Thursday, September 11, 2008

Shooting Fish in a Barrel. Folks Line Up For Miles To Roger Roger.


Oh goodness. We threw Roger to the wolves, but what can you do. We get mail like his fairly often and we just clear the evening for a massive reading session. Again, we're sorry if we didn't find space for your "rogering" of Roger, but there's only so much time between class, drinking, tennis, and someone's annoying baby.

  • So you got a job right out of the gate. Good for you. Do you want a cookie? In today's market with tenure-track positions being replaced with adjuncts, that situation is as rare as a real A student. It's pretty obvious you're NOT in the humanities as there's nothing even remotely humane about your writing. These people you just crapped all over are your colleagues. And guess what? According to the most recent figures, they are the ones doing almost 70% of the teaching in today's academy. Their grunt work makes it possible for you to have that full-time job and do your oh-so-important research. And many of them hold Ph.D. degrees. Maybe if you stopped jacking off in front of the mirror long enough to understand what's happening in academe, you'd know all this. Please, stay in your private office. The adjuncts (and probably your full-time colleagues as well) don't want hang out with the likes of you.

  • Wow! Righteous Roger sure has set me straight! The system is based purely, 100% on MERIT! No politics, no administrative whims, no blind luck, no hidden agendas. The cream rises to the top and the dregs sink to the bottom! During all these years I've spent in academia as an undergrad, grad student, adjunct, and tenured professor, I've never encountered a single tenured professor who wasn't brilliant and stellar in every respect. No ass-kissers, no nut jobs, no back-stabbing manipulators, no chair-warming mediocrities. Each and every one of them so clearly deserved his/her position, status, and salary (several orders of magnitude higher, of course, than that of the adjuncts). The scales have fallen from my eyes.

  • The reality is if it weren’t for adjuncts teaching the majority of classes your motherfucking stack of publications would be as small as your dick. The reason this blog is popular with adjuncts is because in “real” life they have to deal with twats like you, who lord your superiority over them at the best of times and pretend they don’t exist for the rest. I too teach on the side – because I love it AND get the best evals of my department – and I too am getting sick of the tenured staff and admin who expect me to do all their work and solve their problems without any recognition or even a damn photocopy password in time for semester. Fuck that.

  • Every adjunct I know has a PhD. Has had for years. But didn't get onto the academic gravy train somehow - the right job didn't come up; didn't have the right contacts; came second in 3 job searches and the person who came first took it - and after 3 years (if you're female) or 4 or 5 (if you're male) you're toast; you're never going to get a TT job. And they are every bit as good as the people with the tenure-track jobs, most of them. Just not as lucky.

  • Ah, Righteous Roger, so comfortable in his (I’m assuming) well-equipped (by corporate sponsors) lab, where things like grammar and spelling and facts don’t matter. I assume anecdotal evidence is the new standard in the sciences? Listen, Bub, in those fields where doctoral research requires more than simply serving as your supervisor’s assistant, completion times often – frequently – exceed the two year’s allotted by our institutions. Thus, many adjuncts are in the latter part of their projects, doing all that research and publishing that you take pride in. As an adjunct, I published, I won awards for teaching, I taught workshops for other faculty, I sat on committees . . . in short, much more than many tenured faculty I know. The pay was lousy – which I knew going in, but the respect from department members often (not always) provided other forms of compensation. Adjuncts know where they rank in the grand scheme of things. To rub their noses in it is, frankly, rudeness bordering on bullying.