About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing. In English, for instance, fewer than half of the new Ph.D.’s win tenure-track jobs initially, according to the Modern Language Association.
When confronted with those numbers, the apologists, as the Invisible Adjunct calls them, maintain that there will always be jobs for the good ones. —Scott Smallwood
—Disappearing Act (Chronicle)
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Bobby, another area is technological training; that is, you stay up on the latest technology and train people to use it. If you can do that at an education school, where the students would be eater to learn new stuff, you'd probably find it very rewarding. It's good that you're thinking of an academic career in broad terms.
Mike, I agree with you about the social importance of IA. While IA did host a lot of excellent debate, its function was more of a venting and activisim platform. It's probably true that the time the author spent on that host could have been used elsewhere, in the grand scheme of things giving so many people a platform to vent their feelings and try to make sense of what is in many ways an unfair situation was really what made so many people attached to that site. I'm surprised it wasn't reincarnated into a KairosNews-style group forum, where the leadership could change as people's job prospects change. (But I haven't checked the site in a couple weeks... maybe some fans have organized that kind of thing since then.)
I feel for adjuncts, as many of my friends from graduate school long ago are >still
Dennis, As you know, statistics such as this one disturbs me, but something I am learning from the McNair Program on my campus is that statistic is from one area of employment for college professors: academic teaching.
If new professors (like myself someday) consider all possible academic avenues, then the overall unemployment rate of college professors becomes virtually none. I remain skeptical, but beginning to understand.
For instance, Joel and the McNair Program professors believe I should end up in Administration, based on my networking and leadership abilities demonstrated through being Lead Organizer of the English Festival.