Bogost on adjuncts

His latest thoughts are HERE.

Permanent adjunct status must be awful, and I’m sure I would never have agreed to it if that’s the hand life had dealt me. And it very well could have happened.

My Department has no adjuncts. Indeed, we may be the only one in the whole University that uses no adjuncts. We’re happy about that, but what we’ve had to do instead is start using a lot of one-year and three-year full-time positions to deal with fluctuations in student enrollment. Every student at the American University in Cairo must take an introductory philosophy class. That is our primary reason for existing as a department, and indeed we were just a unit of English and Comp. Lit. until 2004.

As many of you probably know, there are certain fields where people only want to be adjuncts, because they have good jobs in other sectors and simply like to teach one class, or like the library privileges that go with it, or gain some sort of career prestige from doing it. In Cairo, for instance, every musician wants to give lessons at the American University or teach one class there, because it enhances their status in the community at large. As far as I know, most of them don’t really want a full-time professorial position. The same holds for engineering, business, and other such fields.

In the humanities, there often aren’t too many feasible career options other than academia. One of the interesting things about Bogost, of course, is that he’s one of the few humanities academics I know who could probably clear more than a million dollars per annum if he chose to do so: in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.

We can’t all be Bogost, with his very specialized expertise. But it may well be that the humanities academic of the future will need to have other skills in just that fashion, because in a sense we may all be headed for adjuncthood, or something like it. I fully expect that my generation is the last one for which traditional modern academic careers are somewhat possible. We’ll figure out a new model (or rather, people a bit younger than I am will figure it out) but it might be scary during the transition.