On being "adequate" in higher education

What would it mean for academic labor (and general well-being) if faculty got off the Type A train and embraced "good 'nuff"? (There's an exciting new CFP in rhet-comp.)

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There’s a rad new CFP (call for papers/proposals) out in rhetoric and composition studies that has got me excited and thinking in all sorts of new directions. I’ve even found a willing co-author who’s as enamored of this call as I am. It’s for an edited collection called Adequate: Writing New Logics of Success in Rhetoric and Composition (click here for the complete CFP), and it’s one of those calls you see from time to time that prompts you to think, “man I wish I had come up with that one!” As mentioned, I plan to submit a proposal with one of my rhet-comp colleagues (the proposals are due next Monday), but I also just wanted to write about and around the idea for a bit and get some thoughts down.

Image credit: Adobe Stock.

By now you’ve heard of the Great Resignation, that pandemic-accelerated movement among workers at all levels—from fry cooks to financial analysts—to cast off the shackles of dead-end, poorly-remunerated careers and actually try to live life on one’s own terms in some kind of way. The narratives we’ve seen in the mainstream press are romantic and compelling: tech workers fleeing the Bay Area for quaint towns in middle America where “real values” prevail (and the available bandwidth is now of sufficient quality that they can work remotely), or overworked office drones cashing out their savings to open an ice cream parlor in some leafy New England bedroom community. There’s #VanLife and all that entails. The opportunity to self-publish inane ramblings on a platform like Substack and maybe even get paid. For what seems like forever now, the “side hustle” has been a thing.

Food service and retail workers in particular, we are told, have “upgraded” their employment by reshuffling jobs within the same sector or jumping to an entirely new one. It seems that no one wants to work for peanuts and zero benefits anymore on an ever-mutating, unpredictable schedule; or, if you’re a Republican, no one wants to work at all. (It’s Biden’s fault! Too much easy money! That’s right. I’m still living high on the hog off that $200 stimulus payment from March 2021.) This upgrade situation, in part, explains why it’s so much harder now to get a burrito delivered or why restaurants are suddenly out of everything and can only offer a limited menu. Or why ordering from DoorDash might turn $18 worth of food into a $93 order.

Bharat Ramamurti @BharatRamamurti

Workers are quitting to go take new, better-paying jobs. It's not the Great Resignation -- it's the Great Upgrade. And it's exactly the kind of economy @POTUS said he wanted to help build.

The reality is that the trends we’re seeing in the wake of the Great Resignation started much earlier, during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Remember all those news stories about people lining up around the block for a part-time position at Home Depot? It’s hard to imagine such a scenario today, especially if you weren’t one of the unfortunate souls looking for work back then or if your memory of that era is sketchy, but it was rough. Accountants who had been making north of six-figures were suddenly working the drive-thru at Chik-fil-a. People clearing six-figures selling real estate became plumbers. I knew a guy who started selling firewood on the side of the road to make ends meet. It might not have been Dorothea Lange-type Depression-era stuff—bread lines and dust bowls and children wearing wooden shoes—but from an economic standpoint it was as bad as anything the American public had seen in nearly a century. Employers learned very quickly that in an environment of extreme scarcity and hyper-competitiveness, they could get away with murder.

Naturally, that’s exactly what they did.