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There are hundreds of applications per tenure track position - departments do not and will not hire out conservatives. Adjuncts are in no position to demand reform and this wouldn’t be it, anyway. The problem goes back to grad school and allowed research topics/positions…
The problem is worsening. We see increasing adoption of actual litmus tests (mandatory diversity statements) in which conservative positions are considered tantamount to hate speech.
How exactly would you have conservatives engage or reform this system?
My argument isn't that the system is easily capable of reform now, but that it got the way it did due to decades of conservatives ignoring it. Tenure track positions were always competitive, but you can't spend decades telling your kids to avoid academic pursuits and then act surprised when academia is full of you political adversaries, who didn't face the same pressure. One interesting development is that schools have become so reliant on adjuncts that there's actually a shortage of professors right now. Schools are loathe to give tenure when they can get away with it, and there used to be no shortage of PhDs willing to take low-paying positions to keep their resumes up to date. They didn't seem to realize that this was a temporary situation. When I was in college, most adjuncts were people who worked regular jobs in the community who wanted to teach and would take a small fee to teach one night class a semester in some niche topic that wouldn't get covered normally, usually an elective. Then the post-COVID labor shortage came and all the aspiring professors got good jobs in the private sector, and no one is willing to live on scraps anymore.
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