Adjunct to Tenure-Track: Ex-Part-timers Tell How They Leaped the Crevasse

by Christopher Cumo Forget the Yellow Brick Road. You don’t want to go to Oz. You just want a tenure-track job but the road is under deconstruction, and the jobs in cul-de-sacs in bleak neighborhoods. If you want a tenure-track job, you have to teach part-time until menopause and publish enough abstruse stuff to fill a library shelf. Finally, after years and even decades of privation and rejection letters that pile up like corpses in your psyche, comes the assistant professorship: four courses per term of freshman composition at $31,000 a year, what a used-car salesman makes in six months. […]