A number of us here at The Rumpus are affiliated with academia—it’s a decent job with a fair amount of time to do your own creative work, as long as you’re at least in the middle of the food chain. The blog Rate Your Students recently asked their readers what kind of money they make and what sort of job they have. The response was explosive, and included some really stupid reactions from proffies at the top of the food chain claiming that part-time adjuncts couldn’t possibly be making the supermarket-cashier-esque wages they claimed. (They do.)
Fortunately, Angry Archie came along with some righteous indignation and wearing boots with that new ass-seeking technology wired into them. Here’s a taste.
People ask me, “Archie, why are you so angry? You have a great job at a great school in a great place. Where’s the problem?” Well, the little salary discussion really wrapped the problem up in a pretty little package. This profession is full of fucking shit, and the salary dump brought it all out. Let me go out on a limb here and guess that the majority of the respondents were good-hearted people with the proper kind of left-leaning politics that most hyper-educated bozos share. You probably don’t like to shop at Walmart because of its union-busting practices, and you wouldn’t be caught dead drinking a non-fair-trade latte, right? But you are shocked to find out that there is exploitation going on here! Here’s a hint for you about what’s going on in our little corner of the world: Walmart could learn a thing or two from you, Mr. “just refuse the number.”…
So this is the ugly fucking truth. You, me, all of us, we get to live the vida-fucking-loca on the backs of all those desperate suckers who just want to get their foot in the door and will accept wages a supermarket cashier would spit at because they believe that somehow if they just suck it up and eat shit for long enough, they too will get to ride the tt train. But we don’t acknowledge this, because it would break our little leftist hearts to do so. And what’s more, our refusal to acknowledge what is happening is going to result in our own extinction. If you don’t think that this is all leading to the elimination of tenure and full-time positions at all but the most elite schools, then you are in for a serious surprise. Keep fiddling, motherfuckers, because Rome is already half-burned.
The whole thing is worth reading.
