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7 Do College Teachers Have to Be Scholars? Frank Donoghue A fascinating op-ed piece from the March 6, 2009, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education prompted me to ask my title question: do college teachers have to be scholars? The editorial, by Douglas Texter, is brashly titled, “No Tenure? No Problem: How to Make $100,000 a Year as an Adjunct English Instructor.” To the question “Do college teachers have to be scholars?” Texter emphatically answers “no.” He maps out a job description—his own—in which he renounces any professional identity as a scholar. A PhD in English from the University of Minnesota, he reasons that there are virtually no­ tenure-track jobs at research universities (where scholarship is prized most highly and thus rewarded), yet there is an abundance of adjunct positions. So rather than feel demoralized by taking on a low-level, likely part-time position while continuing to aspire to the life of a tenured scholar, he embraces the life of the adjunct, committing himself to excellence in teaching and teaching as much as he can—enough, he asserts, to make $100,000 a year. Texter describes, in the most radical terms, the main guidelines for making the emotional and psychological adjustments required to change professional goals. First, he says, “Stop thinking of yourself as an intellectual. You’re not Henry Giroux or Russell Jacoby or Judith Butler. . . . If you must write scholarship . . . consider it a hobby. Frame the cover. Show your mother.” Instead , he insists that you “conceive of yourself as a self-employed professional seeking to provide the best possible services to the greatest number of clients.” Second, he says, “Change your associates.” Texter characterizes his fellow English graduate students at the University of Minnesota as “pretentious sheep” and maintains that by his last year of graduate school he was “teaching in another department; working at a community college; writing for an ad agency; pumping out fiction, satire, and scholarship”; and making $60,000. As a PhD student, these freelance work habits inclined him not only to stop thinking of himself as an intellectual, but to stop socializing with people who clung to that self-definition. Third, Texter advises, “Change what you read. Stop reading scholarship . . . and start cracking goal-setting, time-management, and Originally published in The Hedgehog Review, Volume 14.1 (Spring 2012): 29–42. Reprinted with permission. 173 financial self-help books.”1 He makes several other suggestions in his article, but these suffice to convey his central thesis and tone. Texter paints, from my perspective, too rosy a picture of his working conditions , conveniently eliding consideration of health and retirement benefits and the tax ramifications of his many freelance jobs. He does, though, present himself unapologetically as a new kind of academic: he earned a traditional PhD, then abandoned any pretense to reading scholarship, let alone doing scholarship. His decision and his defense of it represent a profound move, and here I explore some of the implications by asking a series of questions that seek to pull apart connections between teaching and scholarship, which so much of the academy has uncritically yoked together for years. Ultimately we need to ask why Texter’s position is so likely to strike an audience of postsecondary teachers—graduate student TAs, his fellow adjuncts, and professors alike—as shocking, even horrifying. He states that he’s changing careers, a familiar story in PhD student circles in the humanities. But Texter’s story has an unfamiliar twist: he’s staying in the academy as a college teacher. He’s changing jobs by redefining his postsecondary teaching position in a way that both suits his practical ambitions and reflects the realities of postsecondary teaching in today’s world. Barring heroic and successful unionization efforts, the number of adjuncts is certain to continue to grow exponentially. Let’s not forget, too, that unionization efforts are, more often than not, aimed at improving the working conditions and job security of adjuncts rather than at converting adjunct positions into tenured positions. The key factor in the surge of adjunct hires has been the expansion of community colleges in the United States. Their numbers continue to grow, and they now enroll 43 percent of the country’s twenty-million postsecondary students.2 Community colleges are thus increasingly where the jobs are, but they are rarely tenure-track jobs. Here the numbers get very confusing: 82.5 percent of the faculty at two-year colleges are not eligible for...

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