In the discussion that followed Anca Gheaus' guest post on the gender situation in the German academy, there was some mention of the fact that in many European job-markets, faculty searches are not truly 'open,' so that internal candidates are strongly preferred to those from outside the hiring institution. Clearly, when taken to an extreme—institutions becoming highly resistant to hiring anyone but their own PhDs and/or post-docs—such a practice can be very detrimental to any process of diversification within the academy. But I wonder if there might not be other situations in which an over-emphasis on 'open' searches is actually detrimental.
I'm thinking of the situation in the U.S. academy, where the norm is very strongly against not only hiring a department's own PhDs, but also hiring any currently employed non-tenure track faculty into tenure lines, or even adjuncts into full-time NTT lines. Given that the galloping precaritization of the professoriate as a whole is fast becoming a structural crisis, I wonder if it is not time to examine the possible merits of encouraging departments to commit to making at least a certain percentage of their full-time and TT hires from within the ranks of their current part-time and NTT faculty.
Obviously, this would not solve the larger problems of adjunctification and precaritization, but it might improve the overall sustainability of an academic career path in a period where many, if not most, people will find themselves working in precarious positions early on.
It is fairly easy to see how this improvement would be achieved. If widely adopted, the principal benefit of such a policy would be to offer—and indeed to normalize the creation of—a definite path out of adjunct or precarious labor.
Moreover, giving current adjuncts and NTTs a hiring preference would encourage departments to evaluate their merits according to standards that are realistically applicable to people working under the conditions that typically obtain in their jobs.
Compare this to the current situation. As things stand, to be a viable candidate for a full time / TT position, one often needs to be either a very recent PhD or to have produced a fairly large body of scholarship—production that typically requires that one already have a full-time, moderate to low teaching load position with good institutional support for research. Those who find themselves in adjunct and NTT positions post-PhD are thus disadvantaged when it comes to getting any other kind of job.
Structurally, this is a disaster. In a market that is unprepared to absorb many of the PhDs produced in any given year into full-time or TT positions, let alone cope with the backlog of recent PhDs, allowing part- and full-time NTT positions to be 'dead-end' jobs means effectively abandoning an sizable portion of those doing the undergraduate instruction on which many departments depend for their existence. It is to accept the WalMartization of the profession. And given the percentages that now obtain, this is no longer a tangled backwater in an otherwise rational career stream, it is the main channel.
Or, to put the point more bluntly: as things stand, many of us will work in adjunct or NTT positions early in our careers. That is a reality over which departmental-level authorities have little control. The question is whether and how the profession can offer adjuncts and NTTs a way to move into other, better positions. Shifting the norm in our hiring practices towards promiting at least some adjuncts and NTTs seems like one potentially achievable way of doing so.
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