How did we discard the idea of college faculty? Herb Childress asks that provocative question in his Chronicle Review essay “This Is How You Kill a Profession.”
He goes on to describe his tortuous, decades-long relationship with the academy, including several stints as an adjunct. The “peculiar cruelty of higher education is … the vast purgatory of contingent life,” he writes. The experience of adjuncts goes beyond questions of finance and higher-ed policy to the “messy, human elements” of “fear, despair, surrender, shame.”
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