As I was reading Adelmann’s campus novel, I was thinking about one of the most brilliant and personable labour organizers I’ve ever met, the late Miranda Merklein. I miss her.
Like this novel’s protagonist, Merklein had realistic expectations of a middle-class life as a college teacher: not a cossetted existence, but decent health insurance and the opportunity to teach classes and talk about books.
None of that was forthcoming, and I’m enraged by the injustice of the academic system Miranda encountered and fought hard against to the very end of her life.
As the novel’s title indicates, the heroine is an underpaid adjunct instructor whose PhD has consigned her to a life of penury and scrambling for health care. Her rotting tooth and the impossibility of paying for a decent false tooth is a recurring concern.
What many of us encountered when we completed our PhDs is what Sam (Samantha) finds out as she scrambles to assemble a sufficient number of adjunct teaching roles at Baltimore-area colleges: in many ways, academia is a pyramid scheme, and whole groups of people (faculty kids who imbibe academic norms from toddlerhood; Ivy graduates from wealthy families who can afford to be “independent researchers,” e.g. unpaid scholars; lucky spousal hires, riding the coattails of their partner’s tenure-stream hire) have an advantage on her.
In Sam’s position, it’s impossible not to develop some bitterness.
Her temporary roommate and sometimes lover would prefer her to channel anger into union activism; instead, Sam writes, covering the humid and smelly shared adjunct office at one of her workplaces with her pages.
Because the truth about Sam is that she is, at heart, a writer. But a discomfiting experience with her doctoral creative writing supervisor derailed her, turning her into a critic instead of a novelist.
And now, years after their awkward sexual encounter, he’s re-emerged from decades of writer’s block with a new novel that seems to be about his relationship with Sam. He has all of the job security she lacks, albeit at a lower-tier institution, after her grad program exit interview included some pointed questions about sexual harassment, prompting his quiet departure. His novel is a roman à clė that tries to position the middle-aged predatory professor as the real victim of contemporary sexual politics.
Academia’s enraging inequities are on full display here. The students who have no clue that some of their instructors earn a fraction of what the others take home; the department parties and listservs closed to temp instructors, without whom the colleges could not function.
It’s a worthy contribution to the field of adjunct lit, alongside works like James Hynes’s The Lecturer’s Tale and Alex Kudera’s Fight for Your Long Day.
I’m writing about adjunct lit for a piece that was prompted by my rage fit one day, when three different emails thanked me for my resilience as I await a layoff notice. Scribbling a quick abstract for a proposed paper on resilience and precarity calmed me down enough to go back to teaching prep. My reward is the requirement to turn those angry 250 words into a 5000-word article this summer.
Academia has been described as the pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie. I think I just bought myself another pie.
But I want to honour, in the piece I’m drafting between grading stints, what academic labour leaders in Canada and U.S. and Mexico have meant to me.
The COCAL conferences that I’ve attended have introduced me to a sobering array of precarious work and life conditions across this continent.
I’m grateful to, among many others, Joe Berry and Helena Worthen; Karen Lentz Madison, who worked with me on the MLA’s CLIP committee, and all of our other committee members over the years; the ACCUTE folks I worked with on a checklist of best department practices for sessional faculty employment; the brilliant Maria Maisto, of the New Faculty Majority, and the equally brilliant Adrianna Kezar, whose research has been invaluable. I’m grateful to the MLA and to ACCUTE, which have provided receptive audiences for my discouraging words about academia’s social justice problem.
But things are worse now than when I began working on contract faculty causes, and when students tell me, hope in their eyes, that they want to do a PhD in the humanities, I can’t, in all good conscience, encourage them.
I was told by so many undergrad and grad school mentors that as bad as the academic job market is, “there will always be jobs for good people.”
A poignant fiction.
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