Adjunctland

No question my career has taken a few unusual twists and turns.  One of the more disappointing mismatches was when I finally landed at an agency where I had a lot of responsibility and liked my work, but I simply didn't like the city (or region) and my family liked it even less.  Generally, I am somewhat out of step no matter where I land, at least in part because I am a bit of a Cassandra and always imagine things turning out badly (and frankly most people prefer being around people with a more optimistic outlook).  That said, I have managed to contribute to important projects over my career, with probably the two most notable being developing the first Activity-Based Travel Demand Model for the New York metro region (not single-handedly) and then the overhaul I led of the Vancouver regional travel demand model (which was closer to being a one-man job...).  If I can hang in there, I'll probably be able to make major improvements to the Toronto regional travel demand model.

While the "life of the mind" always appealed to me, and I did try for several cycles to enter the academic job market, my timing was pretty bad.  In general, I missed the window by about five (or maybe 10) years when universities were still largely replacing faculty with other tenure-track faculty.  But this hasn't been the case since at least 1995.  This chart demonstrates the truly astonishing fact that at US universities, over 75% of instructors are part-time contingent instructors usually called adjunct faculty.

Now of course, a small handful of these are professionals in other non-teaching fields that are moonlighting and teaching an evening course or two, which was sort of the original justification of the adjunct category.  Incidentally, I did teach such a course at Northwestern while I was employed as a full-time transportation consultant.  In such cases, the salary probably still is only slightly above minimum wage (when all prep time and grading is factored in), but that isn't really the problem.  The problem is that people with the proper credentials end up piecing together careers with a bunch of adjunct postings rather than true tenure-track jobs and then they never can break through and then are trapped in a cycle of near-poverty.  (The mark of the adjunct seems to be a real thing...)

It's marginally better in Canada, in the sense that the part-time faculty are only 67.5% and not 76%.  In addition, Canadian adjuncts are probably slightly better positioned to benefit from unionization drives whereas they have little chance of success in the States for a variety of factors, most related to the hollowing out of organized labour by the political system (and the enthusiastic dismantling of labour protections by the conservatives on the Supreme Court).  With all that said, faculty have no intention of being forced to promote adjuncts to tenure-track positions, which is usually what the adjuncts attempt to put on the table during their periodic job actions and strikes.

Anyway, here is a truly sobering podcast episode talking about a number of issues related to the exploitation of adjuncts

I'm sure I could have been a bit more clever about my own career and published in better journals (and done less hybrid work, which was sort of encouraged in the 90s but then became a huge stumbling block to getting interviewed in the 2000s).  Also, if I had been less picky about where I ended up, I probably could have gotten on the faculty a few places (including West Virginia University).  But the academic market just never worked for me, and nothing was actually better than what I was doing at the time...

I guess this is on my mind a bit lately because a co-worker with a brand new Ph.D. just managed to get hired as a tenure-track faculty member at Dalhousie in Halifax.  I think it is appropriate to be happy for someone, who kind of hit the jackpot, and still be unhappy about the general situation which seems so unfair for so many bright students.  And maybe I am thinking of my own children, though neither of them seem that interested in following the academic track, which is probably a good thing...  There is no question I would no longer encourage anyone to get a Ph.D., as it sort of seems like a dead end with such low odds of getting a reasonable payoff.

Edit (10/24) And only a few weeks after this posted, I saw a job posting for a position in Mobilities at York University.  If Mobilities had been a thriving field when I was an academic with a newly minted doctorate, it would have been my natural home, but it just never really took off.  Anyway, I was slowly gearing up to apply as a late-career candidate (truly a Hail Mary pass!) when I noticed that it was a minority hire and only applicants that self-identified as Black could apply.  So very disappointing...