The Happy* Adjunct

* for now

What follows is a Twitter session from a few weeks back. I wanted to share it with a wider audience primarily because there is intense pressure on academics to continue in academia; in fact, if you're in a PhD program, chances are that you're only "trained" for a career in academe--specifically, in a tenure track job. We know, however, that universities continue to rely on adjuncts for teaching rather than extending/adding  tenure lines. Michael Bérubé, the MLA president of 2012-13, notes that, "contingent faculty members now make up over 1 million of the 1.5 million people teaching in American colleges and universities." If you leave your degree program expecting to find a FT/TT position, chances are you'll be disappointed. Devastatingly so.

Many of my friends IRL, and many people I "know" via social media, are teachers and scholars. I see them--whether degree candidates, Post Docs, or PhDs who've been on the market for three, four years (or more) tear themselves up and make themselves ill (really!) because of the jobsearch. They fight to find open tenure positions, fight to be hired, and fight to achieve tenure. The process is demoralizing at the very minimum. Yet when asked "why not turn your sights from a tenure placement," several reply that it's what they've been prepared for. There's an institutional expectation that PhDs (especially in the humanities) will go on to tenured positions, so it's kind of scary to turn from that. It's also scary because turning away from tenure also means turning away from the securities and benefits that tenure offers. 

I opted against seeking a tenured job, but I didn't want to leave academia. I love teaching, and I love being around people who ask questions for a living. I opted to work as an adjunct, and, at this point anyway, I am a happy one. What follows explains my choice to abandon the TT dream and why I still think it's a good decision:

So I got the terminal degree in my field, and I #adjunct - and I am OK with that. I love it, really. #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

My partner died right after my defense; I didn't go on the job market. After PostDoc limit hit, had to reassess my plans. #adjunct #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

Why I didn't decide for TT: 1) age. Too old to spend 8 yrs, 60-70 hrs a week on work. By time I got tenure--who knows. #adjunct #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

(reason #2)

My partner was ill nrly all throughout my coursework & diss. I didn't spend nrly enough time w/him. Learned from that. #adjunct #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

I am happy to focus on teaching. But a funny thing: letting go of TT pressures freed me from publish-or-perish... #adjunct #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

I've refocused & returned to my scholarship, and it's such great fun. I don't know if I could if I followed a diff path. #adjunct #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

That being said, I am lucky to work at a fantastic place. Only trouble: job insecurity. But we face that whether #adjunct or not. #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

Note: I might be a happy #adjunct but I lucked into my position. Many schools treat adjuncts very badly. I've been there. #highered
— mp&gs (@mpandgs) March 2, 2013

It's true: there are variations in how institutions treat adjuncts. My current school pays me well (not exceptional, but significantly better than previous jobs). I have some benefits. I have an office. I am treated as a member of the department rather than as an interloper. Please note:

     2) My experience is not the norm. 

     3) Adjuncts are, in general, treated horrifically.

In the position I held prior to the one I Tweeted about, I was paid approximately $10.00 an hour. I had no office, so no space to meet students, to hang my coat, or to store student papers (I still have stacks of them at home waiting for the deadline when I can remove them). Adjuncts were not invited to department events (excepting the “adjunct appreciation lunch” at the beginning of  Fall term), and a strict division existed between full-time/tenured and contingent faculty. And, of course, benefits did not exist. I was poor, isolated, and overworked/underpaid--this experience is common to an adjunct. Groups have organized to combat that mistreatment and exploitation of contingent faculty, and chief among these is  New Faculty Majority. Check it out.

Country Roads.

 Let me talk about music (some more)

While growing up, my exposure to music was limited. 

            My family didn’t have wide-ranging tastes. My mother collected LPs by standard artists: Elvis (Blue Hawaii, Gold Records, and 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong: Elvis' Gold Records – Volume 2), Gene Pitney (Greatest Hits), 101 Strings, and Henry Mancini. My grandparents had Sinatra (Sings for Only the Lonely and Ring a Ding Ding—still my favorite Sinatra album), and a multi-volume Time-Life classical collection. Mind you, no one ever seemed to listen to these albums; they collected dust.

             One Christmas, my grandmother presented me with a Mickey Mouse turntable and a few soundtracks from Disney animated films. I listened to those LPs until they popped and jumped, as LPs were wont to do, and then I moved onto the grown-ups’ records. I believe I was the only child in town who went about singing “A Foggy Day” under her breath. In contrast, my classmates were talking about Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard. I had no idea who Sweet might have been, and I certainly had no access to the LP (and Lord, by the time I heard my classmates talking about Desolation Boulevard, it must have been five or six years old). Someone wither inherited the album from an older sibling or they discovered it somewhere in “the city.” 

       Radio-wise, we lived in a mountain-bound community where one AM radio station held sway; FM was non-existent without fancy equipment to help capture stations from 100 miles away. This radio station, based in Idaho’s Silver Valley (which I think was KWAL), operated only between 5:00 AM and about 7:00 PM daily. It played a blend of farm reports, news updates, Paul Harvey commentaries, and country/pop hits (for example, I remember hearing both Lyn Anderson’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," and Wings’ “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey”). Essentially, you can say that while children elsewhere had the option of spinning a dial to discover radio stations offering different genres, I had what was pretty much a news station that played music, rather anodyne music, as filler. I did gain an appreciation for Paul Harvey that continues to this day.

Let Me (Start) Talk(ing) About Music For a Bit...

Last night I attended a show at the Keswick Theater in Glenside, PA (just outside of Philadelphia), which shook me in its intensity, its energy, and its theatricality. Sharon Van Etten opened the show; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds headlined. Van Etten received a warm (if not always enthusiastic) response from the audience*; Cave and the Bad Seeds? The audience gave them a thunderous response throughout/

I was struck by this rapturous audience's makeup: many people older than me, sure (Cave himself is 55), but people younger (some much younger) than me made up a significant part of the crowd. How did these adolescents and young adults discover Cave and musicians like him, e.g., unconventional or non-mainstream performers? In the Internet age, it seems a foolish question, true. Really, though, isn't the answer the same as ever? Musical discovery, and the development of taste, is determined by environment and technology.

Contrast someone raised in a small, homogeneous community with limited resources with someone raised in a city like Philadelphia, with its diverse musical history and wealth of radio stations. In the latter, it's a no-brainer that you'll be exposed to music of all genres. Add the Internet, a primary source for music for at least 15 years, and the problem becomes one of filtering what's good rather than trying to find music at all.

My experience has been vastly different from that of the average Millennial, and I'm sure it's an experience that people born before 1985 or so could relate to, especially if they were raised in a small, rural communities. so I am going to talk about that in a series of posts (that's the plan, anyway). A musical biography, if you will. If your experience is similar, feel free to chime in with your own anecdotes and memories.

And if you have a chance to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' tour? Do it. Don't think. Don't consider, simply do it. You'll be well rewarded.

* Van Etten noted that she wasn't Nick Cave more than once, and at one point said she had "only two more songs" before the Bad Seeds would come on. Apparently, someone in front commented on this remark: Van Etten relayed that "the girl dressed like a princess says 'yeah!' [and to the girl in question] "Good to see you again."  Take from that what you will.

Let Me Talk About Music for a Bit

My greatest hits from childhood, all played on one of these: 

Penguin Cancels "Angel at the Fence"

The tale of an enduring love found during the Holocaust was, shall we say, a lie.

Herman Rosenblat, who claimed that he met his wife, Roma, while he was imprisoned at a Buchenwald sub-camp, when she would approach the camp’s fence to give him apples and bread, has ‘fessed up. He’s said that he “embellished” his story. In reality, it turns out that Roma’s family was 210 miles away from the camp were Rosenblat was interred.

His publisher has canceled Rosenblat’s book on the story.

When scholars and survivors expressed doubt about Rosenblat’s tale because of the camp’s layout—there was no place private enough where he could receive Roma’s gifts—he defended his experiences’ veracity. Last month:

He said that his section of Schlieben, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, was not well guarded and that he could stand between a barracks and the six-to-eight-foot fence out of sight of guards. Roma was able to approach him because there were woods that would have concealed her. (NYT)

It seems as though all possible factcheckers, excpeting the scholars and those who survived the camps with Rosenblat, went to sleep on this one. His agent, Angela Hurst, believed Rosenblat’s story, and declined to research his tale, because “He was in so many magazines and books and on ‘Oprah.’ It did not seem like it would not be true” (NYT).

Well, that’s okay then.

UPDATE: Lerner Publishing Group has pulled its children's book based on the Rosenblats. Published this fall, Laurie Friedman's Angel Girl is being taken from store shelves, and Lerner is offering refunds to people who purchased the book.

"Angel at the Fence"--Another Suspect Memoir

A new memoir, titled Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, by Herman Rosenblat, a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, has come under scrutiny.

The memoir tells of Rosenblat's experience at Buchenwald; apparently, the teenaged Rosenblat met a young girl at the camp's fence--she on one side, he on the other. She would bring him apples and bread. In New York years later, Rosenblat went on a blind date. Turns out his date was the same young woman who brought gifts to the fence.

The problem? Holocaust historians and Rosenblat's fellow survivors say it's not true. While Rosenblat was held at the concentration camp, scholars and survivors say the camp's layout negates any possibility that Rosenblat would have discovered a space isolated enough that he could meet the girl undetected by guards or other survivors.

The New Republic has published an extensive discussion of Rosenblat's story; the site has added an update as well, in which several people close to Rosenblat claim the story of love beyond barbed wire is concocted:

auther [sic] Herman Rosenblat's sister-in-law and a fellow Holocaust survivor, both speaking publicly for the first time, say that Herman's story is fabricated. Sidney Finkel, a 77-year-old Holocaust survivor who was liberated with Herman, tells TNR that he ate with Herman and Roma Rosenblat the night before the couple was to appear on the "Oprah Winfrey Show" for the first time, in February 1996. At the Omni Hotel in downtown Chicago, Roma told Finkel that she was not hiding in Schlieben as Herman tells in his story, and was in fact hiding in another part of Poland. “It’s made up,” Finkel tells Sherman in an exclusive interview.

Sad.
Although people making stuff up and presenting it as autobiography is nothing new (heck, America is all about self-invention). The problem is when we approach matters like the Holocaust. Scholar Deborah Lipstadt is troubled for, as she notes,

"If you make up things about parts, you cast doubts on everything else," Lipstadt told me. "When you think of the survivors who meticulously tell their story and are so desperate for people to believe, then if they're making stories up about this, how do you know if Anne Frank is true? How do you know Elie Wiesel is true?" (TNR)

Exactly. Presenting such a work as fiction is one thing; presenting it as fact is another. If it's prove that Rosenblat embellished or fabricated his Holocaust love story, well...to make a concentration camp the backdrop for a romance is rather dismissive, don't you think? You'd think that after the debacle with Margaret Seltzer's "memoir" earlier this year, Penguin would be a bit more attentive to fact-checking.

Do read the piece at TNR, and be sure to read the comments--other survivors are chiming in.

Update: Rosenblat has recanted the story, and Penguin has canceled publication of Angel at the Fence.

On Seltzer--Again

According to Inga Muscio, a friend of Margaret Seltzer’s (and who only discovered Seltzer’s deception when ‘phoned by an agent, Faye Bender, who worked for both Muscio and Seltzer), Seltzer has collected government cheques on the basis of her Native American “ancestry.”

Seltzer managed a long-term masquerade, and she took numerous people in. Among them, Ms. Muscio, Ms. Bender, and Seltzer’s ethnic studies professor. Are these people somehow at fault for believing what appears to have been a well-researched, well-presented character role? No. Ms. Muscio and Ms. Bender have resisted defending Seltzer’s actions, but the good professor’s apologia, however sympathetic and well-intended, backfires in several ways. In my estimation, the most significant is the patronizing element in excusing a white woman’s “giving voice” to a community that Seltzer (and the professor) characterize as “silenced.”

The professor is a kind and generous person. I’m unsurprised that he lent support to a former student undergoing so public an excoriation; however, I am surprised at his means of offering said support.

"Plagiarizing Other People's Trauma" ?

A middle class white female, Margaret Seltzer (a.k.a. Margaret B. Jones), was raised in a California suburb. She attended an Episcopalian school, and went on to spend some time at the University of Oregon. At some point, she decided to assume a new identity. She claimed Native American ancestry, that she grew up in South Central L. A., that she was passed from foster family to foster family, that she was a drug-runner for a notorious gang, and so on. Then Seltzer publishes her “experiences” as Love and Consequences.

This last week, Seltzer’s sister revealed that the story is fraudulent. Seltzer concocted everything she related as lived experience; she even made up an anti-gang foundation that she claims to be associated with (and publicized on the book’s jacket). And no, she did not graduate from the University of Oregon with a degree in Ethnic Studies.

People are outraged--but for differing reasons. I offer two opinion pieces of the work (there are hundreds available, of course--see Google--but I found these intriguing):

“Stolen Suffering," by Daniel Mendelsohn at The New York Times, argues that Seltzer has appropriated people’s pain for psychological and financial benefit (this blog post's title comes from Mendelsohn's article).

“Fine Line Separates Memoir, Novel” by Gordon Sayre, at The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR), argues that what matters is whether the work is well-researched, that Selzter communicates on behalf of excluded voices, and that we might consider why we want to read about other people’s pain.

So then, is it only a matter of marketing here? Or has Seltzer done more than misfire in presenting Love and Consequences as an autobiography? Has she committed some great intellectual, social, or cultural sin? Is authenticity important?
More on this later.