmen, over and over again the same weary routine," perhaps "for the rest of [their] life."

Those aware of the conditions under which adjunct instructors work will, of course, note that what the full-time faculty got as punishment--the lack of pay rises and promotions, the instability of assignments, the duty of teaching those grinding first-year classes--is the adjunct's lot as a matter of course, in the absence of even the thought that they had transgressed.

Consider that.

Review: The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, by Upton Sinclair

The title of Upton Sinclair's 1923 book The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education promises a study of American education, but, as the author himself owns at the end of his book, limits itself to the still considerable subject of American higher education--the country's colleges and universities, which had him producing a second later volume dealing with the rest (The Goslings).

In approaching the subject of American higher education Sinclair's book is very strikingly a work of its time--the immediate aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution and the Red Scare, interwoven with the story of the Ludlow Massacre, and the Boston Police Strike, and the Abrams case, and the Great Steel Strike of 1919; of the then-ongoing fights over unionization, and the ownership and regulation of public utilities; of the personal exercise of power by people named Morgan, and Rockefeller, and Gould.

However, it is also the case that, to those evolved enough to not rush to dismiss what is merely old as outdated, and who can look beyond the superficialities of today's culture wars on which so much is lavished, much of what Sinclair discusses will seem exceedingly contemporary--the control of universities by businessmen, and the influence of alumni and politicians, generally to reactionary ends (and often venal ends, too, as they use their control of the institutions to fleece them for whatever they can get); the extent to which such institutions are less places of learning than "country clubs" for the children of the rich, vocational schools for persons encouraged to think of nothing but the salary their degree might get them, and factories for producing intellectual stultification and social and ideological indoctrination and conformity for the sake of perpetuating the worst that exists in society; the degradation and corruption of college presidents by the chase after donors' dollars; the unhealthful effects of the college fraternity and college athletics on college life; the extreme hypocrisy of administrators about free speech and academic freedom as they crush those things out of existence; the low pay and insecurity of the instructors that enables their bosses to treat them as if they gave up their rights as citizens in taking their jobs, and terrified to speak up about the way they are treated; the driving out of teachers and researchers of talent and integrity through innumerable forms of insult and injury as the careerist mediocrity rises into the administration, and even beyond; the resort to the shabbiest means to see that the unworthy children of wealthy alumni are admitted and passed, as equally shabby means, overt and covert, are employed to limit the numbers of deserving students from "successful minorities"; the foolishness on which colleges spend so much of their money (as with their wasteful "Collegiate Gothic" architecture); and much, much, much else.

Moreover, as is often the case with older books like this one, Sinclair treats his subject with an intellectual and moral clarity and a rhetorical force all too rare in our time--and rarely to be seen combined with such rigor of research as Sinclair displays as he successively surveys the records of one major university after another (the Columbia Sinclair himself experienced as a younger man, Harvard, Princeton, etc., etc.) in his short, punchy chapters, before he goes on to tackle, again in short and punchy chapters, the troubles that afflict the lot (and devoting a few chapters more to those he thinks are fighting the good fight against all the corruption he sees about him). All too rare, too, is his freedom from the prevailing pieties--like the insane elitism that stands foursquare for the existence of a hierarchy among educational institutions, and the intellectual superiority of those who inhabit the institutions at the top of the hierarchy to the rest, which we have seen so vehemently (and shamelessly) defended amid the scandals of recent years. It was particularly refreshing to see a writer who is by no means unintellectual, anti-intellectual or unlearned--who is, indeed, a great lover, critic and writer of literature and history--rather than bowing and scraping before the mindless Classicism, antiquarianism, formalism and "dust heap-raking" that so many take as the absolute awe-inspiring height of humanistic or social science scholarship challenge its primacy when so much matter crying out for attention. (Remarking the legacy of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, indeed, Sinclair laments that this "student of Princeton College . . . was studying . . . Greek, and imbecile theology, when he should have been studying economics, geography, and social engineering!")

The result is that while this book is an antidote to simple-minded nostalgia about any superiority of the past to the present with respect to what formal education provided, it is probably also the case that, even if it is about the 1920s and not the 2020s, reading it one is likely to learn more about the troubles of colleges today than they could from a library's worth of more contemporary books (just as they can learn more about contemporary publishing from Balzac's Lost Illusions than anything they are likely to see written about it today)--and I have every expectation that I will have many an occasion to return to this book later when, inevitably, addressing its concerns as the comparatively inane mainstream debates about education rage all around us in that manner Shakespeare summed up all too well:

a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

The Poverty of Professors

One of the more striking chapters in Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step is the seventy-seventh, "Damn the Faculty," where he declares that "[t]here are few more pitiful proletarians in America than the underpaid, overworked, and contemptuously ignored rank and file college teacher," and recounts their reports of their poverty. (Many of them, he makes clear, are materially worse off than when they were students--while it seems worth remarking that it is a sad situation indeed when professors cannot afford to buy books to read.)

As Sinclair makes clear, such things factor into the incentives to cowardice on the professors' part before the tyranny of their administrators, and in their corruption, as they fear losing what chance they may have to ascend the academic ladder to those posts in which, income-wise at least, life would be less unbearable.

Still, Sinclair makes clear that even at the absolute height of the field there is still extreme indignity, relating an anecdote in which the holders of a banquet invited both Albert Einstein, at a point in which he was already acclaimed by many the "greatest thinker of our time," and the Prince of Monaco. The Prince refused to be received at a function along with Einstein (making an excuse of his being "German"), and the compromise that promptly followed was that during the banquet "Einstein was put away in an obscure place at the foot of the table, and not asked to speak."

Such was the true nature of this "meritocratic" society then. So does it remain today.

Of Old Books and New

Comparing the books I read that were new (new in the sense of having been published this century, or not much before it) with the books published before that, I am time and again struck by the differences. Among newer work there is a sharper contrast between what might be published for a scholarly audience, and what might be of interest to a general audience, with what the latter seems likely to get often a magazine article (and rather a banal one at that) blown up to book length. Meanwhile the scholarly stuff, if striking for its wealth of data and apparent meticulousness in handling it, compares poorly with older work in point of breadth and fullness of vision, moral and intellectual clarity and courage, and plain old readability, to say nothing of literary graces and literary craft and literary force. (For example, just what writer of today would stand comparison with a C. Wright Mills or a John Kenneth Galbraith or a Richard Hofstadter? Let alone figures from still earlier such as an Upton Sinclair or a Thorstein Veblen?)

Considering all this I can see the tendencies already evident then in academic work playing their part, not least that toward extreme specialization, which some were already complaining had become excessive a century ago and more, but which has gone further still, and made writers timid as they handle smaller and smaller subjects in a manner not so much rigorous as overtimid, cumbersomely demonstrating that they "read everything" on their subject (at least, everything so far as the Establishment in their field is concerned), never making a claim they cannot back with a battery of full citations, and shying away from bold conclusions as they do their damnedest to make their writing read like a lab report.* However, if hyper-specialization played its part in making thinkers timid, so did that cheap and stupid epistemological nihilism that puts any seeker after knowledge on the defensive. All about putting limits on what can be discussed, it has done its job here only too well--and we are the poorer for it, so poor that I often find myself learning more about the problems of today from books a century old than anything being published now.

* Certainly H.G. Wells discusses that drive in his Outline of History.

Does a Ph.d in Literature Make You a Better Novelist?

It seems fair to say that a Ph.d in Literature does not help one much in getting a novel published.

However, is it likely to make one a better novelist--if only by artistic standards?

That question seems to me trickier.

I can certainly say that graduate work in Literature exposed me to a great deal of literature I might otherwise never have read, and a great many ways of looking at literature to which I might never otherwise have been exposed. It also required me to think a great deal about those works and those ideas.

In the process I can say that it trained me as a reader in some ways--not least, to find interest even in works that were not "entertaining" in the conventional sense, and to read systematically.

None of that is negative, per se. Yet I also think that, especially given the worship of Modernism and postmodernism, and my increasingly dim view of that, it was less helpful than it might have been.

There is, too, the fact that textbooks and professors generally tend to be better at retailing the conventional wisdom of the field than furnishing a deep understanding of the kind that can only come with a really detailed knowledge and critical perspective--the more in as so many devote their energies to more specialized work. Indeed, I would say that the student who has an instructor who can offer an intelligent answer to a question like "What is literature?" is exceptionally fortunate in their education. And for my part getting a handle on the major movements, the various standards, that have defined modern Western literature (the stuff at the heart of my book about it), was a lengthy process that only seriously got underway well after the completion of my formal training.

Still, I suspect that that process would never have begun without that prior preparation, for all its failings--a reminder of just how preliminary and preparatory a thing college course work tends to be.

What Do You Get Out of a Ph.d?

People talk a great deal about college degrees--and say very little of value about them.

Certainly one misconception evident in thinking about the whole range of fields of study is that having a doctorate entails mastery of an entire subject area.

In reality it is a preliminary--a preparation to begin the work that is likely to be the main source of learning the actual practice of their profession.

In his Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty, recounting his educational experience, remarked that at the end of his formal training, in which he completed a thesis "consist[ing] of several abstract mathematical theorems," he still "knew nothing about the world's economic problems."

Such self-awareness is likely to lead to a search after more substantial knowledge--as it did in his case, leading up to that particular book. Unfortunately such self-awareness and such searches are all too rare, especially in an intellectual and political culture so prone to seize on any badge of authority to elevate "experts" into a priesthood, which then sets about strangling any real discussion.

Does a Ph.d in Literature Help You Get a Novel Published?

Before going any further in discussing the question that is the title of this post I would like to be clear that I am concerned here with publishing, not writing--a very different endeavor that often has nothing whatsoever to do with the ability of an author to write (as the hyperabundance of celebrity-associated sludge on the bestseller lists indicates).

My experience is that while the "You Can Be a Bestselling Author Too!" industry tells those whose money it wants that they can acquire credentials that will help their blind submissions to the slush pile get something other than more form rejection letters this is merely another piece of aspirationalist dishonesty on their part--making their target audience think they have more control over their careers than they really do, and so more willing to spend on their proffered service. Certainly I found that mentioning such credentials made no difference whatsoever in the way agents and editors replied to me. There seem to me to be two reasons for that.

1. A Ph.d in Literature is no proof of being able to write a novel, let alone the kind of novel that a commercial publisher is likely to be looking for. After all, it is a training for teaching literature, and producing literary scholarship--very different activities. Of course, acquiring that training one reads a great deal of literature, is exposed to a great deal of literature, does a lot of thinking and writing about literature, and it may seem that this could be helpful in preparing a writer to produce a work of fiction, enough so to count for something in their favor. Still, the claim is more ambiguous, and given the ever-narrower interests of commercial publishing, it may be that they will even see such a preparation as irrelevant or even a disadvantage someone who has given much of their life to, for example, Romantic poetry or nineteenth century realist prose, appearing quite remote from the kind of work that today's publishers would want to put on the bookshelf.

2. Far more important than the ways in which an advanced degree in Literature may be of little relevance, or even a disadvantage, from the standpoint of the ability to produce a salable work of fiction is the fact that publishers are infinitely less interested in whether someone can write a book than whether their name can sell a book. This is, of course, not a thing admitted much these days, but Balzac spelled out very clearly in Lost Illusions (the kind of work by the kind of author today's publishers are unlikely ever to read, and knowledge of which they would probably regard as being to an author's discredit), and the reality has not changed one iota since. Indeed, there is ample reason to think that any number of factors have only encouraged the latterday Dauriats in their obscene crassness, as what was only emergent in Balzac's day developed in full.

Spy and Military Techno-Thriller Fiction

This page lists my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) working papers addressing the subject of spy and military techno-thriller fiction.

"The Decline of the Spy Story and the Transformation of the Thriller in the 1990s: The Data From the Bestseller List." (2018)

"American and British Attitudes Toward Spy Fiction: A Note." (2023)

"Spies, Elites and Imperial Decline: Fleming, Haggard, and le Carré." (2023)

"The Rise and Fall of the Military Techno-Thriller." (2018)

"The Military Techno-Thriller: A History." (2023)

"Military Techno-Thriller Fiction and the Bestseller List, 1985-2000." (2018)

"The American Military Techno-Thriller and the Debate Over Women in Combat of the 1990s." (2024)

"Reliving the 1940s in the 1990s: Germany and Japan in the Military Techno-Thriller." (2024)

"The Weirdness of James Bond's World: How Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class Helps Us Understand Ian Fleming's 007." (2021)

"'What Makes an Action Film an Action Film?': How the James Bond Movies Defined the Genre." (2021)

Social Withdrawal

This page lists my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) working papers addressing the subject of social withdrawal.

"Japan's Lost Generation, the World's Lost Generation and an Epoch of Social Withdrawal: A Note." (2022)

"Beyond Japan: A Note on the Hikikomori Phenomenon in America." (2022)

"Hikikomori Nation: A Note on the Possible Dimensions of the Phenomenon in America." (2022)

"Are Attitudes Toward Work Changing? A Note." (2021)

"Low Unemployment, or Just Undercounted Unemployment? A Note on America's "Full Employment" in 2019." (2019)

"Is a Flight into Virtuality Already Underway? A Consideration of Changing Lifeways in the Early Twenty-First Century." (2021)