Invisible Adjunct does a stirling job writing about the corporatisation of the universities. I came across this post this evening. Its a beauty. The post is based on this article
The post captures my experience of academia so well. This bit is spot on. There is no academic job market. Now why is that not being said openly and honestly.
When a postgraduate student and an adjunct I was told that there would be serious staffing problems in essentially all fields within the arts and sciences due to early retirement. Jobs galore was the account given. I was on the money. Tenure beckoned. Just work hard, publsih books and get your teaching up to speed and everything would be hunky dory.
The opposite --no full time jobs---was what actually happened. Along with a process of low-wage, casual positions for PhD's; the deprofessionlization ogf academic teaching and the rise of a academic underclass. The reality was that the universities were full of dead wood in the senior tenured academics and they were institutionalizing the rise of permanent underclass working outside the tenure track.
What was happened inside academia was what was happening in the rest of the Australian economy under a neo-liberal mode of governance (the link is to a bit of Marxist analysis). It led to the establishment of two-tier academic labor system.
And my reaction to being an adjunct and so excluded from the protective guild system of the tenured staff? It was a road to nowhere. Whilst being on the treadmill you felt like the waste product that must be flushed out of the system. And when you look at it dispassionately, the whole point or the purpose of the PhD production process is not to produce degree-holders for tenure-track jobs in academia but to provide cheap and exploited non-degreed teaching labor. That strips the ego bare.
Ten years of academic training as an apprentice to become a waste product. I along with a whole generation.
Excluded from a closed guild system with a PhD means that you are too highly qualifed to be an adjunct. So you become surplus to requirements, as they say in the state bureaucracies. Whilst becoming surplus to requirements I started reading material along these lines. I felt like junk and I wanted to know what I had become. What sort of person had been created by a PhD in philosophy within the "iron cage" of a rationalized modernity? I embraced Heidegger's view that human beings are mere "standing reserves," raw materials to serve the technological system, which treats nature as if it were a gasoline station.
I concluded that there was a pervasive crisis in Australia's Higher Education institutions and I lost interest in doing what I was officially supposed to be doing in terms of academic philosophy. Philosophy's fate was similar to the fate of classical studies three or four generations ago. I embraced the postmodern belief in the continuousness of academe and the real world (the rest of civil society including the marketplace).
I looked for the bridge across the divide between academia and the rest of civil society.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 18, 2003 10:55 PM | TrackBackExcluded from a closed guild system with a PhD means that you are too highly qualifed to be an adjunct.
Well put. And, I'm coming to suspect, most other jobs you might be able to find outside the academy that don't require 3-5 years of in-field experience.
Posted by: Rana on June 20, 2003 08:09 AMOops. That should be "_for_ most other jobs."
I have particular sympathy for Australian academics looking for work; I still recall vividly attending the national history conference about 4 years ago, and I'd say about 75% of the panels mentioned the job crisis in one way or another.
Posted by: Rana on June 20, 2003 08:12 AMRana,
I know the problem well. Highly skilled in one area, deskilled in another.
I solved it by doing volunteer work for two years and so reskilling myself whilst being a volunteer.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on June 20, 2003 09:08 AM