As a former music history professor who now works in tech, I think the adjunctification of American universities is one of the the worst "best-kept secrets" out there. The sheer number of blog "exposés" of adjunct teaching that I have read over the last 20 years simply boggles the mind, each one breathlessly "revealing" the same secret. Of course, they are not wrong: I personally adjuncted for years and it does not pay (example: I earned $5,000 total the year after I graduated from Harvard with a PhD).
What really mystifies me, now that I have 8 years of perspective between me and the day I resigned from my tenure-track job, is why people who think of themselves as great thinkers (or, at least, good enough thinkers to teach college) cannot escape from something of a self-constructed prison of adjunct work. Based on my limited conversations with NTT academics who considered career changes during the pandemic, there is an odd quality of stockholm syndrome where PhDs (especially in the humanities) simply cannot fathom that any other life path might be worthwhile, and hence toil away.
What really mystifies me, now that I have 8 years of perspective between me and the day I resigned from my tenure-track job, is why people who think of themselves as great thinkers (or, at least, good enough thinkers to teach college) cannot escape from something of a self-constructed prison of adjunct work. Based on my limited conversations with NTT academics who considered career changes during the pandemic, there is an odd quality of stockholm syndrome where PhDs (especially in the humanities) simply cannot fathom that any other life path might be worthwhile, and hence toil away.