Epideictic Piece in the Chronicle about IA

Amanda says that everyone has linked to this story in the Chronicle about Invisible Adjunct. I'm embarrassed to be so slow on the uptake, but thought I would comment on it since I recently posted a paper I wrote about the Chronicle and IA.

The article is nice, quite an encomium. It's written by Scott Smallwood, the same staff writer who interviewed Jill Carroll in an article titled, "Less Whining, More Teaching: Jill Carroll, a Proud Part-Timer, Thinks Many Adjuncts Need a New Attitude." (Subscribers only.) Of course I know that Smallwood shouldn't be held accountable for writing a rather celebratory piece on adjuncts' embracing capitalism and entrepreneurship, as the one on Carroll is. (Interestingly enough, he quotes IA's response to that article: "'For all practical intents and purposes, the adjunct is a low-wage worker without benefits who can be hired and fired at will,' she once wrote. 'So in what way can the adjunct be an entrepreneur, except in his or her own mind?'" but doesn't provide the context.) He's writing for a specific publication with specific generic conventions that, I still argue, uphold the status quo. True, he characterizes the hiring system as "broken," but it remains the case that most of the Chronicle's inculcations about academic labor are jeremiads, not radical critiques such as IA's weblog.