Invisible Adjunct

And of course you've saved the cached page so that you're not relying on Google to keep it forever...

Oops! Thanks, ogged.

You think thats creepy? Check out http://www.archive.org ....type an URL into the wayback machine and in many cases you can find the cache back several years. I retrieved several missing articles of mine in this fashion.

I am deeply in love with the wayback machine.
We are considering elopement.

Here's the text of the original post, also from the Google's cache:

Is Tenure a Cartel?

In the comments to "Adjunct Survivor: Big City" (Contingent Faculty and Academic Freedom), John Bruce argues that the tenure system is a cartel:

Tenure is (or more accurately, was) a way to cartelize the academic job market, in combination with the Ph.D. The point is to set up major barriers to entry (the Ph.D. requirement) and then control the overall terms and prices of service via the AAUP's contracts with individual universities...

...Another analogy occurred to me regarding tenure as cartel: cartel members, having established a price, are tempted to overproduce and thus undercut themselves. This is what happens with the Ph.D. product -- to fill graduate seminars, which are sold at the tenured price, professors must inevitably produce more Ph.D.s, which results in an oversupply, which results in price cutting. OPEC members routinely wink at their assigned quotas and produce more; university departments nod in agreement as the various professional associations decry the hiring of adjuncts -- yet they go back to their seminars and produce more Ph.D.s to glut the market in future years. They wouldn't have enough classes to teach if they didn't.

Zizka finds "cartel" an apt term, and adds the following in the comments to 1 in 5: Thomas H. Benton Explains Why You Shouldn't Go to Graduate School (Benton's essay, by the way, really hit a nerve: the joint was jumping yesterday in the comments section for that entry):

We ought to get an economist on this. What we have is a classic two-tier hiring system in a declining industry (humanities). The industry also is highly dependent on a large pool of workers who rationally should be finding jobs elsewhere. To the extent that scholarship (rather than just teaching) justifies the system, the future looks grim since the scholars of the future are not being fostered. And it looks like an enormous shakedown is ahead.

Once upon a time, when I was young and hopeful and naive, I would have dismissed any talk of "tenure as cartel" out of hand. That's the rhetoric of free marketeers, I would have thought, who want to impose a corporate logic on an institution that exists to serve a higher calling. The university does and must stand in opposition and as an alternative to the market.

Now that I've been adjunctified, I'm not so sure. Seems to me the university has been pretty thoroughly, if not completely, corporatized in many areas. The increasing reliance on a part-time contingent workforce is of course one such key area. What, if anything, has tenure to do with this?

Does tenure represent a bulwark against the ongoing corporatization of the university? Or has the tenure system actually contributed to the imposition of a corporate managerial logic in hiring practices, encouraging the overproduction and subsquent devaulation of the PhD?

Once again, I'm not an economist, nor do I play one on this blog. Speaking in non-economic terms, I have often wondered whether tenure hasn't actively contributed the academic job problem by engendering a false sense of security on the part of those who should resist the devaluation of the PhD for the sake of the future of the profession. In a profession where people don't have the security of tenure, would senior people let things come to such a crisis point (almost half of all humanities teaching at colleges and universities is now done by those outside the tenure system) before finally realizing (and perhaps realizing too late in the day) that something has gone awry and that something should be done?

The discussion following this original post is very interesting. I had never heard of the notion of the 'tragedy of the commons', which seems like a very insightful model. What struck me most about the theory is the point made at the end concerning an overall lack or absence of coordination in the management of the "commons." This confirms something I've often suspected about academic hiring; namely, that it is conducted in a very ad hoc manner, with little or no regard to the reality of the crisis.

The CHE ran a series of articles written from the perspective of the search committee (History) by C.A. Wilcox that pertains here. The last in the series recounts the campus interviews of the applicants, and also (lightly) the reactions to these candidates on the part of the committee and the faculty of the dept. What is so striking to me is the relatively blithe or cavalier way in which Wilcox recounts the rejections of the various candidates. Wilcox never blinks. There is no acknowledgement either of the academic labor situation in general, or the stakes for these candidates in particular.

For those curious about the thinking process -- or lack thereof -- involved in hiring, I highly recommend the series. It can be accessed here:

http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/tenuretrack.htm

Look under the heading entitled "The Decision."

Ed, Thanks very much!

Chris, I thought about writing on blog entry on that Wilcox series, but simply could not do so while maintaining a reasonable standard of civility.

IA: I hear ya'. I had to hold back my temper too. Still, if one can mnage to deal with his 'business as usual' tone, and swallow a bit of bile, his series is informative about how the "other side" operates and thinks -- or doesn't think, as the case may be.

A dream: everyone here finds his email addres and inundates his in-box with vented spleens and much vitriol.

What a bummer. I just looked and C.A. Wilcox is a pseudonym. So, just another gutless wonder who ie either just plain stupid or (potentially) one of the greatest poker players to have ever lived.

Well, I'm hardly in a position to criticize the use of a pseudonym :)

Maybe I'll do a blog post on his columns.

To me, the most amusing thing about the "Wilcox" columns is the way in which the author presents his and a few of his colleagues' judgments about the candidates' work as if they were inevitable. The candidates themselves, if they were to evaluate Wilcox's work, might very well pronounce it uncreative or unable to see the forest for the trees.

Wilcox, having attained tenure, might not see things this way, but his ethos would be enhanced considerably if he had acknowledged more forthrightly the situational prejudices constraining his evaluations. Even if real names were used and real projects cited, post-hoc justifiying logic would prevent him from ever revealing the real reasons why their hiring decision was made.

I'd also like to ask the audience what they think of Baron's columns on the tenuring process, which strike me as objectionable in a different way.

OK, more metaphors. Tenured are gang members, grad students and adjuncts are wannabes. Gang members are everything, wannabes nothing. The wannabes slave and risk their lives, and maybe -- just maybe -- get to become gang members. Or not.

As Wittgenstein did not say "The tenured man lives in a different world than the untenured man". (What a sexist, BTW).

The sticking point of a lot of this, though, is that if tenure privileges were reduced, the stake would diminish. I.E., if the tenured had to compete to keep their jobs, the jobs in question would be devalued. Security and freedom from competition are one of the reasons why the tenured gravy train is so great.

Zizka,

I started a gang early in my days in graduate school (the "PN45 Crips," to be exact), and I can testify that joining a gang is much easier than getting tenure.

Chun, Great comment on Wilcox. Can you say more about what you find objectionable in Baron's columns?

One thing that keeps occuring to me is that we might be assuming a bit too much power in the hands of the tenured. Having recently observed the search process here at Midsize Liberal, I can say that the tenured faculty are only one part of the hiring decision. Money, the dean's and president's ambitions, donors, the demands of other departments, etc. also play roles. Granted, the faculty do get to make the next-to-final decision (before the admin signs the paperwork) but from beginning to end, if the admin doesn't want a department to get a new position, there's not much the department can do.

The dean's power varies from university to university. According to my father, his various deans have rewritten short lists, informed the department that X would not be hired, indicated that Y would not be interviewed, and so forth. (One of the things on my father's "list of things our candidates have done that you should not do" was "Do not, under any circumstances, annoy the dean.") Our deans are a bit more hands-off. From chatting around, I get the sense that the dean is often a far more fearsome presence in the hiring process at a public university rather than a private one.

"his series is informative about how the "other side" operates and thinks -- or doesn't think, as the case may be."

Yes, as the case may be, and there's the rub, isn't it? After reading the columns, I came away with a sense of the unpredictable particularities and contingencies of the process.

The thing that sticks in my mind: they eliminated any candidate who didn't put membership in professional organizations on his or her CV. They chose to intepret this as betraying a lack of seriousness, a sign that the candidate was not up on the latest literature in the field. Now, when I was in graduate school, I was told by several "mentors" NOT to put this on a CV, because it would be seen as padding. Turns out that's wrong. So I read Wilcox and thought, My God! have I actually been eliminated from candidacy for not listing my memberships in scholarly organizations? I would be happy to list them, but I had folllowed the advice of people I had assumed (I guess wrongly) knew what was what. Or perhaps at some places it would be seen as CV-padding, a mark of mediocrity, while at others viewed as insufficiently professional, and hence a mark of mediocrity? Who knows? Not I, clearly.

I'm certainly not an economist, but I've been reading a few economics textbooks for my dissertation research. Does that count?

I think one way tenure might affect the labor market in academia (which I think *does* have characteristics of a market economy, or at least supply and demand) is by making the supply of professorial labor into what these first-year econ textbooks I've been reading have called an inelastic (or at least less elastic) commodity. Once you've got tenure at an institution, you're less likely to go elsewhere; you're less of a participant in the job market. And getting tenure might contribute to specialization, too, but that might be too dangerous a generalization to make. . . But the supply of those without tenure is more elastic; they can move from institution to institution, and may -- because they're often at an earlier point in their careers -- teach a wider variety of classes.

Economists of the neoclassical persuasion (from what I understand, the dominant economic ideology in American academia) suggest that when you have *low* elasticity, as with the supply of tenured profs, an increase in the price of labor (i.e., the wage) leads only to a small decrease in the demand for that labor. On the other hand, when you have *high* elasticity, as with the supply of adjunct labor, an increase in the price of labor leads to a large decrease in the demand for that labor.

For what it's worth, composition folks have talked about the labor market and the use of adjuncts in a couple of articles that enact a somewhat more sophisticated analysis than some of the Chronicle articles people have mentioned here. (I think the long URLs may break in narrow windows -- my apologies. . .)

Jennifer Seibel Trainor and Amanda Godley, "After Wyoming: Labor Practices in Two University Writing Programs." (548K PDF)
http://www.ncte.org/pdfs/members-only/ccc/0502-dec98/CO0502After.PDF

Joe Harris, "Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Class Consciousness in Composition." (239K PDF)
http://www.duke.edu/~jdharris/New%20Boss,%20Old%20Boss.pdf

Here's the clip from Wilcox's article:

I paid close attention to what might appear to be a mundane aspect of the CVs: the professional memberships listed by the candidates. Remarkably, some applicants failed to indicate that they were members of the appropriate professional organizations, not just the American Historical Association, but also the smaller ones appropriate to the field in which we are searching. When all such groups have low dues for graduate students, it's definitely a mark against a candidate who has not joined them and who thus is not receiving the journals (and current book reviews) regularly. Nonmembers have to pay more to attend professional meetings, and they usually cannot participate in panels at those meetings. Thus memberships are, to me, an important early sign of the professional engagement we seek from new colleagues.

I thought (and think!) that this is an ineffective criterion. Look at the series of assumptions he makes!

Disclaimer: I didn't list my memberships either, IA, and I struck out this year on the job market -- ahem, I mean "Ivory Tower Idols". I doubt I'll list them if/when I try again in academe. Heck, my AHA renewal notice just came and I'm really trying to figure out why I should send them a check -- so that I can read the job ads on-line?; or have the burden of recycling issues of the AHR the day after they arrive in my office?; to read the president and committees do soft-shoe on the state of the profession in Perspectives?

Do subscriptions to various list serves count as membership in pro organizations?

I was told by career advisors at Harvard that one should not list professional memberships on a CV because these are not achievements or qualifications. Anybody can join an organization, and presumably everyone in the profession with good credentials is already a member of all of the major societies.

Any department that screens out people on the basis of arbitrary and irrelevant criteria is going to reduce its chances of finding the best possible match for its needs. (Perhaps such screening is vestige of a department's semi-professional recent past.)

Of course, as a grad sctudent, I used to worry about whether a single use of White-Out on an address label would count against me. (I'd usually retype the whole thing so I could sleep more easily.)

"I was told by career advisors at Harvard that one should not list professional memberships on a CV because these are not achievements or qualifications."

This is exactly what I was told. And when I read the Wilcox column, I had one of those white-out paranoia moments: have I been eliminated for following what I thought was standard protocol?

"Any department that screens out people on the basis of arbitrary and irrelevant criteria is going to reduce its chances of finding the best possible match for its needs."

What this points to is the need to eliminate candidates based on increasingly narrow and irrelevant criteria, because there are simply way too many qualified candidates for any given position in most areas of history.

If by "career advisors," you mean people who work in the placement office, etc. who are not members of your department or committee, then I'd never take their advice about academic protocol. The CVs I've seen for job searches have tended to list professional organizations. "Padding" is a rather arbitrary criterion; some people will be interested in your service, memberships, etc. while others will not; but I still refuse to believe that anyone would be disqualified for not listing them. In other words, if Wilcox's committee had actually dismissed candidates for his stated reason, they would have had no chance had their CVs been complete either.

To Chun:

By "Career Advisors" I mean tenured faculty at Harvard, including two department chairs, and a former humanities dean (with experience on many searches at several universities). They recommended that memberships should not be listed because it is redundant to list memberships when any credible candidate would have a long record of activities in the societies.

Why would one need to list memberships if one's CV included presentations at the major conferences, professional leadership positions, and publications in journals managed by these societies?

Of course, if one has no such record, then I can't see the harm of listing memberships. But that's not going to be the reason one doesn't make the final cut.

It is rather absurd how competitive it has become for an entry-level position.

The pool of people who've published in PMLA is rather small relative to the job-seeking population, even at Harvard, I bet. And who cares if you've read a paper at the MLA, really?

Same goes for the other professional societies, mutatis mutandis. But you're entirely right about the requirements for an entry-level job. I do see people get hired at major research institutions straight out of graduate school (sometimes with a not-quite completed diss.) with no publications or much of anything else.

My point is that the people who advised me assumed that anyone on the job market should have evidence of membership in professional societies on the CV without having to have a list of affiliations. Granted, reading a paper at MLA doesn't count for much, but having it on the CV should eliminate the need to indicate one's MLA membership in a special section of the CV.

I'd also worry that some people might discriminate against you if you list all of your affiliations besides the major ones. Not all affiliations are apolitical. Some hiring committees will have members who hate popular culture, theory, gender studies, and so on.

If I were on a hiring committee, I would not care if someone listed their memberships in professional societies (unless I had a particular problem with one of the societies). I'd be more likely not to push their candidacy forward if the list of memberships was the only indication that they were engaged with the profession beyond their own grad school.

In any case, there are lots of criteria that are far more important than anything that goes on the CV when it comes to hiring at any institution (but you'll never know what they are). I recently served on two search committees, and I now realize that the process must look nearly random to the candidate. Anyone in contention for a job anywhere has to have outstanding credentials. A trivial difference can easily be blamed for the major differences that cannot or must not be articulated.

"Do subscriptions to various list serves count as membership in pro organizations?"

Participation in the discussions at www.invisibleadjunct.com definitely counts (counts against you, that is).

Seriously, I think not. Don't include unless you've served as webmaster/mistress or resource person or what-have-you.

Remember that Google is the new blacklist.

One other interesting thing about Wilcox's story is that one might assume, from the absurdly competitive process, that the person they do finally hire is stellar. I was an undergraduate at a fine institution not so very long ago, and the new hires were, more often than not, underwhelming (this was in a "mixed" philosophy department).

As one of the professors there told me when I asked about going on to graduate school: "Don't do it. Do something else. Five percent of the people get jobs and it's not the best five percent."

Chris, if you like the "tragedy of the commons" idea, look up Elinor Ostrom's books, e.g. Governing the Commons. They are generally about how specific common resources have been managed, sometimes very well.

I have a whole spooled rant about the use of Hardin's phrase to tar the idea of the possibility of common management, which I will spare you all. I would like to know if others have noticed a word-shift from "public" to "community" to "commons" in the last, what, thirty years? e.g., the "community library", the "downtown commons".

I think "public" was abandoned for class/economic reasons, and then "community" was recognized as a euphemism and then vanquished by the cod-Anglophilia of the misuse of "commons". There's a totally private new building called the Something Commons near where I live; I yearn to exercise pannage and turbary.

You absolutely should list Professional Societies on your CV and belong to them. It is only going to take one line or three or four and there are no limits on length in the academic job market. If I was interviewing a candidate and saw that they did not belong to the relevant society I would assume that that meant they weren't really serious about this field.

PS - The society I was talking about is the International Society for Ecological Economics. If you did put American Economic Association on your CV but ISEE but tell me you are really interested in "Ecological Economics" and you are a new PhD who in economics usually don't yet have much in the way of publications.... I'm probably not going to believe you. I will think you are just saying that to get the job, will then come to our department and not be interested in doing interdisciplinary work. The more signals I can have about this unknown commodity - the scholar with little track record - the better. I have been on several hiring committees in Australia and the US and participated as a faculty member in other decisions. I'm a tenure track Associate Prof now...