Odd essay — partly typical of LARB, which sometimes aim farther than it can reach, but also a tricky approach, fighting data with rhetorical analysis. “PhD ‘oversupply’ is just a euphemistic way of talking about the fact that colleges and universities haven’t met student-generated demand with a commensurate supply of full-time, tenure-track faculty” — basically arguing that academia should’ve become a ponzi scheme. I agree the addiction to adjuncts is f*cked, but the idea that faculties can expand asymptotically is silly. Better to accept that the postwar salad days of edus were a bubble, and that the continued imaginary insistence that they were the norm is a symptom of America’s disrespect for all things working-class.