Wake-up call.

Well, hell. Sorry, folks, but our friend Chaunticleer is here with an even less pleasant morning post than the one involving links to lots of scary, wiggly Jello pictures.

I really didn't want to see this (over at Academic Coach) while trying to drag my sorry ass out of the apartment to go to office hours today. It's even worse than I'd thought:

"(A) 1999 Modern Language Association survey found that only 37 percent of English faculty members were on tenure-track lines."

And, as we already knew,

"At institutions granting doctoral degrees, the bulk of the cheap labor was sucked out of graduate students -- 44.6% of the teaching staff in English departments and 47.9% in Foreign Language departments were grad student TAs."

In fact, some institutions rely on their graduate students to provide the majority of their undergraduate face-time.

Not to mention that these are old figures (from 1999), and the trend hasn't shown any signs of slowing down. I'd guess that things are actually worse now than these figures indicate.

Folks, this is a real crisis. This is not the way it's supposed to be: It's exploitative and just flat wrong.

And some people want to tell me we don't need unions?

Things don't seem to be much better in other fields--even in professional schools, if the painfully ironic listing for an adjunct position in business ethics Dorcasina found is any indication.

Lord 'a mercy.