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I was listening to Umano (an Android app) yesterday and heard this article from a magazine I had never heard of before – Jacobin. The article:In the Name of LoveThe article is contrarian in nature and challenges the line heard from time to time: "Do what you love. Love what you do." The author generally makes the point that people who use that line (DWYL for short) are privileged and don't really face the plight of the regular folk who often times have to work at undesirable jobs out of necessity.But the part I want to highlight is this portion of the article. I got the feeling that the author wrote the article from a quasi-Marxist standpoint, which makes it all the more interesting:
The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which around 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors — contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work....how pervasively the DWYL doctrine is embedded in academia. Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. This intense identification partly explains why so many proudly left-leaning faculty remain oddly silent about the working conditions of their peers. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.
I hadn't thought of that before, but it's true; for how liberal academia is, I haven't heard the storm of college professors coming to the aid of the growing number of adjuncts who must labor and toil for relative scraps. I think it's something to keep in mind in the trendy debate over so-called "income equality". There seems to be an oligarchic structure embedded into higher education which gets ignored by the same crowd which often calls out the capitalist structure of our economy.Thoughts?
I don't know if I'm getting the point here, but it seems the author is saying that doing something you love means only teaching it? Why can't adjunct professors get a 2nd or 3rd job in their field of study? I'm sure there are other things one can do with their major besides teach. If you love science or engineering and want to teach, great. But if that teaching job won't pay the bills there are plenty of other job opportunities they could do (and still love).
I think what the author is saying is that academia has really bought into the idea of DWYL and so they think payment is an afterthought (since loving what you do is its own reward). The problem is that this kind of thinking hurts those at the bottom. It's one thing to say “I love my job and so I'll be content with $85k/year in a tenured position,” but it's another thing to say “We'll pay the adjunct $3k to teach class X this semester. It doesn't concern us that he doesn't get benefits, or that he'll have to find another four classes to adjunct just to make a decent living.” This is especially curious given that liberals often claim they are for things like worker's rights and just wages.You are right that people who adjunct probably need to find other jobs in their fields. While this may be feasible for those in certain areas (business, engineering, etc.) it is really difficult in the humanities. I imagine a person with a PhD in philosophy will have a hard time getting regular work in a related field if he wants to adjunct at the same time.
