So I want everybody to check out this post by Adjunct Nate Silver at Rebecca Schuman’s blog, because it is perfectly emblematic of everything wrong with how people talk about the adjunct  crisis. It presents a entirely convincing argument that the job market in German has been uniquely bad since 2008, despite some who say otherwise. As usual, on diagnosing the facts about the current academic job market, the people complaining about the adjunct crisis have those facts right.

Now here’s the other part: the almost pathological inability or refusal to present this information in a way that might be politically compelling and thus contribute to progress. I find myself thinking: boy, what else was going on in the world of employment in 2008? Oh, right: an employment depression! An economy-wide shedding of jobs! One of the most brutal periods for workers since the Great Depression! And while the employment rate has improved since then, that improvement is in large measure a factor of jobless people falling out of the labor economy and thus being shedded from that statistic. You might call this relevant context for a post like that!

It’s not just analytically dumb not to include that context. It’s politically suicidal. Because here’s the thing: people don’t like academics. They don’t. We can have a long conversation about the reasons why and the consequences, but that’s the fact. So saying “hey, we academics are suffering from a uniquely bad job market here” is mostly going to result in people saying, “So what?” But! If you can tie the death of TT jobs and the terrible working conditions of adjuncts into a broader, economy-wide critique of the death of job security, the ruthless  downward pressures on wages, and the general immiseration of the American worker, you might start to make progress. You might, in other words, make progress in fixing the conditions that you hate by showing people how the plight of academics is the same as the plight of other people, instead of constantly treating those problems as unique. As basic as politics gets: create commonality in understanding to create commonality in purpose.

In my experience, the people who are the most voracious in writing about these issues simply refuse to draw those connections. Why? Well, there’s two downsides to doing so: one, you lose the ability to talk about yourself as uniquely disadvantaged. And two, you lose the ability to treat current grad students as uniquely deluded and current faculty as uniquely corrupt. They become, instead, merely more suckers in an economy full of suckers, losers in a society where the loser-winner split is something like 99 to 1. This is why I continue to say that, despite their desire to act more cynical towards the academy than anyone else, the people who write such articles actually maintain a naive romanticism towards the academy. They want to represent their very real, very degrading labor market problems and poor working conditions as special, and the academy as a specially exploitative employer. But there is nothing special about us. The academy is a factory, like any other, and we’re all assembly line workers, and until we accept that fact and work in tandem with the rest of the losers in a comprehensively broken economy, no positive progress will be made.

Update: If this isn’t clear– it’s better to be analytically correct and politically misguided than to just be analytically wrong. I always kind of assume that’s clear, but then, I have many, many times been accused of being critical towards those with whom I broadly agree in a way that obscures that agreement. I hope that isn’t the case: Schuman (and I presume ANS) are correct on the facts here, and more importantly, on the utter immorality and exploitation of much adjunct labor. I just want to press where I can press to make sure we make the best case possible.