Adjunct professor explains why he is leaving academia
Ten-year adjunct professor, Troy Camplin, can’t say he wasn’t warned: Once an adjunct, always and adjunct.
He’s jumping off the treadmill, and explains why:
…Also at issue is the fact that I taught challenging classes. For academic bureaucrats, the most important thing of all is retention. That is, to keep students coming back, to keep the money pouring in no matter what. A professor who is challenging is thus a threat.
Perhaps, more than anything else, that is why full-time professors are being replaced over time with replaceable adjuncts and lecturers. A professor protected by tenure is someone you cannot force to do anything. But someone who can be terminated for no reason whatsoever, typically worded as “we ran out of classes,” is ideal. Adjuncts and lecturers can be much more easily bullied by the system.
Adjuncts and lecturers should not buy the rhetoric that your input is wanted or needed. It is not. It is a trap to find out who won’t follow the unwritten rule of bureaucracy that student retention is the one and only thing that matters.
This, at least, is my experience. It is my experience at two community colleges and three universities.
I believe that things are only getting worse. The worst elements of elementary, middle, and high school are starting to creep up into higher education in the form of external “assessments.” The excuse is that the bureaucrats need to make sure that the professors, who are experts in their fields, are doing a good job of teaching the very thing at which they are experts. But the real reason is to enforce the status quo, to make sure everyone is a “team player.” The real reason is the logic of bureaucracy itself: bureaucratic growth. They assess so they have jobs assessing. That is all. And it is bureaucratic growth that is killing our universities.
And it is bureaucratic growth that has killed my desire to ever try to work for a university or college ever again. Bureaucracies have crowded out full-time faculty positions. They have created, with the move toward more and more adjuncts, a work environment that in a for-profit business the left would consider horribly exploitative.
Farewell, academia. I hardly knew thee (The John William Pope Center for Higher Education)
Comments
Yup. It’s basically why I’m not considering applying for a tenure-track position at my institution even though one it’s opening up, and it’s also why I’m looking for employment in some other field even though I’ve been an adjunct for eight years. I’m sick of all the baloney and micromanagement ~
I did the adjunct thing for several years after turning down a position that required me to teach very basic skills to community college students in NYC. I should’ve taken that job cuz that’s what you meet sometimes as an adjunct: students who should not be within smelling distance of college; students who are not willing to do the work to prepare them for completing a degree; students who think that because you have the same color as them you will let them slide; students who transferred out when told they will get their grades the old fashioned way.
It was my duty to prepare them to do other course work at the level necessary for graduation. Some students stayed, many dropped, many complained the work was too hard. Those who finished classes with me were grateful because they had the knowledge of and experience in writing research papers, with all that that entails.
The colleges wanted student retention. I wanted performance and achievement. Sometimes those two things are not compatible.
A lot of today’s students, coming in from the high schools, are not interested in working hard, and they just want the grade. They want to know what they need to know to get the good grade. Hearing that they need to think logically, use language grammatically and efficiently, support their claims with references and argument, that was too much for them.
In the long run, it’s not worth it. The love of learning, of inquiry is gone from academia.
I gave up on academia for largely the reasons stated, as well as the inherent bias in most departments against people not doing PC history–my specialty area is Modern European military and diplomatic history–so I was pretty much unemployable/undesirable, not having any gender-bender or post-modern nonsense in my CV.