Adjunct professors are educated hobos

Joe,

Just finished reading your essay on academia vs. the working class ("A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard"). It reminds me of a business professor I once knew who told me something along the lines of "my job is to keep the little shits off the streets for four years in hopes that they grow up enough so that by the time they get out they won't shit on the carpets and chew on the drapes when they get hired."

I tended to hang around the offices of professors when I was in college. I was an older student without much in common with the "little shits" in my classes, and the professors were generally older, lonely, and happy to have someone to talk to for a few minutes who wasn't utterly brain dead like most of their students. I can't say that they educated me (I did that myself), but they certainly had some good pointers on how to get a real education. And the Internet has made that even easier.

The sad thing, though, is that so many of the academic twits today aren't even "working class" slobs -- they'd have to make a lot more money than they're making to classify as "working class". Close to 60% of college instructors today are "adjunct" faculty, with no benefits, no office on campus, and an average wage of $15,000 per year, who roam the nation from temporary job to temporary job like a herd of over-educated hobos living out of the trunk of 15 year old shit cars that your average cracker living in a trailer house in Bugfuck, Mississippi would nod wisely at the sight of because he has one just like it. They delude themselves with the notion that somewhere, somehow, they're going to land "the" tenure track position that's going to put them into the gravy train with the "real" professors. They put on airs of elitism, but what it really is, is desperation. If only they can suck up enough, prostitute themselves enough, fuck the right member of the departmental hiring committee, work at the right unpaid post-graduate fellowship, then they'll get that tenure track position. And the elite at those academic workhouses merely chuckle, knowing that as long as they keep that raw hamburger meat of tenure dangling in front of the starving dogs of itinerate adjuncts, said adjuncts will snarl and snap at it forever without ever looking beyond at the puppeteers holding the strings.

Shit, even that cracker in his trailer house isn't that stupid. He knows he's going to be working cutting up chickens at the rendering plant for the rest of his life (or until Tyson figures out how to import illegals to work as slaves for nothing anyhow), or else sign up for the army and blow shit up, but he sure the fuck knows he's not ever going to be one of the paid prostitute class that serves our rulers directly. He's always going to be at the bottom of the two-story outhouse getting shat upon from upstairs. Crap, even I'm not that stupid. I know that a kid who grew up poor in Bugfuck, Mississippi ain't ever going to be one of the elite that rules our nation. I don't have the "social skills" for that (meaning, I don't say "thank you sir, give me more please?" when my rulers shit on me). I don't "talk right" (i.e., like I got a fucking ramrod stuck up my ass at one of those all-male "boarding schools" that my elite bosses went to), and I'm not pretty enough (meaning, no medical or dental care during my childhood means that I don't look like some goddamned airbrushed model in a fashion magazine).

If I was dumb enough to bring kids into this fucked up world that we've made for ourselves, I have the money now and the knowledge of how this shitty world really works behind the scenes to make sure he could make it into the bottom ranks of the elite, but really, who the fuck cares anyhow? We're all dead, in the end. So it goes.

Anyhow, just wanted to bring you up to date on how academia really works nowadays. If you want to read some mordant commentary from one of that breed of itinerant intelligentsia who's figured out his place in all this, dark-wraith.com might be a nice web site to look at. I don't go there too often because his dark and cynical sense of humor hits home way too often, but he's figured out the score just like the business professor in my first paragraph (who was, however, a couple of generations older than this relative youngster). Not that it makes a damned bit of difference in the end. He serves our masters just as I do, in my own way (I secure their computer networks so that the howling barbarians can't take their ill-gotten gains away from them). So it goes in the United States of Delusion, where we pretend we're free even though we know we aren't.

E

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Dear E.

There is absolutely nothing I can and to add to your blunt eloquence. What few young thinkers and progressive minds we have left in this tattered empire must learn the same way the working class learns -- by brutal life experience.

In art and labor,

Joe