I recently defended my dissertation in English at a land-grant institution in the Midwest. Our department’s national reputation plunges every year as the new hires get weirder and their expertise more esoteric. Ph.D. degrees from our department, unless you’re female or a minority, don’t provide much value in the marketplace. Even if you do fit into one of those desirable categories, you’re probably screwed and headed to a $40,000-a-year job — much less if you get one of those stunningly low-paid, visiting-professor gigs.
Most professors in my department express nothing but contempt for both graduate students and undergraduates. In a recent faculty meeting, professors lamented that the number of graduate students in the department had dipped below acceptable levels. Faculty members faced the prospect of canceled graduate seminars and the horrific likelihood of having to teach two (count ‘em!) undergraduate courses a semester. Tsk, tsk. Literary scholarship as we know it might cease to exist, plunging the world into postapocalyptic chaos. Meanwhile the casualty rate of the department’s graduate students on the tenure-track job market approaches that of the British at the Somme.
Pretty horrible, isn’t it?
Am I depressed?
Not at all.
I’m flourishing, making $100,000 a year as an adjunct, working nine months out of 12. This winter, as most of the people I know teaching literature were shivering in the cold and dark of the upper Midwest while eating ramen, I flew to Florida to bask in the sun and drink with Gore Vidal at the Key West Literary Seminar.
Adjuncting is the way of the future. Make no mistake about it: In 20 years, there won’t exist more than a handful of tenured professors. Universities want cheap, cheap labor, as much of it as they can get. While many lament that state of affairs, I embrace it and invite other graduate students and newly minted untouchables to do the same.
So, just how do you make $100,000 working as an adjunct English instructor?
First, stop thinking of yourself as an intellectual. You’re not Henry Giroux or Russell Jacoby or Judith Butler. Conceive of yourself as a self-employed professional seeking to provide the best possible service to the greatest number of clients. If you must write scholarship (I confess to liking the essay), crank out one article a summer. Consider it a hobby. Frame the cover. Show your mother. But don’t let it interfere with getting and maintaining clients and doing the work you’re paid for. Another way to correctly view scholarship in literary studies is to think of it as professional self-development, helping to expand your collegial network and your teaching abilities. Producing scholarship should keep you sharp, not stroke your ego.
Second, change your associates. It’s a fact that your income will be pretty close to that of those with whom you spend time. So choose carefully. During five years of graduate school, I attended only one gathering of my classmates, most of whom I saw as pretentious sheep. They managed to be both depressed and depressing. I spent my time teaching in another department; working at a community college; writing for an ad agency; pumping out fiction, satire, and scholarship; and doing relatively well-paid fund-raising work. By my final year of graduate school, I was making $60,000 a year. If I wanted to go out for a beer, I hung out with the fund-raising folks. Good honest greed refreshed me after the poverty of the Frankfurt School. Sure, Minima Moralia is beautiful, but Adorno came from money and had cushy teaching jobs.
Third, change what you read. Stop reading scholarship and novels (except of course the stuff you get paid to teach) and start cracking goal-setting, time-management, and financial self-help books. One of the best is T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Eker teaches you how to yank yourself out of your comfort zone and realize that you’re worth a lot more than what you’re getting paid. You have to be very careful here because you’re probably surrounded by professors of English, most of whom can barely balance their checkbooks. Many of these people will be outright hostile to you if you announce that you’d like to be paid well. If my experience provides any indication, the older professoriate views you as cattle, to be paid as little as possible so they can get 80 grand a year for teaching two classes a semester and producing the occasional forgettable article.
Fourth, think of yourself as a valuable service provider trying to reach as much of the adjunct market as you can. Apply for jobs and schmooze everywhere. If you’re good, you have a lot to offer. So offer it. You can help a lot of people and get paid well for it. Do well by doing good. That kind of attitude follows in the footsteps of Ben Franklin, who, by the way, founded the undergraduate institution that I attended. Franklin knew how to make a buck, and that you can’t eat ivy even if you founded one.
Fifth, stay idealistic. That may sound counterintuitive, since I’m telling you how to make a lot of money. But there’s no contradiction at all. If you think you’re valuable as a person and a professional, you’ll feel it your duty to make the most of what you have. Many literature professors have very low self-esteem. Yes, a great deal of narcissism haunts the literature wing of the academy, but narcissism doesn’t equate to understanding and delivering your potential to the world. Indeed, if you look at the scholarly output of most literature professors at research institutions, it’s pretty minimal: a book every five or six years after tenure, if they produce anything at all. So, what exactly do they do with all the time? Not much, I’m afraid. You, on the other hand, work like a demon, because it’s your duty to yourself and others to share your talents and abilities. Burn the midnight oil, baby.
Sixth, watch Risky Business. Remember Tom Cruise’s character, Joel, who ran a brothel in his parents’ house while they were away on vacation? Joel also belonged to his school’s business club. At the year-end presentations of club members, one student proudly proclaimed that her enterprise producing birdhouses, I think it was, netted a small profit. Another, I believe, sold candy, earning a little sum. Finally, Joel announced that he made tens of thousands in one weekend dealing in the satisfaction of human desires. That’s the way you need to think. Modeling myself on Joel, I saved 40 grand during my last two years as a full-time graduate student. Forget the birdhouses. Whore yourself.
Seventh, care about students. And I mean really care. Talk to them like human beings. Give them your best. Be well prepared for and coherent in class. Write letters of recommendation for them. If you do all of that, you’re standing head and shoulders above most tenured professors, at least most of the ones I know. Students are your clients, your bread and butter. Many tenured literature professors may say, “How can you claim to care about students if you’re teaching eight classes or so a semester?” Well, surgeons and lawyers achieve excellence in their professions by doing a lot of work in their field. It’s the same thing for English teachers. You get better at what you do a lot of. Besides, if you budget your money well, you have the summer off and three weeks at Christmas to relax and to reflect upon your practice. Work a lot, keep a journal of your teaching experiences, and use it to learn and grow.
Now, I have met some dedicated, idealistic tenured professors, a few of whom have been very kind to me. But I’ve also met a lot of cranks. For example, one professor told me, “You want to know how I prep for class? I make sure my fly is up.” That kind of attitude is a lot more common than people think.
Eighth, think of yourself as a mercenary. In The War of Art, Steven Pressfield tells aspiring writers not to be prima donnas and never to turn down a job. He says that if you show him a writer who thinks that he’s too good for a job, Pressfield will show you somebody he can crunch like an empty beer can. Many tenured professors get angry when they have to teach undergraduates. That is prima donnaism. Take advantage of it. Teach the gut classes. Teach at community colleges. Teach at trade schools. Teach anywhere and everywhere they will let you in the door. To riff on Simon and Garfunkel, “Seek out the poorer quarters, where the ragged people go.” They need you. So go to them, and let the tenured set drink their sherry and read Heidegger, who was a Nazi anyway.
Being in it for the money is healthy and normal. I’m always suspicious of people who claim uninterest in finances, especially if they are guaranteed work. If you’re in it for the money, you’ll realize that you make money by doing a good job and getting invited back. Unlike most people in literary studies, I don’t believe in the economy of prestige. You can’t eat prestige. When I was starving and at the point of eviction during my first year in graduate school, I tried eating prestige. It needs mustard. On the other hand, I have no problem with working my butt off and expecting to get paid very well for my efforts. The better I am at teaching, managing my time, and marketing myself, the more money I make.
Ninth, tithe. By now, many of you literature types must be thinking: “Oh, that filthy beast. He’s in it for the money.” Of course I am. Money is power — to do good. I’m proud to say that I financially support institutions and organizations promoting goals that I believe in. I donate thousands of dollars a year to the Green Party, the private Catholic high school that I attended, and Amnesty International. I couldn’t do that when I was broke. Making a lot of money is an opportunity to do more good in the world, certainly more good than you can do by publishing in Social Text.
Tenth, remember that literary studies is ultimately a derivative and service-oriented discipline. Fiction writers and poets perform the real work. Always have, always will. Literary studies is not similar to computer science or physics, where people teaching in their subject areas actually “do” the content. Occasionally, of course, people in English departments produce scholarly works approaching the status of art itself. I can think of three or four people in the humanities in the last 40 years who produced that kind of work: Paul Fussell, William Gass, Russell Jacoby, and James Kincaid. Those stylists are the true descendants of people like H.L. Mencken, who realized that criticism can be art. But that’s four out of hundreds of thousands of people. Most of the rest of the work is taxonomy and politically driven commentary — pretty derivative stuff. The work of literary studies is teaching writing skills and other people’s books. If you really want to innovate, don’t read continental philosophy for hours on end and produce incomprehensible articles. Fire up the word processor and create your own fictional vision of the world.
If all this sounds gauche and slightly offensive, let’s wrap up by briefly examining the other side of the coin. Perhaps you’ll be lucky enough to get the typical beginning tenure-track job. Two years ago, as a graduate student, I brought in $4,000 a month after taxes while cobbling together a dissertation fellowship with other work.
I also dated and genuinely cared about a new faculty member at an institution about 50 miles away from mine. She had destroyed her second marriage at the tender age of 34 by getting her dissertation done, and she was raising an 8-year-old boy on her own. Realizing that her old age could be rather desperate, she was trying to save for retirement and pay down the $40,000 of educational debt she had racked up. Money for a house? Forget about it. After loan, rent, and retirement payments, she and her son subsisted in a crummy two-bedroom apartment on about $600 a month. On our first date, she collapsed in my arms, practically crying. In a more cheerful moment, she asked me to read the one journal article she had been able to publish after two years of revision and eking out writing time in between teaching, committee work, and serving as a director of graduate studies. I think she cried herself to sleep some nights from loneliness and desperation. I asked myself: Is this the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Clinical depression, economic despair, and a journal article read by four people?
I don’t know about you, but I would vastly prefer living well; sharing my abilities with the greatest number of people possible; investing heavily in real estate, CD’s, stocks, and a small publishing business; and getting snozzled in the company of Gore Vidal. As Aldous Huxley wrote in the 1946 foreword to Brave New World, “you pays your money and you takes your choice.” For right now, I’ve taken mine, and it’s a pretty good one. Maybe I’ll see you next year in Key West.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 26, Page B11
