ABSTRACT
I’m sure there were more depressing things than coming out of graduate school with a Ph.D. in history in 1994. But at the time, I couldn’t think of many. I had heard all the warnings of the “bad job market” when I was in graduate school, but I hadn’t realized what an oxymoron the term “job market” was. All that talk sounded abstract up to the point of getting my Ph.D. (unlike other graduate students, I had not taught very much as a teaching assistant). But with Ph.D. in hand, it hit me: the restructuring of academic employment, the rising use of graduate students as teachers, the exploding use of adjuncts was now going to crash in on my own life. I put out my applications and got a few nibbles, but no bites. I was told by one person who interviewed me for a full-time position that I had been beaten out by someone who had published four books (all I had was my piddly little dissertation). So I did what most people did then and now: I scraped up as many small teaching gigs as possible. Patching them together into a nice employment “package” with no health insurance or office, I became what was called back then an “expressway professor.” It sounded so hip, so futuristic. And so I embarked on the noble profession that was quickly becoming neither.
