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New From Jacob Collier: Make Me Cry

364
Backwoods Sleuth4/26/2019 1:18:30 pm PDT

re: #347 steve_davis

30 years as an adjunct. 30…fucking…years. I can’t get hired full time because English is a PhD that everyone in the fucking world has no problem managing. An M.A. with 30 years is like yesterday’s coffee grounds getting reused for another pot. I don’t have a fucking portfolio. I don’t even understand what a portfolio is supposed to be. My entire career has been people handing me a departmentally-generated syllabus and saying, “Don’t worry about not having the parking decal yet. They don’t start ticketing until Thursday and we’ll have one put in your mailbox by then.” Teaching philosophy? Show up. On time. Do what I’m asked. Grade with some sense of speed. Go home. So I definitely understand the whole “extra cog unneeded for final assembly” part of a career.

Publishing credits.
“Publish or Perish” applies equally to adjuncts as it does to pre-tenure PhDs.
I say this from experience.
In my case as an adjunct, among other things, it was working for a newspaper, being active in the Illinois Press Association, and writing the occasional piece for the Columbia Journalism Review.