Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday marked the first “Not My Presidents Day” as thousands of people protested Donald Trump in cities all over the country including Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Austin, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Denver and Washington, D.C. 

In New York, protesters gathered outside Trump International Hotel and Tower to hoist signs that defended refugees, condemned the president’s Cabinet picks, and called for his impeachment. Families and individuals of all ages chanted “Not my president!” and “Black lives matter!”   

Here are comments from protesters courtesy of The Huffington Post:

Mercedes Vizcaino, 42, works in New York City and came to Monday’s protest with a friend who is a science teacher.

“I think it’s important to take a stand and not be complicit about what’s going on in the country,” Vizcaino said. “Democracy as we know it is being challenged. … My freedoms that I’ve cherished and perhaps never thought about disappearing, right now I know they may be taken away.”

Richard Rumph, a retired New York City elementary school teacher, said he couldn’t recall attending a rally before Trump took office. He joined in on Monday partly because he objects to Betsy DeVos, the education secretary.

“DeVos basically has no understanding of public education,” said Rumph, 66. “She’s going to push charter schools and public education is going to go down the tubes.”

Richard Rumph, center, came to New York City’s “Not My Presidents Day” from New Rochelle, New York. 

The “Not My Presidents Day” events are the latest in a wave of protests that have followed Trump’s inauguration, starting with the women’s marches on Jan. 21. After Trump imposed a contentious executive order halting refugee resettlement and travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, protesters rallied at airports around the country. Last week, the “Day Without Immigrants” movement inspired rallies and shuttered businesses nationwide.

Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D) was in the crowd in Chicago, gathering signatures for a local ballot initiative. He said the uptick in protests since inauguration was necessary in the Trump era. 

“Freedom of assembly, freedom to protest, freedom of the press — these are all freedoms under attack by Trump,” Quinn said. “We’re going to resist authoritarianism. That’s what Trump is — an authoritarian.”

Olga Lexell, 24, helped plan the protest at Los Angeles city hall. The Facebook invite for the event spurred interest from other cities, and Lexell recruited volunteers in New York and Chicago to set up protests there. Most of the sister rallies were organized independently by grassroots volunteers and are focused on how Trump’s plans affect their cities.

“Pretty much all of the people who volunteered to help us organize turned out to be women,” Lexell told The Huffington Post in an email. “Women are really leading the charge with the anti-Trump resistance.”

Lexell said Monday’s protests had mostly been organized through Facebook and word of mouth. She planned the LA event with Heather Mason, one of her friends. 

“I don’t think either of us had ever organized any kind of protest or rally of this size before, but it just felt like something we had to do to have our voices heard,” Lexell said. “Lately I’ve been afraid because of the overwhelming anti-immigrant sentiment he’s building; I’m an immigrant myself, so that’s terrifying to me.”

Mason, 28, said she thinks Californians have a responsibility to lead the resistance to the administration’s efforts.

“After Trump was elected I cried and was physically ill honestly,” Mason said. “I felt miserable and depressed for days. And then I joined the Action Group Network and began brainstorming with friends as to what we could do to feel less useless.”

Voices are being heard throughout the country!  It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next several months.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Patricia McGuire, President of Trinity Washington University, in a blog posting entitled, On Lies and the Truths We Must Tell, skewers the Trump administration and specifically alumna, Kellyanne Conway.  McGuire states that Conway, Trinity Class of 1989, has been a major manipulator of facts who facilitates much of  Trump’s agenda.  Here is an excerpt:

“Fear is the most powerful weapon dictators have to seize and maintain their power.  Fear preys on the most basic psychological needs of human beings to be free from physical harm, to be economically secure, to protect and care for our children and families.  Autocrats generate fear through capitalizing on ignorance and spreading lies — particularly widespread ignorance of other peoples and cultures and lies about their ability to commit violence and take away jobs.

We Americans study the history of tyranny and exclaim, “That’s terrible, but it would not happen here!” as we congratulate ourselves on the robust state of our democracy.  The experience of the last few months now exposes this once-confident boast as terribly naive and perhaps even dangerous as a new administration indulges in a remarkable torrent of false and misleading statements as a basis for policy and action.

The gravest lie we are grappling with at the present moment is the Trump Administration’s cruel and unreasonable war on immigrants — mostly people who are black and brown, and Muslim — Mexicans and refugees from central America, Syrian refugees, people from certain countries in the Middle East and Africa including Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia.  Trump’s “travel ban” for people from the latter 7 nations is currently stayed by federal court order, but the executive order imposing the ban has spread fear and uncertainty among many people in the United States and worldwide. Outrageously, President Trump subsequently attacked the judges who ruled against him, and has his surrogates proclaiming that, “The powers of the president…will not be questioned.”  THAT, my friends, is an invitation to rise in vigorous defense of the balance of powers!

….Presidential Counselor Kellyanne Conway, Trinity Class of 1989, has played a large role in facilitating the manipulation of facts and encouraging the grave injustice being perpetrated by the Trump Administration’s war on immigrants among many other issues.  She is one of President Trump’s primary spokespersons, an almost daily figure on cable news shows.  Some people admire her staunch advocacy for her client’s positions, and others applaud the fact that she was the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign.  But in fact, as is true of many of President Trump’s statements, her advocacy on his behalf is often at variance with the truth.   Ms. Conway invented the now-infamous phrase “alternative facts”  to defend Trump’s claims about the size of crowds at his inauguration, a thinly-veiled autocratic scheme to try to claim that the Trump inauguration drew the biggest crowd in history when, in fact, it was on the smaller side.  Ms. Conway has been part of a team that thinks nothing of shaping and spreading a skein of lies as a means to secure power.  Perhaps the “Bowling Green Massacre” comment was truly a mistake, as she claims, but she repeated that canard on three different occasions as an explanation for why the travel ban, an executive order that clearly discriminates against Muslims, was necessary.”

McGuire concludes:

“As I write about truth and justice, I recall the heroic example of  Sister of Notre Dame, Dorothy Stang, who was murdered 11 years ago today in the Amazon rainforest by ranchers who wanted to silence her advocacy for justice for the indigenous people she worked with.  Sr. Dorothy did not hesitate to speak the truth on behalf of the people she served.  Her ability to tell the truth, to be an advocate for people on the margins.  She paid the ultimate price for her courage.  While none of us can hope to have nearly that much courage, we should pray for at least enough backbone to speak out about what we see that is unjust, to raise our voices for those who cannot speak.”

Powerful message for this President’s Day!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In a NBC Meet the Press interview to be aired today (Sunday), Senator John McCain criticizes Donald Trump and his attacks on the media.  He also comments that the White House is in disarray.   Here is a recap of McCain’s interview.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” McCain took a swipe at President Donald Trump’s volleys against the Fourth Estate, particularly a Friday tweet in which the press was called the “enemy of the American people.”

“We need a free press,” said the 2008 Republican presidential candidate. “We must have it. It’s vital.” 

“If you want to preserve ― I’m very serious now ― if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” he added.

McCain said that without a free press, “we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time.”

“That’s how dictators get started,” he added, noting that attacks on journalists questioning those in power are a tactic used by autocratic governments.

“When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press,” he said. “I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.”

“A fundamental part of that new world order was a free press,” he added. “I hate the press; I hate you especially,” McCain quipped. “But the fact is we need you.”

Trump has ratcheted up his assaults against media organizations in recent weeks, culminating in a belligerent press conference Thursday in which he excoriated the members of the press as “fake news.”

McCain, in Germany for the Munich Security conference, has unleashed a series of thinly veiled attacks on the White House.

In a speech before the conference, he slammed a “hardening resentment” toward “immigrants, and refugees, and minority groups, especially Muslims” and asked world leaders not to give up on America despite the country’s current politics.

During a question-and-answer, the senator said the resignation of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, showed the administration was “in disarray.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday highlighted the importance of community colleges in promoting vocational and technical training as a way to lower unemployment and fuel economic growth.

Addressing the Community College National Legislative Summit in Washington, D.C., DeVos said she supports President Donald Trump’s plan to make alternative approaches to postsecondary education a priority. DeVos said community colleges cost less, are flexible and equip job seekers with the skills that the economy needs.

“Community colleges are a uniquely American national asset,” DeVos said. “You are nimble, you are inclusive, you are entrepreneurial.”

“You are absolutely essential engines for … economic development locally and regionally,” DeVos added. “You help identify and close the skills gap between employers and job seekers so that U.S. businesses and industries can thrive and expand.”

Given that DeVos has made few public statements about higher education in the past, these comments can be taken as positive as she assumes the responsibilities of Education Secretary.  This also assumes that President Trump does not eliminate the US Department of Education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial today takes aim at Donald Trump and the “mess” he is making in the White House.  The editorial sets the record straight by commenting that Trump did not inherit “a mess” from Barack Obama but a nation recovered from recession and with strong alliances abroad. Mr. Trump is well on his way to creating a mess of his own, weakening national security and even risking the delivery of basic government services. Most of the top thousand jobs in the administration remain vacant. Career public servants are clashing with inexperienced “beachhead” teams appointed by the White House to run federal agencies until permanent staff members arrive. 

The editorial also comments that “If there is any upside here, it is that the administration’s ineptitude has so far spared the nation from a wholesale dismantling of major laws, including the Affordable Care Act, though he may yet kill the law through malign neglect. In the meantime, however, the chaos carries other risks.

The editorial concludes that the White House is isolating itself and is having trouble attracting people and keeping people who have the experience to right Trump’s ship.

If it continues on this course,  Vice President Mike Pence is waiting in the wings.

Tony

===================================

President Trump, White House Apprentice

By NY Times Editorial Board

Feb. 17, 2017

It’s with a whiff of desperation that President Trump insists these days that he’s the chief executive Washington needs, the decisive dealmaker who, as he said during the campaign, “alone can fix it.” What America has seen so far is an inept White House led by a celebrity apprentice.

This president did not inherit “a mess” from Barack Obama, as he likes to say, but a nation recovered from recession and with strong alliances abroad. Mr. Trump is well on his way to creating a mess of his own, weakening national security and even risking the delivery of basic government services. Most of the top thousand jobs in the administration remain vacant. Career public servants are clashing with inexperienced “beachhead” teams appointed by the White House to run federal agencies until permanent staff members arrive.

Mr. Trump lost his national security adviser this week in a scandal involving ties to Russian intelligence. Robert Harward, a retired vice admiral, refused the job on Thursday, rattled by a dysfunctional National Security Council and a president who has alienated Mexico, Australia and even the British royal family, while cozying up to Moscow.

When Mr. Trump’s assistants can keep the edge of panic out of their voices, they insist that Mr. Trump has gotten more done in the early going than most presidents. And Mr. Trump is so adept at creating smoke that Americans might be forgiven for thinking that’s true. But at this point in the Obama presidency, which did inherit a mess, Congress had passed laws aimed at dragging the economy back from the brink of depression while committing $800 billion in Recovery Act spending to projects ranging from housing to roads to advanced energy technologies.

Mr. Trump’s vaunted $1 trillion infrastructure spending program, by contrast, doesn’t yet exist, because the president confuses executive orders with achievements. Orders are dashed off without input from Congress and the government officials who would implement them. The White House is a toxic mix of ideology, inexperience and rivalries; insiders say tantrums are nearly as common as the spelling errors in the press office’s news releases. Steve Bannon writes the president’s script, and Reince Priebus, the embattled chief of staff, crashes meetings to which he has not been invited.

Mr. Trump complains about the slow pace of congressional confirmation of his appointees, but the obstacle is at his end. His staff doesn’t bother to vet nominees in advance. His pick for labor secretary failed in part because no one in authority seemed to know that the nominee had employed an undocumented immigrant and had been accused of abusing his ex-wife.

“Everything he rolls out is done so badly,” Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, marveled recently. “They’re just releasing comments, tweets and policies willy-nilly.”

If there is any upside here, it is that the administration’s ineptitude has so far spared the nation from a wholesale dismantling of major laws, including the Affordable Care Act, though he may yet kill the law through malign neglect. In the meantime, however, as Mr. Harward’s retreat on Thursday suggests, the chaos carries other risks. A Navy SEAL turned corporate executive, Mr. Harward cited family and financial considerations for refusing the national security job, but privately he was reported to be worried about the effect of a mercurial president on national security decision making. As Gen. Tony Thomas, head of the military’s Special Operations Command, said this week: “Our government continues to be in unbelievable turmoil. I hope they sort it out soon, because we’re a nation at war.”    

The most damaging downside to the administration’s stumbles could be an exodus of talent from the broader government; scientists, lawyers and policy specialists at the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, are openly disheartened at the prospect of working for Scott Pruitt, whose nomination as the agency’s new boss was approved by the Senate on Friday. And if others follow Mr. Hayward’s lead, capable people may be reluctant to come on board and fix things. That would leave the White House further isolated, particularly on foreign policy.

Indeed, unless Mr. Trump can bring some semblance of order to his official household and governing style, the only element of his famous campaign pledge that may prove accurate is the “alone” part.

Dear Commons Community,

During a press conference yesterday, Donald Trump ranted about the biased media, Hillary Clinton and his electoral college win while immigrants around the country stayed home and did not go to work.  As reported in the New York Times:

“It first spread on social media, rippling through immigrant communities like the opposite of fear and rumor: a call to boycott…Around the country, many cooks, carpenters, plumbers and grocery store owners decided to answer it and not work on Thursday as part of a national “day without immigrants” in protest of the Trump administration’s policies toward them.

The protest called for immigrants, whether naturalized citizens or undocumented, to stay home from work or school, close their businesses and abstain from shopping. People planned for it in restaurant staff meetings, on construction sites and on commuter buses, but the movement spread mostly on Facebook and via WhatsApp, the messaging service. No national group organized the action.

“It’s like the Arab Spring,” said Manuel Castro, the executive director of NICE, short for New Immigrant Community Empowerment, which works primarily with Hispanic immigrant day laborers in Jackson Heights, Queens. “Our members were coming to us, asking what the plan was. Frankly, it kind of came out of nowhere.”

But what began as a grass-roots movement quickly reached the highest levels of federal government. In Washington, the Pentagon warned its employees that a number of its food concessions, including Sbarro’s, Starbucks and Taco Bell, were closed because immigrant employees had stayed home and that they could expect longer lines at restaurants that were open.

Restaurants, from San Francisco to Phoenix to Washington, D.C., were some of the most visible spots affected, with well-known chefs closing some of their eateries for the day in support. Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef and owner of the Frontera Grill, closed several of his restaurants and said he would give a portion of the revenue from the ones that remained open to an immigrant and refugee rights group.

“What really makes our country great is the diversity we experience here,” Mr. Bayless said in an interview. “I can’t say enough about the lack of respect and the fear-mongering and hate-mongering that I’m sensing around us these days.”

Sadly, so much of the fear-mongering and hate-mongering has been fueled by the White House!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Neighborhood bookstores around the country are becoming focal points in the anti-Trump movement.  Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article describing what is going on.

“A hundred people packed a bookstore in Brooklyn to write postcards to elected officials and, as the invitation urged, “plot next steps.” In St. Louis, bookstore owners began planning a writer-studded event to benefit area refugees. At a bookshop in Massachusetts, a manager privately asked his senior staff members how the store should respond to the Trump presidency.

“Go hard,” they told him.

In the diffuse and suddenly fierce protest movement that has sprung up on the left since President Trump took office, bookstores have entered the fray, taking on roles ranging from meeting place to political war room.

Many stores have distributed information for customers who are mobilizing against Mr. Trump’s actions: his cabinet choices, his threat to cut off funding for sanctuary cities and his immigration bans on refugees and many Muslims. At City Stacks, a bookstore in Denver, employees printed out forms with elected officials’ contact information in a gentle nudge to customers.

On Inauguration Day, Broadway Books in Portland, Ore., handed out free copies of “We Should All Be Feminists,” a book-length call to arms by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the novelist.

All over the country, independent bookstores have filled their windows and displays with “1984,” by George Orwell; “It Can’t Happen Here,” by Sinclair Lewis; and other books on politics, fascism, totalitarianism and social justice. Booksellers have begun calling the front table devoted to those titles the #Resist table.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘We’ve turned our store over to the revolution,’” said Hannah Oliver Depp, the operations manager for Word, which has bookstores in New Jersey and New York. “I do think that it is going to fundamentally change bookstores and book selling.”

The pen is mightier than the sword!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For those of us who enjoy doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, yesterday was its 75^th anniversary.  To celebrate, a website has been established by the Times showing a brief history of crossword puzzles.  Here is a blurb on how the puzzle got started at the Times:

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a New York Times editor made a decision: “We ought to proceed with the puzzle.”  The puzzle in question was a crossword. Despite decades of popularity — and the endorsement of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, then the publisher of The Times — crosswords had yet to appear in the newspaper. (A Times editorial had called the puzzles a “sinful waste” of time.)

Responding to an audience in need of relaxation, the paper moved in a new direction.

Seventy-five years later, people continue to turn to The Times’s puzzles for comfort and distraction.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

An advisory group formed by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine yesterday lent its support to a once-unthinkable proposition: the modification of human embryos to create genetic traits that can be passed down to future generations.  As reported by the New York Times:

“…human gene editing has long been seen as an ethical minefield. Researchers fear that the techniques used to prevent genetic diseases might also be used to enhance intelligence, for example, or to create people physically suited to particular tasks, like serving as soldiers.

The advisory group endorsed only alterations designed to prevent babies from acquiring genes known to cause “serious diseases and disability,” and only when there is no “reasonable alternative.” The report provides an explicit rationale for genetic research that the federal government has avoided supporting until now, although the work is being pursued in countries like Sweden and China.

So-called germ line engineering might allow people to have biological children without fear that they have passed on the genes for diseases like Huntington’s, Tay-Sachs and beta thalassemia, and without discarding embryos carrying the disease-causing mutations, as is often done now. Though such cases are likely to be rare, the report says they should be taken seriously.

The new report heralds a day scientists have long warned is coming. After decades of science-fiction movies, cocktail party chatter and college seminars in which people have idly debated the ethics of humanity intervening in its own evolution, advancing technology dictates that the public now make some hard choices.

“It is essential for public discussions to precede any decisions about whether or how to pursue clinical trials of such applications,” said R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a leader of the panel that wrote the report. “And we need to have them now.”

Just over a year ago, an international group of scientists said it would be “irresponsible to proceed” with making heritable changes to the human genome until risks could be better assessed and there was “broad societal consensus about the appropriateness” of any proposed change.

No one is pretending that such a consensus now exists. But in the year that the committee was deliberating, Ms. Charo said, the techniques required to perform this sort of gene editing have passed crucial milestones.

The advent of a powerful gene-editing tool called Crispr-Cas9 allows researchers to snip, insert and delete genetic material with increasing precision. It has led to plans for experimental treatments of adult patients with cancer, blindness and other conditions as early as this year…

…..“This opens the door to advertisements from fertility clinics of giving your child the best start in life with a gene-editing packet,” said Marcy Darnovsky, the executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public interest group in Berkeley, Calif. “And whether these are real advantages or perceived advantages, they would accrue disproportionately to people who are already advantaged.”

The new guidelines, Ms. Darnovsky noted, also set the United States apart from many European countries that have signed a treaty to refrain from human germ line editing.”

This article rightly points out that genetic engineering is a complicated, ethical issue.  This first small step taken by the cited science panel is significant not for what will happen in the near future but what might happen in the intermediate to distant future.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Kevin Birmingham, an instructor of writing at Harvard upon winning the Truman Capote Award for his book, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, comments on the plight of adjuncts and the glut of PhDs in the humanities.  Here is an excerpt from his address courtesy of today’s Chronicle of Higher Education:

“I accept the Truman Capote Award in this spirit of justice. I would be remiss, therefore, if I did not address another injustice tarnishing the literary critical profession. I am, so far as I can tell, the first adjunct faculty member to receive this award. To be sure, I have one of the best non-ladder positions available. My paychecks cover my bills. I have health insurance. I can work full time. I know by the end of June if my appointment is renewed for the fall. And yet I am one of over one million non-tenure-track instructors working on a temporary or contingent basis and whose position offers no possibility of tenure. To be contingent means not to know if you’ll be teaching next semester or if your class will be canceled days before it starts. Most adjuncts receive less than three weeks’ notice of an appointment. They rarely receive benefits and have virtually no say in university governance.

Yet to talk about adjuncts is to talk about the centerpiece of higher education. Tenured faculty represent only 17 percent of college instructors. Part-time adjuncts are now the majority of the professoriate and its fastest-growing segment. From 1975 to 2011, the number of part-time adjuncts quadrupled. And the so-called part-time designation is misleading because most of them are piecing together teaching jobs at multiple institutions simultaneously. A 2014 congressional report suggests that 89 percent of adjuncts work at more than one institution; 13 percent work at four or more. The need for several appointments becomes obvious when we realize how little any one of them pays. In 2013, The Chronicle began collecting data on salary and benefits from adjuncts across the country. An English-department adjunct at Berkeley, for example, received $6,500 to teach a full-semester course. It’s easy to lose sight of all the people struggling beneath the data points. $7,000 at Duke. $6,000 at Columbia. $5,950 at the University of Iowa.

These are the high numbers. According to the 2014 congressional report, adjuncts’ median pay per course is $2,700. An annual report by the American Association of University Professors indicated that last year “the average part-time faculty member earned $16,718” from a single employer. Other studies have similar findings. Thirty-one percent of part-time faculty members live near or below the poverty line. Twenty-five percent receive public assistance, like Medicaid or food stamps. One English-department adjunct who responded to the survey said that she sold her plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays to pay for her daughter’s day care. Another woman stated that she taught four classes a year for less than $10,000. She wrote, “I am currently pregnant with my first child. … I will receive NO time off for the birth or recovery. It is necessary I continue until the end of the semester in May in order to get paid, something I drastically need. The only recourse I have is to revert to an online classroom […] and do work while in the hospital and upon my return home.” Sixty-one percent of adjunct faculty are women.

You have asked me to speak to you today about literary criticism, and so we might note that the conditions ravaging our profession are also ravaging our work. The privilege of tenure used to confer academic freedom through job security. By now, decades of adjunctification have made the professoriate fearful, insular, and conformist. According to the AAUP, adjunct faculty are about half as likely to undertake risky research projects, and the timidity moves up the ladder. “Professionalization” means retrofitting your research so that it accommodates the critical fads that will make you marginally more employable. It means cutting and adding chapters so that feathers remain unruffled. Junior faculty play it safe — conceptually, politically, and formally — because they write for job and tenure committees rather than for readers. Publications serve careers before they serve culture.

If my book deserves recognition, then we must also recognize that no young scholar with any sense would be foolish enough to write it. Graduate students must tailor their research projects to a fickle job market, and a book like mine simply doesn’t fit. Few academic presses publish narrative literary history, and what’s worse is that my book is a microhistory — it chronicles the publication of just one novel. The job market’s clearest demand is that a candidate must demonstrate breadth in research, especially if he or she works in a traditional field. This year, for example, there are only eight tenure-track jobs seeking a scholar of British modernism. And yet even this tally is too generous, because all eight of those departments are looking for someone whose expertise covers two or more centuries of British literature.

The message is clear: Stick to the old dissertation formula — six chapters about six authors. The most foolish mistake is addressing an audience beyond the academy. Publishing with Penguin or Random House should be a wonderful opportunity for a young scholar. Yet for most hiring committees, a trade book is merely one that did not undergo peer review. It’s extracurricular. My book exists because I was willing to give up a tenure-track job to write it.

We cannot blame this professional anemia on scarce funding. The largest adjunct-faculty increases have taken place during periods of economic growth, and high university endowments do not diminish adjunctification. Harvard has steadily increased its adjunct faculty over the past four decades, and its endowment is $35.7 billion. This is larger than the GDP of a majority of the world’s countries.

The truth is that teaching is a diminishing priority in universities. Years of AAUP reports indicate that budgets for instruction are proportionally shrinking. Universities now devote less than one-third of their expenditures to instruction. Meanwhile, administrative positions have increased at more than 10 times the rate of tenured faculty positions. Sports and amenities are much more fun.

Last year the University of New Hampshire made news when one of its librarians, Robert Morin, who had saved almost 50 years of paychecks, left $4 million to the university upon his death. UNH spent $1 million of the librarian’s gift on a 30-by-50-foot high-definition scoreboard for the new, $25-million football stadium. The university defended its decision by stating that the donation had been used for “our highest priorities and emerging opportunities.” Adjuncts in the English department there reportedly receive $3,000 per class. They already knew they weren’t a high priority.

And why should they be? Amid competing budgetary pressures, classroom instruction is the easiest expense to cut. And part-time employees aren’t just cheap; they also provide curricular flexibility. Unpredictable course enrollments encourage administrators to find faculty who can be hired and fired just as unpredictably. Adjuncts help departments offer an ever-changing menu of courses.

But the problem goes deeper than administration as well. It’s systemic. The key feature of adjunctification is a form of labor-market polarization. The desirability of elite faculty positions doesn’t just correlate with worsening adjunct conditions; it helps create the worsening conditions. The prospect of intellectual freedom, job security, and a life devoted to literature, combined with the urge to recoup a doctoral degree’s investment of time, gives young scholars a strong incentive to continue pursuing tenure-track jobs while selling their plasma on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

This incentive generates a labor surplus that depresses wages. Yet academia is uniquely culpable. Unlike the typical labor surplus created by demographic shifts or technological changes, the humanities almost unilaterally controls its own labor market. New faculty come from a pool of candidates that the academy itself creates, and that pool is overflowing. According to the most recent MLA jobs report, there were only 361 assistant professor tenure-track job openings in all fields of English literature in 2014-15. The number of Ph.D. recipients in English that year was 1,183. Many rejected candidates return to the job market year after year and compound the surplus.

It gets worse. From 2008 to 2014, tenure-track English-department jobs declined 43 percent. This year there are, by my count, only 173 entry-level tenure-track job openings — fewer than half of the opportunities just two years ago. If history is any guide, there will be about nine times as many new Ph.D.s this year as there are jobs. One might think that the years-long plunge in employment would compel doctoral programs to reduce their numbers of candidates, but the opposite is happening. From the Great Recession to 2014, U.S. universities awarded 10 percent more English Ph.D.s. In the humanities as a whole, doctorates are up 12 percent.”

Birmingham makes important observations about the state of higher education.

Tony