Perhaps familiarity does breed contempt. Nearly half of post-secondary faculty work as adjuncts, yet Ph.D. students pay them scant attention when choosing dissertation topics. During the past three years, 11 out of 120,000 dissertations examined adjunct faculty use. Ten of the eleven were written by scholars in the discipline of education, and a Ph.D. candidate in economics wrote the eleventh. Ph.D. candidates in the rest of academe are curiously uncurious about adjunct faculty.

Even the dissertations that acknowledge adjunct faculty do so only in a parochial sense, focusing on part-timers in one state or one community-college system, for instance. Only one dissertation among those examined by this writer included research about part-time faculty from two states; for the most part, the dissertations presented research about adjunct faculty in the Midwest and south. The coasts, with their prestigious universities and tens of thousands of adjuncts, might have been fertile ground for research, but only in Virginia, Florida and California did Ph.D. candidates do any spadework.

As a result, the picture of adjuncts that emerges from these dissertations is fragmentary, like a strand of DNA with only a few nucleotide bases in place.