An Article about Adjunct Instructors – by Celine James

My followup:

In my field (musicology or “music history & culture”), only about 20% of Ph.D.s ever get continuing full-time positions, including temporary/adjunct ones and the handful of multi-year post-doctoral fellowships.  The best I had was a pair of 8-9 month temporary full-time positions and a pair of multi-year part-time positions (single courses).

This situation is pretty normal in the arts and humanities.  Music academia has 75 new positions per year for 375 new Ph.D.s (not to mention existing Ph.D.s who change jobs), but it does almost nothing to prepare the other 80% for any other type of career direction, such as “alternative-academic” careers (libraries, museums, research projects, etc.).  To me, that’s a much bigger issue than the problem of universities cutting costs by now using adjuncts to such an extent and closing tenure lines.  See also my posting about such issues at:  https://durrellbowman.com/?p=946.  In addition, I recently gave a semi-autobiographical conference paper on the subject.