A FALSE ECONOMY. Inside Higher Ed reports on working conditions in Tennessee, where composition faculty are putting together multiple jobs that work out to five courses per semester, at multiple institutions, for annual earnings of around $15,000 and no benefits. (Motlow State Community College, in Lynchburg, pop. 381, where they can bottle Jack Daniels but not serve it, is one of the employers named.) News of this report came from 11-D.

One of the first blogs that I read was the Invisible Adjunct. She retired from blogland several years ago. Too bad. We could use some of her bile today.

There's a longer analysis at Household Opera.

There are no worthy, interesting, or rewarding careers outside of academia. You either have a faculty job, or you have to become a corporate drone (or else consign yourself to a life of flipping burgers).

Thinking like a humanities scholar is something I have never done well. I claim some ability to think like an economist. Hence the false economy of the freeway flyers teaching composition.

Half of college seniors have never written a long paper (20 pages or more) while in college. Several of my senior students tell me they have NEVER written a blue book (essay) examination in college (they do with me!!).

That's Richard Vedder, not me, although I too set blue book examinations, and I participate in the department's capstone course. There aren't many large universities that attempt to require a senior paper of all majors, but my department does just that. It's clear that for many of our seniors, a research paper is an unfamiliar and daunting prospect (although many manage and more than a few excel). There have been more than a few occasions on which I've wished for the ability to time-slip the English department. I'm doing the work of editorial conferences and reviewing drafts and the like necessary for senior theses, often after doing the work of style and attribution and related elements of paper construction that I understood to be the work of the composition class and that I did in high school. In the absence of the shop steward, perhaps there's a Pigouvian tax that Economics could impose on English that reflects the true cost of their false economies in personnel.