Inside Higher Ed has a lengthy article on a smokin’ hot new book by Santa Clara University English Professor Marc Bousquet called How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York University Press, 2008). Ever since he was a graduate student in the 1990s, Bousquet has worked to bring attention to the degradation of American higher education caused by the declining numbers of regular (tenured or tenure-track) faculty and its increasing reliance on ill-paid, easily exploitable graduate student and adjunct instructors. Quite cleverly, Bousquet has a blog now by the same name, and it looks like a rich source of information and commentary about faculty working conditions across the spectrum. The Inside Higher Ed article does a good job explaining the book, but you might throw the working man some coin and pick up a copy yourself, or at least order one for your university’s library.
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, and click on over for a visit. Tell him Historiann sent you.
Historiann 
Huzzah! That’s great! I am reminded of a Bill Mauldin cartoon from WWII:
The caption reads: “You’ll get over it, Joe. Oncet I wuz gonna write a book exposin’ the army after th’ war myself.”
HJ
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I started my PhD program with great optimism in 1989 (the year “Prospects for Faculty in Arts and Sciences” was published). I’ve now been working as an adjunct more years than I spent in college earning three degrees. Books like Marc Bousquet’s relieve some of the guilt I suffer for the mess I’ve made of my once promising career, but fail to improve my morale.
Misery loves company. Thanks for the links?
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Historiann started her Ph.D. program in 1990, after hearing all of that 1989 propaganda too…it’s remarkable how that wishful thinking spread so quickly. Another thing that the 1989 report didn’t take into account is all of the Ph.D.’s from the 1980s who were still on the market in the 1990s. That truly was the “lost generation” of scholars, at least in History.
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