First Person

A Very Modest Proposal For Academe's Road Scholars

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person The Rejection Letter I Wish I Could Send If we had to make up a story for why you might be interested in our position, then interviewing you was too risky. Peer Review Hirings and Firings The new law school at the University of California at Irvine gets some high-profile hires ... and other appointment news. Ms. Mentor Does This Make Me Look Old? Advice on how best to dress, and act, when you look as young as your students. Career News Gone, and Being Forgotten Why are some of the greatest thinkers being expelled from their disciplines? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Tamar Rothenberg

Times are hard in academe. For every three tenured professors who retire or otherwise depart, only one of the precious budget lines left behind goes to another tenure-track position. Another becomes a variant of the one-year visiting, instructor, or adjunct position, and the third is eliminated altogether.

Today's doctoral student, then, has about a one-in-three chance of landing a tenure-track position upon graduation. Since the other option is no job at all, many a freshly certified teacher-scholar takes to the road, inhabiting one one-year position after another -- that is, if such a position is forthcoming at all. One of every three teaching assistants today will be a Trailer Adjunct tomorrow.

And that is the gist of this modest proposal. If things are so bad in these best of times, surely academic prospects will not improve when the certain slump sets in. It's time to accept the inevitable. One-year positions, whether with full salaries and benefits, or scrawny and adjunct, have become a way of life for universities and for an entire class of academics. And what's so bad about all these short-term positions?

Moving. Boxing up all those books and papers and files, and all those peripheral things that people seem to accumulate, like furniture and clothes and computers and cast-iron pots and china and art and CD's and, good grief, records. Pity the poor itinerant pianist. Days -- weeks -- are lost as time better spent preparing for the three new classes to be taught at Next University is squandered packing, and in the laborious process of deciding what you want, what you're willing to part with, and what will join the growing collection of "to be sorted later" boxes.

A new university also means new housing. It'll either be university owned, in which case you'll be kicked out at the end of the academic year, or privately owned, with an inflexible year-long lease to match your nine-month appointment.

The answer to all this discomfort and angst? Trailers. End the cycle of packing and unpacking by having a permanent mobile residence to match the permanently transient profession. Akin to the way companies offer 401(k) retirement funds for their employees, universities could establish "seed" trailer accounts for full-time graduate students with university funds. A small portion of the student's stipend would be siphoned off into this graduate "retirement" account.

Alternatively (though less lucrative for the university), a fraction of the money that universities save by hiring adjuncts would go into a fund out of which grants would be given to graduating Ph.D. students for the down payment on a trailer home or RV. As befitting the new corporate university, institutions of higher learning would also sell special Trailer Adjunct homes, with built-in bookshelves equipped with straps to keep the books from flying around the trailer as it rumbles along to its next destination.

Colleges and universities would establish trailer parks for their roving non-tenure-track faculty members. A distant parking lot could be handily turned into such a facility. Rural institutions could carve out a patch in the adjacent corn field for the homes, while city institutions could create mobile-home developments. Troublesome fraternities could be threatened with having their houses razed for faculty trailer parks.

Campus trailer parks could also be seen as the answer to the isolation of professorial vagabondage. Clustering visiting faculty members in one concentrated area would foster community, perhaps even community gardens, passed down from one year-long generation to the next.

As for those awkward in-between times, tossed out of one institution's housing and not yet able to move into lodgings at the next institution, roving faculty members need no longer fret. Upon accepting a one-year position, the smart provisional professor could reserve a spot for the following summer in any of North America's lovely trailer campgrounds. And trailer adjuncts could collect national- and state-park bumper stickers to display alongside parking stickers from a string of universities. Instead of being a strain and a drag, moving from institution to institution would become an exciting competitive sport: Whoever racks up the most stickers wins!

In the olden days, life in the ivory tower consisted of quiet stability, contemplation, and big old houses (or in urban areas, subsidized apartments in desirable neighborhoods). Academe today is more swiftly paced and unstable. Academic culture has changed -- and let it be so! A new culture will bloom as the Trailer Adjuncts develop social networks and create symbols of community and identity.

The roving professiorate will commune on the road, flashing headlights at one another in recognition along the interstate. Web sites will be dedicated to favorite stomping grounds, summer itineraries of fellow travelers, and comparisons of university libraries. Temporary faculty softball leagues will dot the country, consisting of loosely agglomerated teams with monikers such as the Wide Loads and the Rolling Profs.

Should a trailer professor eventually be offered a tenure-track position, he or she might choose to sell the mobile home to a newly emerging road scholar. Those commencing the Trailer Adjunct life would vie for possession of these "lucky trailers," homes whose inhabitants landed tenure-track positions (rather than those whose inhabitants returned to the outside world). Once the cycle is established, and used faculty trailers are available, the cost-effectiveness of the system will be as evident as the convenience.

One need only look at today's strip malls and urban highways to know how thoroughly the road has supplanted the train track in our society. Despite its many peculiarities, academe is but a subset of larger society. Here, too, the road is replacing the track, as temporary positions rise proportionately to the disappearance of tenure-track lines. Like it or not, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee -- brewed in your own little Trailer Adjunct home.