Professors file health care lawsuit – The Boston Globe

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Temple University’s adjunct professors, who teach somewhere between a third and a half of all classes at Temple, have started agitating for more rights and unity. Perhaps inspired by current and past labor struggles, the adjuncts have begun demonstrating on campus.

The numbers are revealing. Of a total of 3,400 faculty, 1,584 are adjuncts. That’s a powerful bloc if they become united and have a motivated membership and aggressive leadership. But therein lies the rub. The group says it has 50 active members, which is far short of what it needs to be an effective organization.

Considering the recession, it may not be the best time to start organizing. Adjuncts are happy to have any job they can get. Still, and this is based largely on anecdotal evidence, adjuncts might be tired of being at the mercy of the university, with low pay, few to no offices, and widespread cuts during a recession.

The likelihood of substantial change happening is pretty low, as it stands now. Temple has no room for more offices, and can barely fit the professors and classes it has now. There’s a lot of out-stretched hands waiting to get disappearing funds. Unless the adjuncts become very organized very fast, this probably won’t move any mountains soon.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Monday.

* Žižek has an op-ed in the New York Times on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall. It’s pretty good.

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, “Better dead than red!” are now often heard mumbling, “Better red than eating hamburgers.” But the Communist nostalgia should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to the gray Socialist reality, it is more a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past. As for the rise of the rightist populism, it is not an Eastern European specialty, but a common feature of all countries caught in the vortex of globalization…

* Standards for Grading the Life of an Adjunct Composition Professor.

* Our university in the news! Duke Criticized Over Sex Toy Study.

* Two good posts from Josh Marshall consider whether 2010 or 2012 is the next flashpoint for health care reform.

* And who supports marriage equality? The real question is, what’s going to happen to me when I turn thirty next week?

Also see: (Video) Flu Vaccine Permanently Disables NFL Cheerleader

The Swine Flu is an orchestrated attempt to spread fear and chaos into the population and to try to get people vaccinated, which everyone should know contains mercury that damages your nervous system. Mercury, of course, is one of the most toxic substances you can put in a human body. It is a heavy metal known to contribute to neurological disorders, including autism, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease. Mercury also tends to build up in tissues in the human body and is not easily removed, so even small exposures to mercury can accumulate over time and end up compromising the health of the person involved. Baxter, the makers of the flu vaccines was caught putting live bird flu in the vaccines and making people get more sick and ill with the help of the World Health Organization (WHO). DO NOT TAKE THE VACCINE! Unless of course you want to have the possibility of dying and destroying your immune system and have all sorts of side effects and you are determined for your own personal destruction – then by all means get it. If you are an intelligent person and not a sheep who cannot critically think for yourself – research further and you will come to the conclusion that this vaccine is a big scam and should not enter one single human body.

I just came across a thought-provoking interview with Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP. The video is titled Twilight of Academic Freedom. It deals with the consequences of increasing numbers of “contingent faculty” in higher education — the adjuncts, visiting professors, instructors, and various other titles for instructional staff who do not have the protections of tenure.

Right now, many universities are looking for ways to save money, and one way to do that is to hire fewer tenure-related faculty and shift the teaching burden onto adjuncts who are hired for as little as the uni can get away with paying. (It’s worth noting that this trend started well before the current recession, though I wouldn’t doubt that it’s accelerated.) Nelson is concerned about universities that are moving toward having an increasing share of teaching done by such contingent faculty.

Adjunct positions have a useful place in universities when used for the right reasons. One such reason is to expose students to perspectives that come from outside of the academy. For example, my undergraduate Abnormal Psychology class was taught by an adjunct whose main job was as a clinical psychologist at a hospital. That gave her a wealth of stories and practical experience that she could bring to the classroom.

But using adjuncts as a cost-cutting measure is a different thing. Many adjuncts will tell you that the system exploits instructors who work at low wages as a way to remain in the game while they hunt for better-paying permanent jobs. Those jobs typically don’t exist in high enough numbers to hire everybody who’s circling in the adjunct holding pattern.

Nelson offers a different line of argument, one that stems from the core reason tenure exists in the first place: academic freedom. To quote from the interview, “Academic freedom and job security are inextricably linked.” Tenure ensures that a professor can choose what to teach based on professional judgment. Direct review of those decisions is made by professional peers, protecting individual faculty from legislators, donors, regents, and others who might wield their considerable influence to drum out professors who don’t fit some outside agenda.

Nelson is not just worried about individual adjuncts being vulnerable. Even more ominous are the systemic risks of a university shifting to an adjunct-heavy portfolio. Hiring the occasional adjunct at an institution with a solid core of tenure-protected faculty is not likely to be a problem, as long as tenured faculty care enough about academic freedom that they’ll raise a stink if an adjunct is being subject to inappropriate pressure. (It’s sort of intellectual herd immunity.) But without that core, when too many of your faculty could be threatened for teaching something that someone does not like, the institution loses an important protection. Just look at the battles over secondary school textbooks in biology and history for an example of the kind of political infighting that can result. Is that where higher education could end up — with a state board telling me what to teach and what textbooks to use? I hope not, but Nelson presents good reasons to worry.

Today is the day for lots of adjunct news. Here is another article discussing efforts to form an advocacy group for adjuncts.

An Activist Adjunct Shoulders the Weight of a New Advocacy Group

By Audrey Williams June, Akron, Ohio

There was a time when Maria C. Maisto didn’t know much about the struggles of adjunct professors. She didn’t know that teaching six courses could still pay less than $20,000. She didn’t know that adjuncts are likely to be on the outskirts of faculty governance. She didn’t know that adjuncts can’t count on unemployment checks to fill in the gap when they’re not able to teach. But four years after teaching her first English-composition class at the University of Akron, Ms. Maisto knows all of that. In fact, now she thinks about the plight of adjuncts all the time.

Full article is available at http://chronicle.com/article/an-activist-adjunct-shoulders/48348/

As you may know, my syllabus is completely out of control. It is up to 11 frickin’ pages. The college I’m working for insists that certain sections be included, even if the information is included somewhere else. The latest addition was a “Dates to Remember” section. Even though I carefully list every due date with the description of the assignment, I now have to have a section with every “important date” listed. When I first saw this requirement, I thought I was already meeting it by listing the add/drop, withdrawal, and exam dates on every page in the footer, and the list of things to be included in the final grade (also now required). But no. I was tongue-lashed by the instructional secretary and sent to syllabus purgatory, where I had to write the section required and insert it after the semester had begun.

I have to list every assignment, plus the instructions for the assignment, in detail. I have to include the description of the course quoted from the college catalogue. I have to list a clear and specific attendance policy. I have to include a paragraph about the disability center, which I have always done anyway. I must include a clear academic honesty policy.

Then I have to have certain things synched with every other professor who teaches the intro classes throughout the college. I don’t have to do this at any other college I have ever taught for, but whatever. Who needs control over their own classes, anyway? I was shocked to find, however, that despite the clear description of what time periods begin and end each section of the intro, one of the other profs was going way beyond where the first half was supposed to stop, because they were very into modern and contemporary stuff and wanted to spend more time on that in the second half. Never mind the description for the course catalogue which clearly states what general material the class is supposed to cover.

Eleven pages, people. The class I just took over at the local four-year school? Her syllabus was two pages. Just like I told you about, the way I remember syllabi being. Student knew they were expected to be in class. The assignments were listed, but everybody knew specifics came later.

Now, there is apparently a move to included a standardized grading standard, to be included in the syllabus. I have wishful thinking that this just means I have to list the grading scale, which I already do, but I have a bad feeling about this. I have never, ever had to put in my syllabus specifics about how each and every assignment is graded. If I grade holistically, and someone else grades substractively, and a third grades additively, we are not going to agree about how to assess students. It is a basic difference in pedagogical philosophies. It would be like asking Jews and Muslims to agree on religion, and now write it all down and nice and clear for everyone.

Part of being in college is experiencing different ways of doing things. Different ways of grading and assessment are part of that. When you go out in the workplace, bosses aren’t standardized. They all have their ways of assessing you, providing feedback, and setting goals. They have different ideas of how the same job is to be done. Some under-manage you, some micro-manage you, and you have to go with the flow and learn these different styles and philosophies.

These kinds of standardization may look good to students- hey, I know what to expect from class to class!- but I find it is not to their advantage. Slackers tend to figure out how to work the system, and with a single system, it makes it easier to work it. Teachers with differing philosophies than the one selected for the “standard” either go teach elsewhere, or squeeze their own standards into the standardized frame, so that students think they know what is expected, and in fact find that “interpretation” can vary. Besides, micro-managing professors? We’re not children, thanks.

I have the feeling I now have a 13-page syllabus. Plus the lecture outline.

My little community college has grown by leaps and bounds, and has now opened a new “center”- four classrooms, a computer lab, and a group office with a front desk and restrooms. Its a lovely little satellite for folks in that area to be able to take classes.

I am used to group offices. After all, I’m an adjunct. In fact, I consider myself lucky to be permitted such a luxury as a group office. People who are not used to group offices, such as permanent faculty and new adjuncts, can be quite the adventure. Sometimes they are pains in the ass, such as the lady who couldn’t understand why I was meeting with a student in the group office- she seemed to think this was some kind of adjunct faculty lounge, not an office. Sorry, sweetie, group office means just that- its the office space we have. When enough of these PITAs accumulate in a single semester (which happens during budget cuts, when colleges do away with permanent positions in favor of cheap adjunct labor for teaching- we’re even cheaper than full-time contract labor!), you end up having to meet students in hallways and libraries. Not a good thing.

On the other side of the spectrum are folks who are just plain not used to group offices, but are trying to roll with it in good humor. After all, they have a permanent office somewhere else, or were clear that they wouldn’t be getting one, or are clearer on the concept of “center” instead of “campus” (ie, no one has an office in a satellite classroom location!) than PITAs. When you have a nice accumulation of these kinds of people (such as when a satellite is supported by the faculty and faculty are happy because they have less of a commute to the satellite than to campus), the group offices is something like a Greek Theatre, in the vein of an episode of Cheers. Folks walk in, and you know who’s there because hey, there’s only four classrooms, so there are only a certain umber of classes going on at a time, you can’t be in the office when you are teaching, and PITAs tend to only drift in when they need to make a copy of something.

So in our usual exchanges, I and another part-timer for the biology department were noting disappearing students, and the bio prof was noting that putting up materials on Blackboard was useless because none of her students were using them, and they were failing her tests because they included material from the stuff she had put up on Blackboard. And we laughed about how I put up the exam questions on Blackboard two weeks ahead of a test, harp on the fact they are there, and still get crappy essays. The New Adjunct from the English department is still getting used the group office thing, and she was nodding and smiling, I think more because she was unused to having to share space with two people who talk too much than in actual understanding of what we were talking about.

In walks Permanent Full-Time Tenured Professor, who is a stitch. He’s having student woes, too. We also discuss the technology woes of my virtual section (not the online sections- the section where I am teaching two places at once, via video). Bio Adjunct and I both note that with kids back into full-day school, and that means we can take on more classes and students, but really, its the night classes that have the best students; adult day students have a much less serious attitude towards the classes, and pondering if the connection with school being back in session is a factor (adults taking night classes often work, but you don’t hear them complaining about it like the day students do). However, having kids, we can’t take on as many night classes. With that, PF-TTP offers up that he doesn’t have to worry about that, because his kids are 35 and 38 years old. He heads out to class as we all laugh.

Then Bio Adjunct and I look at each other.

“Should we tell him we’re the same age as his kids?” I asked jokingly.
“Nah,” Bio Adjunct replies. “He doesn’t want to know. We’re just young and academic.”

And marginally employed.

I have a grading dilemma. It’s not too serious, but it makes my life very uncomfortable at times. I think it has everything to do with the limits of my ability to correct behaviors in undergraduates.

Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. I can think of no joy more complete than when I see a student make progress over the course of a semester or really put in hard work to pass my class. These students are likely to make the same mistakes I will describe below, but only with the best intentions.

I try to keep my personal opinions hidden. Like every good historian, I believe in the value of objectivity not only in research, but in the way I teach. Therefore, only accidental traces of my atheism and liberalism seep into my teaching (this is especially the case because the curriculum is standardized). Even though many of my students hold beliefs that I absolutely abhor, I treat them the same as my students who sway toward the things that I believe. They are equals, because that’s how it should be.

Apparently, I’m a rare bird. Many of my pupils are terrified of me before they talk to me for the first time. They’re nervous, I can almost smell their cold sweat.  My only conclusion is that there are some teachers in the community college system who have become embittered (easily done in a system that lacks support for adjuncts, I must admit). I’m easy to talk to, make my accessible, and I’m generally cheerful unless you’re a plagiarist.

Though this issue in several forms has gotten my attention before, today it struck a chord. The question on the discussion board was rather simple: “Why do we study history?” For me, this question is quite easily answered. The government wants you to be a better citizen (read: not Communist or prone to dissension in anyway). The school wants you to fulfill requirements to enable you to transfer your credits. The professor wants you to be made aware of what’s happened in the past. More importantly, taking humanities classes teaches you to think creatively, use your organization, memorization, and written communication skills, how to discuss controversial topics like an adult, and how to maintain objectivity in analysis.

Today’s post from the student was about how the Christian God created “His Story.” As mentioned above, I’m an atheist. Have been for years and in fact, was never part of any organized religion. Not Christened, not baptized. I was given the choice, and I chose the most rational option. This doesn’t mean that everyone should believe the same things I do. Some people need religion to get through their lives, and that’s cool. However, proselytizing on my discussion boards isn’t acceptable.

How does one deal with this as an instructor? The student didn’t really answer the question, so the actual points grading was simple.  This isn’t the first student who has done this, and now that there’s one, there will be others who will copy this sentiment.

As an instructor, with this sort of situation, you walk a fine line. You can tell the student to tone it down and stick to the proven facts, but you risk them being offended. This is further complicated by the fact that I’m an adjunct and rocking the proverbial boat is not necessarily a good idea when you’re a contract employee.  I also feel that perhaps if anything further than a lower grade (for not answering the question) is given, such as a note, that whomever the incident is reported to would also be offended.

The real question, for me, is why this student thought that throwing out a plethora of Bible quotes and standing on a soap box would help their grade. Has this worked before? If it has, what does that say about the quality of education?

I understand that many students make mistakes, and especially in the online environment. It’s no easy feat to move from the pedagogical model to the andragogical one (passive to active learning), but there has to be a point where you consider the feelings and thoughts of others. This student left no room for discussion of her point, not only because she didn’t make one, but since most of my students are of the same faith, there’s no way for them to actively engage this kind of behavior from a discussion standpoint. Once you bring in Jesus, there’s not much more to say.

I was musing this Monday morning, as I often do as opposed to writing, that the life and professionalism of the adjunct makes for top notch blog hits, even from a site not as popular as it could be (well, the site does advertise UNasked advice, as opposed to solicited advice which tends to go over better).  I have realized that writing about the adjunct prof (NOT an oxymoron to those of you who think they may be mutually exclusive) means that I get lots of hits on my website, as well as a number of links and pingbacks.  This led me to look at the life of an adjunct more closely.  Here is what I noticed:

Due to the volatile nature of the job market, most adjuncts:

• routinely search for new jobs on-line,
• have impetus to increast their web skills, and
• participate in new programs.

Because materials for adjuncts are often in short supply due to funding issues, most adjuncts are innovative:

• they look for the least expensive copy costs
• don’t spend lots on per diem requests (because they know they can’t get them)
• routinely scout out the least costly materials for their students to buy
• know how to get the most out of on-line resources for their classrooms, and
• definitely keep updated on the new technology that might be the key to getting the next full-time gig.

In order for adjuncts to be competitive within the job market, adjuncts participate more in their professional development:

• more adjuncts write blogs,
• participate in discussions,
• try to participate in unions,
• push to publish something to get their name out in their field,
  
• look for leadership roles to add value to their employere,
• volunteer for more work than the full-time(read guaranteed) employees, and
• learn all the new technology that will enable them to teach in more places.

How does this NOT add value to a school? Adjuncts have to work harder for less, even with student evaluations, because poor student evaluations can get an adjunct fired just as easily as making a secretary angry.  It’s not that I have anything personally against the full-time or tenured profs, well maybe a little due to the manner in which I had been treated while teaching at the adjunct status, but I do have a problem with the recent articles hinting at the unprofessionalism of the adjunct population.  Adjuncts work harder for less money, and still don’t get respect.

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• Commenting on the Adjunct Plight: Why do the readers of Inside Higher Ed miss the point? (unaskedadvice.wordpress.com)
• English Profs Have Office Phone Cords Cut as Florida State Univ’s Budget Crisis Amps Up – Just like adjuncts (unaskedadvice.wordpress.com)
• Faculty/ Adjunct Firing: Stillman College, Edison Community College, & Bowdoin College seem to try to fire profs to keep them from speaking (unaskedadvice.wordpress.com)
• Add Eddison Community College in Ohio to the list of openly censoring professors by firing them – as deemed necessary by President Yowell (unaskedadvice.wordpress.com)
• “Do it for love” and other fallacies to motivate grad students and junior faculty (academicproductivity.com)

Other stuff.

* William Jelani Cobb: ‘Obama absent on gay rights.’ Yes he is.

We long ago overdosed on comparisons of Obama and previous presidents, but it’s hard to miss the way his administration had begun to echo that of John F. Kennedy. And not in a good way.

During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy ran as a forward-looking Democrat who understood the necessity of civil rights. He promised an executive order banning housing discrimination. Gestures like his phone call to a pregnant Coretta Scott King while her husband languished in an Albany jail and Robert Kennedy’s judicial arm-twisting to secure his release endeared the young candidate to millions of African-Americans.

But once in office, Kennedy made civil rights a low priority. By 1962, Martin Luther King was openly critical of Kennedy and bitterly observed that the movement activists had become “pawns in a white man’s game.” It is worth recalling that the 1963 March on Washington was organized not only to ensure passage of a civil rights bill, but also to ensure that Kennedy would not cave to Southern Democrats on the issue.

Via Kinohi.

* Exactly what we don’t want: “VP doesn’t rule out his own presidential aspirations on Meet the Press Sunday.”

* Can You Afford to Be an Adjunct? Don’t consider using adjuncting as a “back door” into a specific department. You are the academic equivalent of a fry cook. You will not be moved into district manager very easily. Perhaps your department grows their own. Ask. How many tenured, tenure-track profs started out as an adjunct? Take your answer as policy. Adjuncts are seldom promoted. You may, especially in smaller or community colleges, be able to enter by attrition, but this happens rarely and should be considered along the lines of winning the lottery. Think very carefully of your overall plan, especially if you have a family or dependents.

* The Ghostbusters’ risky business model.

* Marvel’s big Captain America news surprises exactly no one.

* Three-frame movies. Via MeFi.

“Like the rest of higher education, elite universities have grown increasingly reliant on non-tenure-track faculty members. Leaders of those institutions are frequently unaware of the role played by adjuncts or how they have come to make up a larger share of the teaching force. The causes for this shift – while related to money – go far beyond the savings from hiring off the tenure track, and the blame may need to be shared by senior professors and graduate student unions. At the most celebrated institutions of higher education in the United States, the teaching quality of the adjuncts is many times better than that of those on the tenure tack. These are among the conclusions of Off-Track Profs: Nontenured Teachers in Higher Education, being released this week by the MIT Press …” (more)

[Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, 27 May]

“What’s an adjunct?” I asked this question, like a hundred times.

My telephone line was dead and I couldn’t call my friends and ask for help. The credit in my cellphone was going in negatives and I couldn’t call them from it as well. So, I repeated the question like a thousand times in my head reading from some book and not actually understanding a bit. So today when I went to the university and saw one of my class mates, I went up to her and said,” Listen, what’s an adjunct?”

Well, she said something about some mobile element of the sentence and I just looked at her as if she was talking rocket science.

And then I went to department’s library and took out my books and started.. okay okay.. I couldn’t concentrate so I just tried to look like someone who’s very busy studying. Well, another classmate arrived aand so I thought why not ask her. So I asked, “hey, what’s an adjunct?”.Bechari forgot about her nervousness and tried really hard to explain to me what an adjunct was. So all I could remember is that an adjunct is some kind of the mobile element in a sentence, not actually understanding what it was.

Well… the exam started, I tried my best to make best guesses as to what adjunts, adverbial and adjective phrases were while doing the structures. A girl sitting next to me asked something (haaa haaaye during the exam) but agar mujhe kuch ata hota tu mein usse kuch batati naa!

After the exam, I got out, found my friend and said, “Listen, what’s an adjunct!?!”

So, yes I had a nightmare.. not exactly a nightmare because it was an afternoon nap so kind of afternoonmare (if that’s anything) that even my hubby texted me the definition of adjunct and I couldn’t make anything out of it! (lol.. seriously)

Oh! And a friend texted just now, “exam kaisa hua” (how did it go??)

Well… I texted her back, “What’s an adjunct?!”

Well.. about grammar, I know it’s cruccial even while doing literature, but what I thought in the beginining of this semester that maybe we’ll learn things about language the way we talk about it in literature- language .. something crucial, something unavoidable, something so close to you that you cannot distance it from yourself andf analyze it that way. But this semester, though, concentrated on other things (I’m not saying that I didn’t learn anything but I think importance was not given to the things that maybe I consider as important). Because I was looking forward to all Saussure, and Derrida and even when doing fairclough, I realised how important grammar is to analyze the text, to critcially analyze the text, but I think the attention was soo much on the TESL part of each subject that we have undermined the importance of language or linguistic studies to just teaching of English as a second language and nothing more.

InsideHigherEd.com reported briefly on something that I’ve been suspecting was going to become a trend in the coming years; the slow death of the professoriate. I don’t think that this profession will ever see complete death, but there are trends that show that the long term changes in the market will cause a decline in this profession in the future.
1. Trimming of PhD programs
2. The increase in adjunct professors and the decrease in tenure track professors
3. The rise of online education and creation of educational offerings that are standardized online (FGCU is a leader in this field)
4. The self study MBA and classes being offered free of charge online

The economics of the change make sense. Cutting salaries, especially of tenure track professors, can produce huge savings for the university.

Don’t shoot me; I’m just the messenger.

FAQ on the BCC Summer Institute, May 20-21

Q. Is it all about technology?

A. It’s all about learning outside the classroom: first day focus is service learning, field trips, study abroad, experiential learning — pretty low-tech! Day 2 will focus on web 2.0 technologies in the context of supporting student learning

Q. Can I come to just Day 2?

A. The two-day program actually is a complete experience. Email me if you have questions; it may be possible.

Q. Day 2 might be way beyond my level…

A. We have a guest speaker who will put the technology in a classroom context: doable and potentially time-saving. The workshops will be focus on 1-3 easy things you can do to incorporate the tech in a pedagogically sound way. 

Q. Will there be outside presenters?

A. We will have presenters from HCC, GCC, HVCC, Boston College, and UMass Amherst. We will also have presentations from our own faculty and staff.

Thursday, Thursday.

* My four-word post on marriage equality in Maine yesterday somehow turned into yet another epic comment thread about gay marriage. I just know this time we’ll hammer out agreement.

* Science fiction in the New Yorker: “The Slows” by Gail Hareven.

* Dollhouse “certain to be canceled.” Keep hope alive.

* Wolverine, despite by all accounts not being very good, gets a sequel.

* Craig Arnold update: they think they’ve found his trail.

* ‘MLA Urges Chairs to Focus on Adjunct Issues.’

* When the bomb goes off, everyone’s got one last thing to do before they die. A game.

Somehow I missed it, but this is an interesting article from the WSJ, “So you Want to Be A Professor.”  Along with Mark Taylor’s pretentious Op-ed from the NY Times last week (for a spirited reaction see here), it kind of rubbed me the wrong way.  For instance:

On some recent doctoral program cuts at Emory and Columbia:

But graduates students also act as teaching assistants, doing a great deal of time-consuming classroom work (and grading) that professors themselves are thus not compelled to do. In all sorts of courses, especially in their freshman and sophomore years, undergraduates may find themselves being instructed more often by a 25-year-old doctoral candidate than by the university’s full-time faculty members, who, of course, already have their doctorates (and one or two books to their credit, too). It is an odd, upside-down arrangement, but it has an economic logic: By providing cheap labor, graduate students save college administrations millions of dollars each year in salary costs.

So why the cuts? Well, the calculations work out differently for different schools. For instance, universities in lower tiers might not have to do as much because they can get away with having a higher percentage of classes taught by graduate students. But some of the schools making doctoral cuts this year gave compassion as their reason. Catherine R. Stimson, the dean of Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University, was quoted in Inside Higher Ed: Given the state of the academic job market, she asked, referring to would-be doctoral candidates: “Is it fair to bring them in?”

First, lower tiered universities can “get away” with having a larger contingent labour force?  This just seems wrong to me.  I’m too lazy to cook up the stats (in fact, if anyone wants to send me some I’d be grateful), but um…remember the whole move to unionize the graduate students at Yale in the late 90s and beyond? Wasn’t there something to the effect that almost half the classes at Yale were taught by adjuncts.  Wishful thinking, at best.  There are still the “teaching assistants,” I would imagine.  Compassion? Bullshit.  Very disingenuous.  The next paragraph suggests that the “market” (such as it is) was always pretty bad and cites the retention rate for doctoral programs (which mirrors the retention rate for undergraduates, by the way):

As Peter Berkowitz recalls from his time as a graduate student and professor at Harvard and Yale in the 1980s and ’90s: “The departments knew that something like half the students they admitted to their programs wouldn’t get Ph.D.s.” And, says Mr. Berkowitz (who is now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution), “something like half of those wouldn’t get tenure-track jobs.”

The article spends a couple of paragraphs detailing the move to an adjunct labor force and notes the myth of supply and demand, but here’s the part that put a bit of a bad taste in my mouth:

Not surprisingly, these adjunct faculty members are feeling exploited and getting angry. In recent years, their concerns have been taken more seriously by the American Association of University Professors, which now has committees engaged in rigorous hand-wringing over their ordeal. Marc Bousquet, the author of “How the University Works,” sees a couple of key ironies in the academic job market: Getting a Ph.D. now often means the end of an academic career rather than the beginning of one; and the American university, which claims to be an egalitarian institution, relies on people who can only afford to take badly paid adjunct teaching positions because they have another source of income, either from a spouse’s job or a second job of their own.

One response may be: So what? Is there any compelling reason that universities — as self-interested as any institution — should reconsider their employment policies? Why not staff classes with adjunct labor? Why not give customers the same product at a lower cost?

The last question points to a bigger problem, though: Is it the same product? Who knows? Higher education has gone so far off the rails in recent years that parents and students hardly know what they are supposed to have learned in a freshman composition course or in Sociology 101. And as long as there is a degree waiting at the other end, they hardly care.

Is it better for everyone to have FT TT profs that are involved and active participants on campus (that you know, actually have an office) rather than schizophrenic adjuncts cobbling jobs together and driving all over the place to do so?  Of course, but to imply that the blame for dwindling expectations and quality is to be placed on the adjunct labor force strkes me as rather problematic.  However, I do share the same sentiments expressed in the last sentence, I see it all the time.  Radical Compartmentalization, I’m afraid, and really, how far does the BA get those students outside the meritocracy, really?

Adjunct faculty members and their advocates put forth lots of arguments for improving the benefits paid to those off the tenure track. But Marquette University’s theology faculty has come up with an unusual argument that involves a power higher than a college president.

After discussion of a memo questioning how Marquette could stay true to moral and Biblical values while not paying for health insurance for part-time instructors, the theology department voted to call on the administration to start paying for health insurance for those who teach at least two courses at a time at the university. While it is unclear whether the theology department can sway administrators, Marquette is a Jesuit university, so the views of its theologians might carry weight — and at the very least can be embarrassing if ignored.

Given the Catholic Church’s well-known reluctance to participate in immoral activities for its own benefit, I’m sure this argument will easily carry the day.

Berkshire Community College faculty staff made a strong showing at the Teaching, Learning & Student Development Conference at STCC last week. Below are some BCC presenters as they prepared to share their work with community college professionals from across the state:

I joined the debate about how to deal with composition courses on Inside Higher Ed, and it wasn’t a pretty debate.  Here is my posting in regards to getting rid of adjuncts by doing away with an entry level English course:

• Standards don’t matter
• Posted by BrokeHarvardGrad on March 17, 2009 at 9:00am EDT
• If you are so concerned with standards, you might actually look at admission policies or high school standards, because no college or university can make up for poor schools all the way through life. The thing is though, I think the students deserve a chance to try at these courses, and fail if they must. I was with the guy above stating that they should get away from an English writing course, because there are no entry level math or science courses. That has nothing to do with getting rid of adjuncts, as though they were a pestilence. Listen, Buddy, I was an adjunct handling all the stuff the full-time tenured profs had no ability to handle because of class sizes. that is set at the admin level, and there’s no indication that one teacher is better than another without analysis for which universities are unprepared. It’s naive to talk about standards when you only want the gifted in your classes or in your work arenas, whatever. The gifted have their issues too, because there is NO SUCH THING as the perfect student, not to mention the perfect teacher. And hey, Business Dude, don’t even get me started on the trials and tribulations associated with the quality of people in business today. You don’t stand a chance of having any sort of credibility there.

Yahoo’s article on 3 year college degrees sparked a good deal of discussion in our house.

I have long thought that the college degree that takes 4 years, now 5-6 being the norm in our country places us far behind the other industrialized nations worldwide that crank out degrees in 3 years as far as world competition goes.  There seems to be no reason for the 4 year degree, and I can’t even begin to get behind the 5 year degree, it being a bloated reflection of the overimportance of ego among administrators and policymakers.  The sad thing is that for most of those administrators, the 4 year degree was the norm, but I have heard it said over and over that our students “really aren’t prepared.”  I think that’s a crock of shit.

Sure, if we want a socialist educational system that only allows the most successful book study people to go to college while the rest work menial jobs the rest of their lives, we should subscribe to the constant whine of professors and administrators that our students are not “prepared.”  This is seconded only by business leaders and policymakers who continually complain about the next generation being underprepared.

What these people don’t realize is that educating everyone in this country is hard work.  None of them have spent much time in a classroom, and those that have continually wax on about how much students benefit from more classes.  I think this is called stuffing your own ballot.  It’s like the doctors prescribing medicine that they have helped develop (which they do and I am against that as well), but really, it’s not the basis of a logical argument.

Aside from the generational divide element present in all these discussions, one could make the logical argument that more of our nation than ever is educated, with population levels rising, as well as literacy rates.  What we don’t have is system in place that employs people without a college degree, those who don’t want to attend school but are dumped in with the college crowd anyway.  Far more people are seeking degrees now, but still the educators complain that no one is compared.  I would mention here that no one comes wholly prepared for any class, hence the term teach, but it would sound too much like wholesale bitching on my part.

The other comment I hear put out by teachers and administrators alike is that college is part of the experience, and taking extra classes is part of the experience.  I felt 10 years ago, and still feel, that I am well and open to experiences as long as they are not foisted upon me in the form of retractable policies up for change any given semester with the carrot of a monetary-enhancing degree ( supposedly, my moniker is no lie).  It can also be said that students have the pleasure of paying for all these extra classes, and it has been roundly proclaimed throughout the news that college tuition costs are rising.  (See my own post on this.)  College tuition rates have doubled each year, well above the rate of inflation.

So, we have inflated class schedules, less full-time instructors, inflated degrees for inflated costs, and the students have no choice.  Where is the value in that?  Students have started to rebel by insisting that they deserve a B just for showing up.  All the while, instructors who have tenure proclaim it to be the best for education, while adjuncts suffer on wages of roughly $3.50/hour in comparison with $41.66/hour for full-time instructors. The people who have the decision-making power are the ones raking in the cash. It’s staggering the amount of flaws in this system.

What do I propose?  I propose we work toward a 3-year degree. I predict that college tuition will have to come down.  College tuition, like the housing market, was inflated to begin with, as the numbers show.  If we work toward a 3 year degree, maybe the universities can actually accomplish something in 4.

What makes a Beer, the Beer that it is? Well, first of all, it is the Brewer. Every beer should be an expression of the Brewer’s personality. Each Brewer has an individual style and character; the Beer should be a natural extension of that character.

Well, that is where it starts on the spiritual side of brewing, but what about the basic physical side of the equation? Well it starts with the ingredients of course. Two of the most basic of ingredients of any brew are the Malts and the Hops.

With so many different Malts and Hops available for the Brewer to use, I found it hard for me to know where to start. I sat down one day (that lasted for almost a week) an decided that I would make myself a reference to put in my Brewing Book.

The information comes from many different sources; Brewing Wiki’s, manufacture’s web sites, retail web sites, and many other places. As much information is listed as I thought was relevant. The guides are by no means a complete listing but, they should still be helpful, or at least I hope they are.

Hop Guide

Malt and Grain Guide

Tim

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A pair of links about the academy from my Internets today.

* Inside Higher Ed has stats on the adjunctification of English. (Via Meredith.)

* Only 42 percent of all faculty members teaching English in four-year colleges and universities and only 24 percent in two-year colleges hold tenured or tenure-track positions.
* Part-time faculty members now make up 40 percent of the faculty teaching English in four-year institutions and 68 percent in two-year institutions. (Part timers are only a subset of those off the tenure track since, for several years now, an increasing share of the adjunct population works full time at a single institution.)
* Huge gaps exist in salaries between tenured and non-tenure track faculty members teaching English, although full-time adjuncts have seen salary growth in recent years. Per-course payments for part-time instructors have been relatively flat over the last eight years.

* Minding the Campus suggests tenure may be doomed. All it needs is a few more years, baby. (Via Critical Mass.)

In early December, the Board of Regents of the Kentucky Community and Technical College system agreed to vote in a few months on a proposal that may have far-reaching effects on higher education. The proposal would end the practice of offering tenured or tenure-track posts to new faculty hires. Is this a crack in the tenure dam that will produce a cascade of other schools eradicating tenure from the ranks?