When I was in graduate school in English in the 1980s, nobody talked much about the job market. Other students focused on completing seminar requirements, passing qualifying exams, defining a dissertation topic, and writing the darn thing. Professors, too, stuck to intellectual matters, talking about novels, poems, ideas, and theories, not about dossiers, the MLA Job List, and campus interviews.
I thank my teachers for that, to an extent, for apart from letting graduate students know from the start just how bad the tenure-track job prospects were, I’m not sure that more information about the profession would have helped. Yes, as Marc Bousquet has rightly declared, we should have been informed about the worst trends of “adjunctivization,” but further discussion of all the mechanisms of the market and how to enter it successfully probably wouldn’t have been registered by novices struggling to fill in big gaps in reading while teaching freshman composition to pay the bills (no private school stipends for us). The depredations and corruptions of the labor market are there, but I’m not sure that graduate students are disposed to receive the knowledge. In my case, I would have been too naïve, distracted, and invested to accept the hard facts. If I had to account for all of the vagaries of hiring, the race to get on conference programs, the need to network, and so on, it would have scrambled my brains. Remaining cloistered and unaware was an intellectual advantage.
Besides, without first-hand experience of the decision-making process from several sides, one can’t really understand its workings. Not until I lucked into a tenure-track job at a growing department did some of its Baroque features come clear. At Emory in the 1990s, we made multiple hires nearly every year, sometimes running four search committees at once. All the professors got placed on search committees, even the junior faculty members, and I read hundreds of cover letters, CVs, letters of recommendation, and writing samples. It was a revelation, and I’ll go into one of its curiosities in a later post.
For now, I’ll echo a point made in a comment to Marc’s “Downwardly Mobile” post. It’s by Tina Trent, and it singles out an important culprit in the situation:
“Fully half the people here are missing an essential point: these jobs did NOT disappear: they were transformed from full-time work into abominably paid temp scams. Who’s responsible? Well, any tenured professor who didn’t stand up for their colleagues, for starters. After all, these people hold considerable power within universities and have a big say in hiring, firing, and general administration. Far too many of them decided that their “commitment” would be to their own paychecks and to diversity-driven parlor-dressing, rather than to ensuring (at little or no real personal cost) even a basic level of financial viability in their own discipline.”
She’s right, especially in light of what I’ve observed above, the inability of graduate students to recognize what’s in store for them. At this point, tenured professors need to accept that their duties extend beyond classroom instruction. They are stewards of knowledge, and they are also stewards of the institution in which it resides, and that means not letting their personal comforts blind them to their junior, adjunct, and graduate student colleagues.
