After writing a lot about the current plight of adjuncts and how to effectively address it, I pretty much stopped for a long while. I’ve always agreed with the basic complaints as laid out by adjuncts and their allies: the university exploits them, paying them absolutely terrible wages with no benefits or job security, at a time when they teach a large percentage of the total courses in the American university system and in universities that seem to have inexhaustible budgets for assistant vice provosts and dining halls. That has to change. The condition is immoral and unsustainable. There are many people that deserve blame, and while tenured faculty are not solely or primarily responsible for this condition, too many of them have actively or passively contributed to it, and they deserve censure for their apathy or collaboration. Individuals need to work to support better adjunct working conditions, and we need to create systems to advance their interest. We need to help adjuncts unionize and collectively bargain for better working conditions. Solidarity with adjuncts comes first, before anything else.

But I also have always had my disagreements with the broad and growing world of “rage of the academic underclass” essays, strategic and political disagreements. I have felt, for example, that these essays frequently fail to articulate a strategic vision for what kinds of changes they want to achieve, or a political vision of how to achieve them. They tend to be scattershot in their approach. Often, they seem more interested in advancing a particular emotive response to exploitation than to devising and implementing an effective means to end it. When I say “hey, this seems like an ineffective tactic for winning broader public support,” I tend to get the canned response that I should “respect the emotional truth” of the people writing the essays. To me, respecting people’s emotional truth rather than effectively advancing their project is a form of condescension and disrespect. Indeed: a lot of the tenured faculty who the authors of these essays despise have taken exactly that wrongheaded lesson to heart, that support for adjuncts and similarly exploited academic labor is primarily a matter of emotional sympathy and respect, in a deracinated way, rather than a matter of labor solidarity. Of course you need to show respect to adjuncts, like you need to with anybody else. But ending exploitation will take material change. Labor solidarity is about recognizing the mutual benefit of working together, not being nice.

Anyway, awhile back some former Stanford grad student published a piece that to me was deeply indicative of all of the problems with the genre. In particular, it had the bad habit of acting like the conditions described within were somehow unique to academic labor, when in fact they are universal conditions of being a worker. That pretense is sympathy repellent. You can imagine anybody who’s ever been in a bad job saying, “Oh, those above you in the hierarchy were condescending and dismissive towards you? You felt destructively competitive with your peers? What’s that like?” So I intended to write something about it. But one of my frequent real-world interlocutors on this subject told me I shouldn’t. Solidarity, she said, means accepting these essays for what they are. I’m not inclined to agree, but every time I write a piece about adjunct issues, I get people accusing me of a failure to  prioritize solidarity because of my analytical and strategic disagreements. So I mostly gave up on arguing these issues. I don’t want to be part of the problem.

I will also freely say that part of my frustration with this topic is the way that a small handful of voices have come to so dominate the discussion that they become the locus of discussion themselves. I have no interest at all in adding to the growing field of Rebecca Schuman Studies. I get it; you have to build a writing career. But there’s having an issue that is personal to you and there’s making yourself the issue.

I am happy, though, that smart people continue to write more interesting, more productive pieces, and few writers are wiser or more provocative than Yasmin Nair. Yasmin has always been someone who is capable of ruthlessly critiquing the academy and its labor practices, without falling into false, ahistorical narratives or mistaking the pleasure of rage for power or efficacy. Though I may not agree with every word, I think her piece “Solidarity without Affect: The MLA Subconference Enters Its Second Year” is required reading for anyone interested in these subjects. Check it out.