The Adjunct Novel at Inside Higher Ed

From Colleen Flaherty's "The Adjunct Novel" at Inside Higher Ed:

Alex Kudera, who has spent many years as a non-tenure-track professor of English, made waves in 2010 with his book about Cyrus “Duffy” Duffleman, a Philadelphia-area adjunct who travels around the city to five different jobs. Fight for Your Long Day traces Duffleman’s steps and the various indignities he experiences inside the classroom and out. He’s always running late, for example, and is wrongly accused of sleeping with a student by a college counselor, but still shows dedication to his work.

Kudera published Auggie’s Revenge, which touches on similar themes and features as adjunct as its central character, earlier this year. Hinting that some audiences aren’t quite ready for a full-on fictionalized takedown of adjunct issues, he said via email that his work might be “a more brutal version of socioeconomic America than relatively affluent urban readers like to see in their novels.”

Interview in Inside Higher Ed

At Inside Higher Ed, Joseph Fruscione included in his adjunct interview series Gordon Haber, of Adjunctivitis and False Economies, and I exchanging e-mails on writing while teaching as adjuncts.

In one of my questions, I slipped in a Richard Yates reference to the fact that he did very little writing while teaching at Iowa. For me, this relates to his almost famous assessment that writing and teaching are thoroughly incompatible as they require the same emotions. At least, Yates saying that is famous to me.

From the interview:

AK: Richard Yates, in an interview, said he hardly wrote any fiction when he was teaching at Iowa for six years. He described teaching as demanding the same emotions as writing, and so he was too drained from teaching to leave anything on the page. How has it been for you?

GH: Teaching was draining, but I wanted to do it. I have a really hard time with day jobs that don’t interest me. Of course it was extraordinarily difficult to balance marriage, fatherhood, teaching, freelance journalism and fiction writing. And yet the last few years have been a fertile period. I wrote a story collection, the third draft of a novel, a bunch of features and book reviews. I really don’t know how it happened. Maybe because for me writing is like exercise — you’ve got to do it regularly, even just a little bit, so you don’t feel like crap. So even though teaching can be emotionally taxing, I still managed to write, except during finals week when there was 100 essays to get through.

Read more at Inside Higher Ed: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2014/05/07/two-novelists-discuss-their-experiences-adjuncts#ixzz315BAkkCh

first they quit?

It is of course absurd, unfair, and unoriginal to describe any recent shenanigans in American higher education to anything related to Nazi Germany, but Paul Fain's piece in Inside Higher Ed reminded me of this poem from my childhood.

Martin Niemöller: "First they came for the Socialists..."

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.

They've already come for so many different kinds of "nonessential" workers on many different campuses, from adjunct instructors to garbage collectors to a guy I knew whose job with a college degree was to do all the laundry for another school's men's basketball team (20K, no benefits), and, thus, it's not at all surprising that online instructors are being let go. Administrators aren't gassing anyone, it's humane termination, so to speak, and by some criteria the benefits of not working seem to be on the rebound (Affordable Care Act, food stamps, etc.), but it's still a peculiar time we're in, and it's hard to know where it will all end, and what kind of United States we'll be living in when we get there.

And then again, the market is roaring higher, hundreds of thousands of jobs are going unfilled, and if we discount hundreds of thousands falling off the employment rolls then we've had positive job creation for several years. We'll see what this Friday's jobs numbers say. There's some rosy America out there where angry scientists don't need to teach classes at Marist, and adjuncts who quit find rejuvenation in a full-time job beyond the groves of academe. BRIC economies thrive and every discounted European worker flies away to find gainful employment! Perpetual growth is an unstoppable force of jobs and social justice!

Oh. You said, "contraction"?

Well, what else?

April 29 (John Warner On Failure)

I was doing some a.m. search and rescue for something I could share as the next-to-last blog of the month, unless I get inspired and overcome this morning's fatigue, and I found John Warner writing "On the Possibilities of Failure" at Inside Higher Ed. In a world where finishing second is often counted as such, you'd think this would be a 20,000-part essay, but in fact, he manages to make some good points in one piece of reasonable length. I've always found failure to be a positively inexhaustible topic, indeed the only topic of great literature or at least a primary topic of my literature, so it took me only a second to decide to share it with you.

Now, if I could only get this hyperlink function to work.