Escape from Adjunct Hell

Illustration by Anna Sorokina

A happily lapsed academic, I try to avoid any content that might bring back memories. This instinct for self-preservation has generally served me and my inbox well; recently, I finally unsubscribed from a listserv about Slavic grammar that has, over the years, devolved into a cesspool of transphobia and people “just asking questions.”™ However, complete abstinence—which, coincidentally, was the subject of my dissertation—nearly prevented me from reading one of the sharpest pieces of fiction released last year, The Life of the Mind, by Christine Smallwood. The novel, along with Lynn Steger Strong’s piercingly honest Want, has been credited with cementing the literary status of adjunct fiction, a relatively new genre that is billed as a kind of remix of the traditional campus novel, with less ivy and more medical debt. Earlier entries included Rion Amilcar Scott’s experimental novella “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” (2019), the story of a homeless adjunct who burns his diplomas to stay warm, and the self-published Adjunct (2017), by Geoff Cebula, a murder mystery about a lecturer who wonders just how far another precarious PhD might be willing to go to eliminate the competition.

With The Life of the Mind and Want, adjunct fiction feels like it has finally arrived, even if its subjects have not. Both novels follow female protagonists whose PhDs in literature have failed to translate into secure, tenure-track positions. They are instead relegated to low-pay, benefits-ineligible, short-term contracts that have little to no chance of becoming permanent. In short, they are like the vast majority of people with their level of education who teach at colleges and universities in the United States.

As much as we might be primed to read these books in terms of their depiction of academic contingency, Smallwood’s protagonist, Dorothy, and Strong’s unnamed narrator concern themselves with questions that will feel familiar even to people who have never written a dissertation. Unlike many of the viral personal essays that have been penned by PhDs unable to secure permanent jobs in academia, the novels never present what happens to these women as uniquely tragic, or as some violation of an unwritten rule that this is not supposed to happen to people who read The Arcades Project. The Life of the Mind is as much about climate change as it is about the adjunct crisis; Dorothy is ever conscious that global warming has rendered everyone on earth a member of the precariat. The narrator of Want is saddled with medical debt and is married to a freelance carpenter who is struggling to get back into the kind of stable, salaried work that could help lift his family out of bankruptcy.

In other words, these novels acknowledge the broader forms of contingency that exist beyond the walls of the university, and in doing so open up the question of why these walls—and the various measures that distance academics from other workers—exist in the first place. As Dorothy throws her students’ papers in the trash, has poetry verses blown into her vagina by someone on the tenure track, and finds endless material from her own professional life for the class she’s teaching on “Writing Apocalypse,” we get a sobering picture of what finding refuge in the life of the mind actually means. More importantly, though, we are asked to question—or, to borrow a word from academia, problematize—the very concept of refuge itself. If academia once provided a life raft that could stave off the destructive forces of the material world, precarity now has Smallwood and Strong’s overeducated heroines realizing that to float, in this economy, means to watch others drown.

When we first meet Dorothy, a thirty-something adjunct, she is on her sixth day of bleeding following a miscarriage. Knowing when the bleeding began is not the same as knowing when the pregnancy failed, a fact Dorothy finds both frustrating and predictable. “How typical of her,” Smallwood writes, “not to know something was over when it was over. And...