Last night the PBS NewsHour profiled several Ph.D. instructors who were working as adjunct faculty, receiving no benefits and surviving on teaching whatever isolated courses they could scrounge. One young Ph.D. graduate, a single mother who genuinely loved her field, was surviving on food stamps and assistance from her family.
I would like to know if there are people here on ECOLOG who are enduring similar circumstances--who followed their dreams, put in the grueling hard work as graduate students, and are now genuinely struggling to survive in their field, or simply survive at all. I would like to know who here on ECOLOG has been caught up in the corporate-model conversion to adjunct teaching which has become increasingly common throughout the U.S., and whether any of you feel you can continue in your chosen disciplines. I am interested in neither condemnation nor plastic platitudes from the comfortably established, the self-satisfied and the lordly-wise. If you feel entitled to lecture from your keyboard on how and where these people went wrong, then don't. I'm not looking for that, and they aren't either. But if you are like the young Ph.D.s profiled in the news segment--or even someone not so young, and caught up in the same circumstances--please contact me off-list, because I'd really like to hear from you. - J. A.
