(Image: “Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise,” by Benjamin West, 1791)
See the glory
Of the royal scamSteely Dan (Donald Fagen/Walter Becker), “The Royal Scam,” 1976
We had no reason to imagine that our doctoral hoods were merely emotional courtesy prior to execution. The blindfold before the guillotine.
Most of us in academia, eighty percent or more of all new research doctorates, will be exiled from our adopted home. Will be shot directly from the most vertical rise into a vast, airless nothingness, jettisoned into the silence just as we imagined that we were about to be cleared for a new stage of flight.
Those of us who’ve been associated with graduate education have a very specific, lived, daily experience of the holy land. We know its pleasures, and we know the ways in which we could imagine making it even more sublime. Every one of us comes to the work with our own specificity in detail—in names, institutions, disciplines, graduation dates—but with a remarkable uniformity in the wonders of intellectual life. We have all lived within, and helped to manufacture, heaven.
None of us were prepared for hell.
Aside from the various mythologies—of burning pits, sulphureous lakes, being herded by demons with forks—the most basic concept of hell is that it is a full removal from the presence of God. Academic hells are like that. The particular experiences might be unique to each of us, but what they have in common is the absence of specific emotional qualities that we have come to love.
It is this sense of absence from the divine that binds us so closely, even after our condemnation, to the enterprise that has banished us. Online trolls plague every discussion of adjunct life with some variant of, “well, if they’re treating you so badly, why don’t you just leave?” And the easy psychological response will have something to do with identity—that we have framed a particular kind of self (and self-narrative), and are bonded to that identity in ways that we shouldn’t be expected to easily abandon. But I think that there’s a second force at work, which is that we hope to be paradise-adjacent. To hold at least a gauzy, pastel version of the vivid pleasures we once knew so well. To imagine that there is, after all, one last final exam we might pass in order to be welcomed home.
Let’s examine nine specific blessings from which we will be held apart.
The First Circle of Hell: “Your Call Is Very Important to Us…” The abandoned scholar will no longer have software, either general nor discipline specific, at her disposal. She will not receive updated computers, will not have automated backups, will not have a local-area network, will not have an IT team on call. She will not even have a photocopier, or a cabinet of pens and legal pads. She will not have a single W-2 at the end of a year, but instead a scatter of 1099s. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of what it means to be part of a community, a specialist contributing to and supported by a team. She will know instead what it means to surrender time to tasks that she would have expected to outsource. What it means to be a sole practitioner rather than a member of a professional culture.
The Second Circle of Hell: Banished from the Garden. The abandoned scholar will no longer have a free on-site health club, nearby food service, or a beautiful campus landscape within which to walk, with its own grounds crew, its own public safety service, its own transit system. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the aesthetic nature of the academy, the ways in which beauty and generosity have been core facets of the academic enterprise, from the Groves of Academia to the monasteries and private libraries and collections that gave rise to the modern university. The abandoned scholar will do without the unnecessary but ennobling powers of beauty which are so often foregone in workplaces more dedicated to purely economic principles; will no longer have places, and lives, that are outside the simple demands of maximized production.
The Third Circle of Hell: Each Day the Same as the Next. The abandoned scholar will have no recourse to the liturgy of the seasons: the year that breathes between the opening and closing of semesters, the programmed temporal movements between immersion and recovery, between service and discovery. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the rituals that make a calendar into a sacrament. We will instead live within a flattening of time, in which the pressures of “time is money” have made all hours and seasons into fungible commodities.
The Fourth Circle of Hell: Non-Member Rates. The abandoned scholar will have no access to the common heritage of intellectual life. The library—its books and journals, its databases and collections, its invitation to browse freely rather than be solely strategic—will be supplanted by Google searches for the random, pirated PDF copy of an important article. The abandoned scholar will have no support for memberships in scholarly societies nor to register for and travel to their meetings; their professional community will be replaced by email and LinkedIn. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of serendipity, of bringing intelligent people together to talk freely, and thus to discover fruitful intersections that power new ideas. The abandoned scholar has not merely been abandoned, but undergoes the active process of cashiering, of dishonorable discharge—the ritual disgrace of the fallen officer, stripped of sword and stripe; the service record stricken from history.
The Fifth Circle of Hell: Free Agency. The abandoned scholar will no longer have a daily community of the like-minded, a cohort that has set aside worldly concerns for the unreasonable pursuit of wisdom. The daily exchange of the secret languages and iconography of one’s field, the collective effort to continually redefine one’s discipline, all will be set aside for the blunt intersections of the co-worker: the project update, the check-in, the annual review. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the commonality of wisdom, the awareness that intellectual life is communal more than individual, that the debate and argument and peer review of scholarly life are all mechanisms through which a community both rises and binds together.
The Sixth Circle of Hell: Billable Hours. The abandoned scholar will no longer have the freedom to take her work wherever her interests might lead, to spend months or years chasing an idea to its natural conclusions. Research will be reduced to fact-finding, strategic planning, product R&D, client service, market forecasts. And this will lead toward a greater understanding of the power of curiosity and exploration, the importance of having an entire profession of people who specialize in the things they don’t yet know, the benefits of whose work might arrive in years, or decades, or generations.
The Seventh Circle of Hell: No Thru Traffic. The abandoned scholar, having finished her dissertation, will now find her intellectual path truncated, her enormous work leading to none further, the ladder reduced to a stepstool with no higher levels. That imagined family tree, bearing forty or fifty further years of discovery, has instead been uprooted and burned. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the increasing sophistication of thinking that becomes possible with sustained engagement, of insights that can only fostered by accumulation and repetition. It will lead us toward thinking about the meaning of life, of setting a trajectory of values rather than merely accomplishing goals.
The Eighth Circle of Hell: Barren. The abandoned scholar will have no leverage with which to influence a new generation of young thinkers, will never have a second or third course with a particularly lively undergraduate, will never have graduate students, teaching and research assistants, dissertation advisees. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the lineage of ideas, of the personal evangelism and encouragement that brings new initiates into the faith.
The Ninth Circle of Hell: Ghosted. The abandoned scholar will be excluded from a machine expressly designed to offer all of its participants regular feedback, with extensive individual commentary and recommendation. Whether course grades, student evaluations, peer-review judgments, or tenure and promotion structures, the academic structures of individual appreciation and growth will now forever be closed. And this will lead us toward a greater understanding of the powers of admiration and recognition, of the emotional value of being meaningfully appreciated.
I can’t count the number of times when some tenured faculty member, hearing about the indignities of adjunct life, said something about how hard life is for us on the inside, too, you know… To which I can only say, “Trade you.”
Cultures are lived from the inside, but understood from the outside. So it’s no surprise that faculty members might become blind to their blessings, and instead attend to small nuisances. They can take for granted the continuation of things the rest of us can only remember.
I’ve often been criticized for not holding out hope for collective bargaining for adjuncts. And it’s not true. There’s absolutely no justification for paying someone three grand per class with no expectation of renewal, no justification for eliminating someone’s course the day before the semester begins and thus removing even that meager income. I’m all in favor of banding together to change the compensation and work security of the majority of college teachers, and I think that it can actually work a little bit. But for me, the economics have only been a small part of the ache of banishment. Far more important is being told for decades that we belonged, only to discover that paradise was provisional at best. Far more important is being exiled from a community and its language, its patterns and its tools. It’s important to see heaven clearly, to burn its pleasures into mind, so that at least we can comfort ourselves with the paradise we once had.
Herb Childress 