#adjunctification

For a variety of reasons, this was an extremely busy semester, and I simply wasn’t able to keep up with my open tabs (I had several hundred open at one point!). An irrecoverable browser crash killed any possibility of ever doing even an omnibus record of what I’ve been reading and thinking about — but I do have a tiny number of highlights from the semester that I will link here just to close the…

The median salary for a UC lecturer is $20,000 a year, and 25% of us rely on government assistance to secure necessities such as housing, food or healthcare. We stand on perpetually shaky ground: burdened by unpaid work, salaries too low to afford to live in the communities where we teach, and always wondering if we’ll still have a job next year.

Time for my regularly scheduled piece of friendly advice from a former PhD student: DO NOT GO INTO ACADEMIA.

A brilliantly expressed (and scathing) critique of academia's rapidly expanding adjunctification in the form of an acceptance speech the author gave for winning the Truman Capote Award. Kevin Birmingham’s thesis:

"All of this is to say that the profession of literary criticism depends upon exploitation. Even this formulation is too soothingly vague, so let us be more direct: If you are a tenured (or tenure-track) faculty member teaching in a humanities department with Ph.D. candidates, you are both the instrument and the direct beneficiary of exploitation. Your roles as teacher, adviser, and committee member generate, cultivate, and exploit young people’s devotion to literature. This is the great shame of our profession. We tell our students to study literature because it will make them better human beings, that in our classrooms they will learn empathy and wisdom, thoughtfulness and understanding. And yet the institutions supporting literary criticism are callous and morally incoherent."

I have exactly 1 piece of life advice to give to all of you and it is this:

* SFFTV 13.2 is out! It’s a great issue with some really great essays on wast and District 9, monster theory and Monsters, race and Arrival, and feminism and Ex Machina, but I want to put a special plug in for my co-editor Dan Hassler-Forest’s great essay on the nostalgia industry, Stranger Things, and Twin Peaks: The Return.

* Meanwhile, David Agranoff reads Extrapolation 61.1-2.

* And ICYMI: GS…

Lockdown Megapost Part One, Just the Bad News for Academia

* Decision Points Loom for College Leaders. Certainly Uncertain. Preventing the Collapse of Higher Education. Here’s what Fauci said about college students returning to campus in the fall. Colleges Are Deluding Themselves. The Case Against Reopening. Colleges Aren’t Reopening in the Fall. Empty Lecture Halls, No Fall Football, a Freshman-Only Campus. A Playbook for a Second-Choice Fall. This…

* A new Modern Masters of Science Fiction volume is out: Joanna Russ, by Gwyneth Jones. Check it out!

* The Tiptree Award Motherboard has issued a lengthy statement on why they won’t be renaming the prize.

* Podcast alert! Keywords of Capitalism with John Patrick Leary.

* Natalia Cecire on “cursed” as an aesthetic category.

* It may well be the purest and most honest expression of a society that…

* Active shooter drills are scaring kids and may not protect them. Some schools are taking a new approach.

https://twitter.com/gerrycanavan/status/1117895903744946176

* The adjunct underclass.

* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre…