So I hate to sound like a broken record with this stuff, but it keeps being necessary, so….

My argument about the current rage for essays decrying the working conditions of adjuncts has been consistent: I think it’s very necessary to be having a conversation about the plight of adjuncts, which is immoral and untenable, and my first concern is to work in solidarity with them for better pay, benefits, and job security. I also freely and readily acknowledge the long odds of the academic job market, and all the attendant problems therein. (Including, of course, for me.) However, I take it as superficially and obviously the case that it’s not enough to identify real problems, but to do so in a way that contributes to solving them, and this is a bar that many within this burgeoning genre utterly fail to clear.

So take Dr. Karen Kelsky of The Professor is In. She’s published several blog posts that are indicative of this general line of argument. As usual, I broadly agree with her diagnosis of what’s ailing the academic job market and the simple immorality of the adjunct labor crisis. But, again as usual, I look for a prescription– a plan, a theory of politics– and I find nothing. I’ve read thousands of words from her on the subject of the academic labor market, and I have no idea what she wants to do that could materially help the adjuncts she rightly speaks out for. Instead, I find a focus on going after tenured professors and grad students that seems to me to play into the hands of the very people who created these bad conditions in the first place. That’s just a profound mistake.

I have admitted many times that there are tenured professors who deserve criticism, and I have participated in criticizing them in the past, including in person and at times when it was socially and academically inexpedient to do so. But it is astonishing the way that the administrators and legislators who are actually responsible for the conditions these writers say they hate escape their criticism again and again. Look, this is simple, factual reality: the budgets allocated to academic departments for hiring adjuncts, and the number of courses those budgets must stretch to fit, are not determined by tenured faculty, but by administrations above their heads. The lack of job benefits for adjuncts is not the fault of tenured faculty but of administration. The lack of permanent contracts for adjuncts is  not the fault of tenured faculty but of administration. Those are facts. So what’s the plan? How do you get to the world you say you want? You don’t get credit for merely expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo if you have no theory of politics for how you will get past it.

If you’re interested in improving the life of adjuncts, it makes little sense to so focus on the tenured, or even worse, on the recently-hired tenure track profs who are only guilty of having been hired and who had no part in creating these conditions but have become whipping boys in this conversation.  Please, criticize faculty where appropriate, but recognize that the utter lack of attention for those who make the actual decisions in these areas works against the adjuncts you claim to speak for. The constant focus on accusing current faculty of corruption and current graduate students of contemptible delusion makes no sense, analytically or politically. It only makes sense emotionally, to soothe the egos of those who still think of themselves as in social and cultural competition with TT faculty. But effective politics are about nothing if not putting aside emotion to focus on practical, positive action. What’s your plan?

I don’t like the term “useful idiots” because it is unnecessarily pejorative and inflammatory. But the fundamental concept, of those who unwittingly do the ideological bidding for causes they don’t actually believe in, I am very happy to apply to people who rage against TT faculty in an unfocus, apolitical way. This is the case: there is a powerful and well-moneyed movement of neoliberals and conservatives to destroy the very concept of a professor, and in its place to establish an army of contingent faculty who have no research agenda, no job security, and no bargaining power. These people hate the tenured, who represent one of the last impediments standing in their way.  We have to balance that with understanding with appropriate criticism of tenured faculty who don’t contribute to fixing the problems.

If we simply attack all TT faculty in a way that contributes to no meaningful political organization or cause, we are working for those who want us all to live the precarious lives our current adjuncts do, and we speed our advance towards a world where achieve equality only in the sense of being equal in misery. What the people writing these types of essays have to ask themselves is if that’s what they really want. Because I’m more than happy to do all I can to support a political movement that moves toward equality by building adjuncts up, but I have no interest in one that does so simply by tearing the tenured down. I’ll reserve that effort for the financiers and capitalists who make many times what tenured professors make, who soak up such an enormous portion of our country’s wealth, and who are the actual source of our economic problems.