by Christopher Cumo

AS MANY AS 46 percent of postsecondary faculty are part-time, remarked Jane Buck, AAUP president at its annual meeting last June. Richard Moser, AAUP associate secretary, decries the corporate university for defining education as a commodity it buys at lowest cost by subcontracting adjuncts to do the dirty work. Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, writes of "thirty years of unemployment and underemployment" enveloping the humanities in "a culture of defeatism." Elizabeth Radcliffe, executive director of the American Philosophical Society, laments the desperation of a generation of philosophers in search of full-time work. Adjuncts circulate stories of their colleagues holding office hours in the beds of a pick-up trucks.

The irony is that the adjunct wave may already have crested. The debate is shifting from the vilification of the contingent-labor system to the creation of full-time teaching opportunities. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has taken a tentative step in this direction, awarding some forty two-year academic fellowships since 1999. But these fellowships are at best a piecemeal solution, for at the end of two years, recipients are on their own. Even if some do land on the tenure track, as Weisbuch claims, what happens to the rest? The Foundation's answer seems to be to coax them into corporate America, but this doesn't solve the problem of part-time and temporary labor; it is merely a tacit recognition of the status quo in academe.

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