First comes an email. A senior colleague in your field needs your opinion on contingent labor. You message back with your opinion. You also send links to posts, articles, and thinky pieces. Senior colleague responds, “Can we talk about contingency more?” You agree, but admit that you are no expert. Senior colleague is contacting you because you wrote a piece about your experiences as an adjunct and a full-time lecturer. You’ve also written about the challenges of the faculty job market and your attempt to walk away from academia. You realize that this makes you a voice on this issue. You are not sure how that makes you feel. You are writing to learn to live with how your life turned out, but you aren’t sure you are an activist. People keep calling you an activist. You wonder if speaking up is the mark of activism. It makes you sad to think that’s the case.
Next come the phone calls. You have a lovely chat with the senior colleague, who heads a prestigious committee for a learned society. He wants that society to take action on contingent faculty (finally). You agree wholeheartedly. This has been one of your frustrations with the learned society that you’ve been a part of for 12 years. Almost every year, you send money to this group for dues and conference fees. A quick calculation reveals that you’ve paid thousands of dollars on plane tickets and hotels to attend its annual conferences — all in an attempt to build an academic career.
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