Institutes, Grading, and the Nine Circles of Adjunct Hell: ‘McSweeney’s’ Regards Academe

When Susan Harlan read a blurb on her university’s website describing a new institute, she didn’t draft an essay to voice her frustration. Instead, she turned to poetry and Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Ms. Harlan is an associate professor of English at Wake Forest University. She recently published a piece on the humor website titled “A Poem About Your University’s Brand New Institute” in which an administrator extols the (mainly monetary) virtues of the “Eudaimonia Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing Under Capitalism.”

To write the poem, Ms. Harlan said she played with language from administrative announcements, which can be “banal and bureaucratic,” to highlight what she perceived as the gulf between what an institute claims it will do and its actual function on campus.

For Ms. Harlan, that gulf is especially noticeable when institutes borrow philosophical phrases. She said she often sees Aristotelian terms, like Eudaimonia — a Greek word that has been loosely translated to mean “human flourishing” — pop up in a corporate context without much thought to their complicated, historical meaning.

“It’s the kind of thing I love, by which I mean hate,” she said.

Ms. Harlan, who has been writing academic satire for a few years, tells her classes that comedy and tragedy are close together and often overlap. She uses humor to express her exasperation with the absurdities of academic bureaucracy because of how playful, yet aggressive, it can be. In the poem, she writes that the institute will be studying "#wellbeing,” the nature of which “is not yet fully understood, but our initial research suggests that it has something to do with yoga at sunset, baby koalas, and rooms filled with gold coins.” And academics will publish works on well-being on the institute’s blog called “Education Is Fine, But Money Is Great.”

“You force them to reckon with the fact that you’re joking, but you’re clearly not joking also,” she said.

And Ms. Harlan is not alone. Many academics have used McSweeney’s to make light of some of higher education’s most reviled customs.

Chantelle Messier, now an adjunct professor of writing at Roger Williams University, thought up “How Glorious Our Task! Letters from a Dissertation Boot Camp” on the car ride home after attending a four-day dissertation workshop during which graduate students toiled for eight hours a day with limited internet access.

Ms. Messier said the “boot camp” was very helpful to her. But it did, in some ways, feel like a prolonged slog with everyone trudging through a difficult process together, she said. And that struck her as funny because they were really just drinking coffee and typing on laptops.

“There’s a natural humor in writing your dissertation because it feels so deadly serious,” Ms. Messier said. “And at the same time, to the outside world it seems like such a sedentary, low-stakes activity.”

So she wrote her piece like a series of wartime daily dispatches from a graduate student updating her adviser on her harrowing academic journey. Ms. Messier said she was inspired by Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary series that shows the letters soldiers wrote home, which often had a “semitragic, superformal tone.”

“My Dearest Advisor,” one of Ms. Messier’s letters begins, “Today, a flurry of writing and citation. Thirteen more pages gained!”

Other professors have used McSweeney’s as an outlet for more serious grievances about working as an academic.

One professor said she wrote her post “I Am the Woman in Your Department Who Does All the Committee Work” under the pen name Sophia Gould after being blamed for the behavior of a senior male colleague when she was a junior faculty member on the same committee. The piece was a form of protest, she wrote in an email.

“I didn’t have the power I wanted so, anonymously, I strived to address the issue in another way,” she wrote.

Dan Moreau was inspired to write a piece for McSweeney’s during his two-year stint as an adjunct professor at two public institutions. At the end of the semester, he remembers sitting in a plain room, shoulder to shoulder with other adjuncts, working through boxes that brimmed with final exams.

“It wasn’t the happiest environment,” Mr. Moreau said.

In “The Nine Circles of Adjunct Hell,” Mr. Moreau mashes the adjunct experience with the rings of hell Dante traverses in his Inferno.

The circles of hell in Mr. Moreau’s piece include New Employment Orientation (in which an administrator “reads the new employee manual aloud for eternity”) and Office Hours (in which you sit “with no phone, no internet access, and otherwise no contact with the outside world”).

Mr. Moreau said that although his account was hyperbolic, it reflected some of the problems he dealt with in his job. As a new adjunct, it could feel a little like being “thrown into the fire,” he said. And airing those frustrations in a funny, creative way can help take the edge off a serious or depressing topic, Mr. Moreau said.

While some professors have used humor to shed light on problems within their academic environment, another professor wrote a piece to poke fun at herself.

Deborah Thompson, an associate professor of English at Colorado State University at Fort Collins, said she wrote about the despair professors feel during the final-exam grading process after she went through it and felt like she was losing her mind. She recorded the experience in her journal and then returned to the entries later and was struck by how funny they were.

“I realized how ridiculous it was to pose my little melt-down as a major trauma,” Ms. Thompson wrote in an email. “I’ve only ever been able to write humor when I think I’m being deadly serious. Her piece, “The Stages of Grading,” went viral, Ms. Thompson said. She was flooded with emails from other academics saying how much it resonated with them.

“Teachers really connected with that end-of-semester intensity,” Ms. Thompson wrote. “The piece gave me a temporary sense of community that I hadn’t expected.”