well this just seems bizarre to me given that a) i make substantially more 'an hour' than a person who cleans houses here and b) i make a hell of a lot less than US academics
Catherine ---------------
Catherine,
It may seem bizarre, but it reflects conditions I discovered some thirty years ago. Just about any blue collar work was paying a lot more than beginning an academic career. The only academic art jobs I could get were part-time temporary. The theory back then was, you start off with a couple of years of one year contracts in a state school, or just a couple of classes in a city college and build up some experience, and put together a couple of shows in local galleries and then you could compete in the tenture track positions. The only trouble was I literally couldn't live on the few thousand a year I could make teaching individual classes at the city colleges here. I had to have another job. But two jobs doesn't leave much time for art and a domestic life.
The only way around this trap was if I had been a star, had magically put together enough work to show in some museum open and my thesis adviser had gone out of his way to get me into a department some where. As it was, I ended up in a minor protest group to support him for tenture. A great role model, huh?
My original grad school buddies in English were in the same merry go round, except they were getting one and two year contracts to start with and could marginally live on that. But they ended up in small mid-western schools and had to endure culture-death. Of the two I kept track of for a few years, one dropped out after a two year stint in northern Michigan and then another two years in Montana. The other migrated down to rural two year colleges back east where the jobs were more secure---or were more secure twenty years ago. The only success stories I know were several disabled people in the Seventies who managed to keep their welfare checks and rehab support coming in while they managed one or two classes a semester as a part-time hires. After several of these, they managed to get into tenure track positions in Reno, Santa Clara, and Tucson. In other words without some kind of subsidies or external support most people in the arts and humanities don't make into academia.
And much later in the early Nineties, the same conditions had begun to effect the sciences. In the bio-science lab I was working in, everyone there had PhD's, a short publication list and were desperately hanging on with post-docs and tech jobs. Only one out of a lab of about fifteen scored a standard tenure track job. One post-doc had managed to make a brief flash by doing something interesting with imaging techniques in living cells. But this was a short lived flash and he was very lucky his future dept employer went to the conference where he presented his paper.
At any rate, I was making more as a hospital orderly and certainly more as an apprentice carpenter thirty years ago than I was making teaching night studio classes. The only way I could have lived on teaching back then was if I was still living with several roommates, mattress on the floor and another part-time job. After eight and half years of that kind of shit just to get through the degrees I said, well, fuck it. Forget having a work studio or a wife still going to school. And remember, this was back when you could still go to school without generating a lifetime of loan debts.
I am pretty sure Kelley and Yoshie could come up with similar and much newer stories.
Chuck Grimes
PS. Just read Yoshie answer. The souless stats. Oh well, you get the idea.