This article surveys the challenges college teachers in the United States will likely face in the near future and argues that overtly political attacks from the Right may be less important than the erosion of tenure entailed in universities' overuse of adjunct labor and the implications of the recent California district court case Hong v. Grant.

1. The timing could not be better for such a journal. It not only allows professors of English to write about teaching in an intellectually rigorous and reflective way (and, for me, serves as an incentive to do so) but establishes a forum for discussion on teaching unlike any other in the profession. This is important for many reasons, some of which have to do with the fact that the profession is so routinely critiqued—not only by know-nothing legislators and feeding-frenzy journalists but by leading figures in the profession, whose essays and books on the state of English studies mystify pedagogical matters at least as often as they clarify them. For my part, I have written about the state of English studies on a regular basis, but I have not, so far, attempted to say anything useful about how it inflects my pedagogical practices.