Reader Tim is saying that I’m posting too much. I’m nothing if not accommodating, so I decided to conduct a poll to see what people wanted. Please vote in the new poll that has appeared in the right-hand panel of the blog.

I will be shutting up now. For a little while, at least.

I love teaching upper-level courses. I don’t hate lower-level courses either but upper-level is a different world. In the Intro to Literary Theory course, students stare at me with big, curious eyes, mesmerized by everything I say.

I started this course by saying, “People who don’t like to read don’t exist.”

And everybody gasped. It’s too cute for words: these kids are so young and so eager to learn things that my heart almost explodes when I look at them.

“People who say don’t like to read simply haven’t learned to see movies in their heads when they read,” I explained. “Whenever I open a book, I begin to watch a movie inside my head, a movie that I create myself, with some help from the book’s author.”

And everybody gasped again.

“It happens to me, too,” one student shared.

“Wow. . . I want to be able to do that, too,” another student said.

Then I told them about 1st-person narrators and omniscient narrators, and they were completely amazed.

I know a couple of people who are very prolific on Facebook. Every day they post anywhere up to a dozen imaginative comments, interesting links, great photos, talented articles, etc. All of the income and fame generated by them goes to Zuckerberg.

It is a mystery to me why such people don’t start their own blogs and get at least a small portion of the income and all of the fame that they create with their writing, turning their Facebook pages into a place where they only post personal news and keep in touch with family and friends.

If you have the need and the capacity to be very productive and engaged online, why not make it work for you?

If you don’t want to do what I suggest, and you don’t want to do what Schuman suggests, and you don’t want to do anything concrete and practical, then just have the courage of your opinions and say, “I don’t give a rat’s ass about adjuncts, the erosion of tenure, the casualization of academic labor, etc. It’s a dog eat dog world, and all I care about is myself. Everybody else can go jump off a cliff for all I care.”

This, at least, will be honest. This will be a serious, consistent, coherent position. I can’t support it but I don’t despise it as much as I do the hypocrites who are yes-butting every real initiative to death.

Everybody complains about the substitution of tenure lines with adjunct positions but nobody is actually doing anything about it.

So here is what I suggest: let’s stop whining and start acting. We need to inflict a lot of hurt on any department that cuts a tenure line. We need to heap shame and scorn on any administrator responsible for destroying scholarship and responsible teaching in this country.

Administrators are terrified of bad publicity. The moment you make the first Google search result with an administrator’s name reflect his or her destructive behavior, said administrator begins to grovel. (Here is an example of how easy it is to make an administrator come to her senses and stop bullying educators. And here is how this story got resolved.)

Here is what you need to do from now on: when your department decides / is forced to cut a tenure line, make that shameful fact public. If you are afraid of doing that under your own name, let somebody else do it for you. Let me know anonymously, and I will make the news public. Send the information to some fearless blogger. Send it to Rebecca Schuman. Send it to College Misery. Start an anonymous blog, give me a link, and I will make sure people read what you have to say.

And when you see a post or an article condemning a specific college for cutting a specific tenure line, help spread the news. Tweet it, link to it, post it on Facebook, send it by email to trusted friends.

No excuses should be acceptable. Is anybody listening to your excuses why you didn’t manage to get a tenure-track job? Is anybody interested in the challenges you face? Does anybody care about the hardship you experience?

It’s time we tell the administrators to stop covering up their incompetence by sacrificing our interests. Cutting a tenure line and hiring an adjunct instead is not the only way to save your program. That is a lie, and anybody who proffers this egregious falsehood should become a pariah in academic circles. It should become dangerous to one’s career even to think it, let alone say it.

There are many of us: contingent, tenured, adjunct, visiting, associate, full, assistant, graduate, post-doctoral, part-time, full-time. Together we make an army. Together we can win.