Going adjunct

When all the postal workers have been sedated and locked away, will adjunct professors follow in their gun-powdered footsteps?

By Andreas Killen

Sep 17, 1998 | I first noticed my symptoms two years ago. It was January and I was running a slight temperature. I'd backed out of a visit to my in-laws in order to attend the American Historical Association conference in New York City. Hundreds of academics crowded the lobby of the mid-town Hyatt. Earlier that week, I'd learned that I'd been bumped from one of the classes assigned to me for the next semester in favor of a full-time professor. As the day progressed, I grew more and more fever-addled. Around me milled groups of graduate students in a miasma of anxiety and halitosis, while the professors schmoozed happily, already anticipating next year's shindig in Seattle. By Day 2, as I slouched in my seat listening to a talk on war memorials, I found myself daydreaming about blowing up the hotel.

Help! I thought. What's going on here? My analyst had no advice. She'd never heard of such a thing, doubted it was in the literature. I felt ashamed and tried to keep my sick fantasy to myself, unnerved by the image of mayhem lurking within my fevered brain.

But the urge to confess was too great. My friend Jonathan Skolnik came to my rescue. "It's called 'going adjunct,'" he told me: homicidal impulses directed at the academic profession. He cited an incident in New York's public school system, in which a beleaguered substitute teacher became unglued and started hurling chairs at the wall. Perfectly normal, he assured me. I felt instantly better.

But my symptoms didn't go away. As I studied the job listings in the Chronicle of Higher Education I found myself contemplating scenes of bloodcurdling violence, followed by cheerful scenes in which fellow adjuncts fed me cupcakes and made toasts in my honor. Hundreds of tenured faculty gone! Yikes! I needed help and fast.

I talked to some of my fellow adjuncts, hoping they could tell me something, anything, to reassure me. But they only seemed to agree that it was just a matter of time before adjuncts replaced postal workers as symbols of downtrodden, disgruntled laborers.

Next Page: The rude discovery that one is in a dead-end rather than an entry-level job

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