March 12, 2020 43
ety where 65 percent of young adults
have some college education, to serve
as “prototypes for the new union
members of the future.”
Raewyn Connell, an emerita pro-
fessor of sociology at the University
of Sidney and veteran union activ-
ist, makes a similar argument in The
Good University. At most institutions,
she writes, the academic staff and the
operations staff share a love for their
work, a dedication to the students, and
a sense that their labor serves the com-
mon good—a firm ground, she hopes,
upon which to build a full-scale indus-
trial union, bringing together all the
workers in the sector into one over-
arching organization.
Nonetheless, one of the reasons many
adjuncts stay in poorly paid jobs is the
dream of a position that would lead
to tenure, and it is in the competition
for such positions that the academic
workplace may become distinctively
terrible. “This is what faculty life looks
like now,” Herb Childress writes in
The Adjunct Underclass, “living in
hope about the promises that are made
to keep everyone quiet”—the whisper
in an adjunct’s ear that “there may be
a tenure-track line ahead.” The num-
bers, of course, belie such promises. To
take the field of history, in 2017–2018
there were an average of 122 applica-
tions for each tenure-track position,
with some openings receiving almost
seven hundred applications. Instead of
a market, the tenure-track labor system
has come to resemble a lottery—“a su-
preme arbiter,” as Cebula writes in his
slasher novel, “the magic of which [is]
only confirmed by the seeming arbi-
trariness of its judgments.”
Behind these numbers lies a larger
structural transformation. As recently
as the 1990s, there were largely two
separate strata at which tenure-track
hiring tended to occur: a national-level
market with Ph.D.s from the magic
circle of highly advantaged “top pro-
grams” migrating to less highly ranked
research universities (the University of
Wash i ngton h i r i ng f rom UC Berkeley,
for example), and a number of regional
markets fed by Ph.D.s from regional
centers (Western Washington Uni-
versity hiring from the University of
Washington). Over the course of the
1990s and 2000s, in many humanities
fields at least, these markets increas-
ingly came to overlap; in the past de-
cade, they have all but unified, with
Ph.D.s from schools like Princeton and
Berkeley now fighting over nearly every
tenure- track job at four-year institu-
tions across the country.
Yet even with the movement of na-
tional markets into regional ones,
there still are not enough positions
for graduates from the most presti-
gious programs—let alone for all the
other Ph.D.s produced each year. The
American Historical Association has
published the most complete statistics
on career outcomes available in any
humanities discipline, and its database,
“Where Historians Work,” shows that
in the field of modern American his-
tory, to take one example, only 56 per-
cent of Ph.D.s at roughly the top ten
programs from 2004–2008 attained
tenure-track positions at four-year
institutions—a figure that dropped to
48 percent for the 2009–2014 Ph.D.
cohort, as the job market crashed after
the recession and failed to recover.
(Job listings across the humanities re-
mained down 31 percent between 2007
and 2016.)^2 There are, however, around
150 universities offering history Ph.D.s
in the US, and at a sample of mid-level
institutions the proportion of graduates
who found such jobs declined from 35
percent to 26 percent. In other words,
while the national and regional job
markets have become more unified,
the outcomes for graduates of the most
privileged programs have nonetheless
declined—even as these Ph.D.s appear
to have further crowded out the gradu-
ates of less well-off institutions. Boththe academically rich and the academi-
cally poor are getting poorer together,
although some of those at the top are
maintaining their positions, to a signifi-
cant degree, at the expense of those at
the bottom.
The prospect of a full-time position
may be a standard way to pacify con-
tingent employees across the contem-
porary workplace, but there are few
other sectors in which the differences
in pay, prestige, or job security are as
large as between contingent and core
staff in the academy. There is also no
other field in which one trains, on av-
erage, for eight years—with around
half of one’s peers failing to complete
the degree—only to line up a poorly
paid, insecure position, or else embark
on a series of wide-ranging travels to
take up short-term jobs (postdoc po-
sitions have nearly tripled in the hu-
manities since 1996) in the hope that
you may eventually get lucky and at-
tain a permanent position. Pursuing
a life in academia has become more
like trying to become a professional
athlete or a star musician than a doc-
tor, a lawyer, or even a typical service
sector worker. Little wonder that there
are articles in mainstream publica-
tions like Slate with headlines such as
“ Getting a Literature Ph.D. Will Turn
You into an Emotional Trainwreck,
Not a Professor.”
Circumstances are not much better in
many of the social sciences than in the
humanities, and while career prospects
outside of academia are more attrac-
tive for those in STEM fields, there have
been severe drops in the proportion of
STEM Ph.D.s securing postdocs and,
for those who want to stay in the acad-
emy, tenure-track positions. This is one
reason graduate student unions have
recently found success at institutions
like Brandeis, Columbia, Harvard, and
Tufts. A decade ago, when unions tried
to organize graduate-worker bargain-
ing units that stretched across entire
universities, STEM students saw their
interests as fundamentally different
from those of students in the social sci-
ences and humanities. Now, prospec-
tive Ph.D.s across the university findAdjunct
by Geoff Cebula.
Self-published, 137 pp.,
$7.99 (paper)Reclaiming the Ivory Tower:
Organizing Adjuncts to
Change Higher Education
by Joe Berry.
Monthly Review, 162 pp.,
$75.00; $13.00 (paper)The Good University:
What Universities Actually
Do and Why It’s Time
for Radical Change
by Raewyn Connell.
Zed, 233 pp., $22.95 (paper)The Adjunct Underclass:
How America’s Colleges
Betrayed Their Faculty, Their
Students, and Their Mission
by Herb Childress.
University of Chicago Press,
213 pp., $24.00Where Historians Work:
An Interactive Database of
History PhD Career Outcomes
American Historical Association.
Available at http://www.historians.org/
wherehistoriansworkProfessors in the Gig Economy:
Unionizing Adjunct
Faculty in America
edited by Kim Tolley.
Johns Hopkins University Press,
219 pp., $34.95The Meritocracy Trap:
How America’s Foundational
Myth Feeds Inequality,
Dismantles the Middle Class,
and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits.
Penguin Press, 418 pp., $30.00Listen, Liberal:
Or, What Ever Happened
to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank.
Picador, 334 pp., $17.00 (paper)Degrees of Inequality:
How the Politics
of Higher Education
Sabotaged the
American Dream
by Suzanne Mettler.
Basic Books,
261 pp., $27.99Undoing the Demos :
Neoliberalism’s
Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown.
Zone, 295 pp.,
$29.95; $18.95 (paper)The Great Mistake:
How We Wrecked
Public Universities
and How We Can
Fix Them
by Christopher Newfield.
Johns Hopkins University
Press, 430 pp., $36.95;
$29.95 (paper)BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE(^2) A similar though less detailed study
of Ph.D.s in literary disciplines is also
available: Modern Language Associa-
tion Office of Programs, “Where Are
They Now? Occupations of 1996–2011
Ph.D. Recipients in 2013.”
With her striking poetic gifts, Denise
Riley is as happy in traditional forms as
experimental, and though her poetry
has a kinship to that of the New York
School, at heart she is unaligned with
any tribe. A distinguished philosopher
and feminist theorist as well as a poet,
Riley has produced a body of work that
is both intellectually uncompromising
and emotionally open.
This book, her first collection of poems
to appear with an American book pub-
lisher, includes Riley’s widely acclaimed
recent volume Say Something Back, a
lyric meditation on bereavement com-
posed, as she has written, “in imagined
solidarity with the endless others whose
adult children have died, often in far
worse circumstances.”
Riley’s new prose work, Time Lived,
Without Its Flow, returns to the subject
of grief, just as grief returns in memory
to be continually relived.
“This book is without a scrap of
sentimentality but provokes a deep
emotional response: not from
poignancy but in awe at the precision
with which Riley records her grief.
It is often too painful to read,
but too valuable not to.”
—John Self, The Guardian
“[Riley’s] writing is perfectly weighted,
justifies its existence. It is impossible not
to want to ‘say something back’ to each
of her poems in recognition of their
outstanding quality. Her voice is strong
and beautiful—an imperative in itself.
But her subject is not strength—it is
more that she is robust about frailty.”
—Kate Kellaway, The Observer
SAY SOMETHING
BACK
&
TIME LIVED,
WITHOUT ITS FLOW
DENISE RILEY
Afterword by Max Porter
Paperback • $16.00
Also available as an e-book
A BOOK OF POETRY AND PROSE
FROM DENISE RILEY, ONE OF
BRITAIN’S FINEST WRITERS
Available in bookstores, call (646) 215-2500,
or visit http://www.nyrb.com