The writing is on the wall, but we ignore it. The much neglected truth of academia is that colleges and universities operate primarily as corporate venues freely competing against each other in an open market with little regulation on tuition. The cost of an education is no longer proportional to quality derived from any academic instruction. A student that pays an advanced premium on tuition is not exactly guaranteed brilliant instruction. For post-docs, the pursuit of a career in academia preoccupies an even greater disparity as colleges/universities opt to favor adjuncts over positions with established tenure. At face value, the facts suggest that adjuncts are more likely to be employed academically than tenured professors considering the scarcity of the latter. All depending on department and academic program, tenured professors farm out classroom instruction combined with grunt work research to adjuncts.
It is no secret the majority of the academic workload is achieved through those less than desirable assignments and positions. Technically, that allows greater time and flexibility for research which in this case qualifies as academic freedom squarely for tenured professorships; the former being one of the highest and most sought after currencies of the academy. Nonetheless, adjuncts continue to get shafted by massive workloads only to receive minimal recognition with no promise whatsoever of tenure let alone a long term career in academia. When managerial politics takes precedence over academic affairs, the bottom line of each institution is dedicated toward big money. With it, colleges and universities acquire funding directed toward the enhancement of facilities and amenities which have minimal impact on the actual academic performance of students.
The academy, derived in the form of the college or university, was established to preserve, develop, and produce knowledge for purposes of contributing to the intellectual enrichment of man. Any objective observer cannot resist but to wonder, does the same objective continue to operate as the modus operandi of academia today? Adjuncts require a separate organizational voice that operates interdepartmentally with each college and university. The weight of this proposition is more suitable for public universities considering how significantly subsidized each one is by taxpayer money. If adjuncts are denied collective bargaining power for ample representation, they will remain as a repressed majority in almost every academic circle.
Job prospects for post-docs are competitive and few and far between; far too long, academic administrators have been exploiting this chasm as a caveat for priorities that contribute little to the universal accessibility of intellectualism. In a world of underpaid and overworked adjuncts, initiative to contribute to the foundation of the academy is rendered scarce which makes a future in academia seem like a bleak from those looking in from the outside.
The Adjunct Revolt: How Poor Professors Are Fighting Back
-Image is Courtesy of the Broken Mirrors Blog-