Last week, I wrote about how “graduate students” are “cooled out” of PhD. programs in something of a pyramid scheme, i.e. how 60-70% of the students who are admitted eventually drop out of the program, while blaming their “failure” on themselves, and not the larger system.
August is the month in the United States where many adjunct faculty are being told “I’m sorry we don’t have any classes for you,” for reasons beyond the control of the Chair, Dean, or other administrator in charge of hiring. The system is blamed, not the the actual human beings who designed it. But of course, these administrators encourage the rejected adjuncts to leave their applications in the pool for next semester so that, well, they will continue to be able to play adjuncts off against each other. They do this while hiding behind the anonymity of “confidentiality,” a process designed to protect the institution, as much as the privacy of the rejected applicants. Imagine how many lawsuits there would be if people could transparently compare their records to the people actually hired? There would be heat and fury, rather than “cooling out.”
What are some of the “cooling out” stories you’ve heard? What are some of the cooling out stories you have heard spun to rejected adjuncts? Here are a few that I’m aware of:
–It was an unusually competitive pool, even though you were great
–It is not my fault, the administrator higher than me just told me to cut the budget
And then the most common cooling out move which is to “ignore the applicant” and hope they will go away. This is probably the most common move—and it often works. If you just ignore them, they tend to assume that it was something inherent to their application—because after all, the system is infallible!
So have you ever been cooled out? Please tell your story below!
Tony Waters is czar and editor of Ethnography.com. He came to us from the Sociology department at California State University at Chico where he has been a professor since 1996. In 2016 though he suddenly found himself with a new gig at Payap University in northern Thailand where he is on the faculty of the Peace Studies Department. He has also been a guest professor in Germany, and Tanzania. In the past, his main interests have been international development and refugees in Thailand, Tanzania, and California. This reflects a former career in the Peace Corps (Thailand), and refugee camps (Thailand and Tanzania). His books include: Crime and Immigrant Youth (1999), Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan (2001), The Persistence of Subsistence Agriculture: Life Beneath of the Marketplace (2007), When Killing is a Crime (2007), and Schooling, Bureaucracy, and Childhood: Bureaucratizing the Child (2012). His hobby is trying to learn strange languages–and the mistakes that that implies. Tony is a prolific academic, you can read more of his work at academia.edu.or purchase one (or more!) of his books from Amazon.com.