A is for Adjunct

This is my first contribution to the ADJUNCT VERSES multimedia project/direct action. Please contact me at Migrant Intellectual if you wish to contribute: ht...

by Jack Longmate: The Pittsburgh “Countering Contingency” conference that took place April 5-7, 2013, may possibly hint at a new direction and encouragement for the contingent faculty movement.

by Lee Skallerup Bessette 

There is a great piece floating around about efforts being made to help current graduate students find “alt-ac” work [and more]....for those looking for career paths off the tenure track (The Alt-Ac Track). Something has been bothering me about these lately, and I have finally been able to put my finger on it.

 

All of these resources seem to focus on graduate students. It’s all about preparing for your career once you’ve finished your PhD with no intention (or little hope) of being successful on the academic job market. When we talk about reforming graduate education to focus more on a broad set of career option, we are (once again) forgetting about the adjuncts who already have PhDs and are stuck in a cycle of precarious employment.

 

Their former institutions don’t care about them. Their current institutions don’t care about them.

Vintage May Day PostersInternational Workers' Day (also known as May Day) is a celebration of the international labour movement and left-wing movements. It commonly sees organized street demonstrations and marches by working people and their labour unions throughout most of the world. May 1 is a national holiday in more than 80 countries. It is also celebrated unofficially in many other countries

image by @Faviana via @culturestrike

Ah, the 2013 Special Salary Issue of The National Education Association’s Higher Education Advocate is out! 

Therein you will find out a lot about what's happening in higher ed, like this, "public colleges and universities are getting shortchanged," and this: "gender gap shows no sign of shrinking." You know, new ideas and new information that will empower you to think in a creative new way about how to manage the challenges of the future. My favorite has to be this:   Contingent faculty members who provide instruction without the benefit of tenure or permanent employment make up a significant portion of the teaching force in postsecondary education.   You know, that just makes sense to me.... 
Fifty Shades of Community College: , I’m busy, so I'll just look at the first college on each state list—that’ll be all community colleges—and we’ll see about that significant portion thing. Hold on a Minute: Dawson Community College?
That's right—83% of the Dawson Community College faculty are genuine tenure track or tenured full-time faculty! There's only 30 of them, sure, but still. Another 10 points maybe, that almost looks like New York University upside down. Dang.

by Cindy Ellen Hill (Vermont, Adjunct Instructor in law, ethics and communication)

 

Ethos. Pathos. Logos.

Those three stalwart musketeers of persuasive argument are also the three foundational pillars of a successful undergraduate liberal-arts course. If you skipped rhetoric (or Latin), Logos represents factual, logic-based information: 1066, covalent bonds, Admiral Nelson, square root of half the perimeter, or whatever may be the core content of that particular class. It’s the stuff that is listed in the table of contents of the textbook.

The Adjunct Model: A Good Thing Gone Wrong

No classroom. No live instructor. No Ethos, no Pathos. Thousands of years of storytelling tradition, rejected. Hundreds of years of a three-element formula for persuasion, discarded....The content will be delivered, like seeds cast out upon the ground of the waiting students. But without the warm sun of Ethos and the drenching rains of Pathos, a successful crop of wisdom and knowledge most assuredly will not grow.

 

from New Hampshire Adjuncts United (blog) Administrators in Claremont and Keene (New Hampshire) have demonstrated a growing hostility toward adjunct equity by way of clandestine Full Time hiring processes, cancelling over-enrolled Liberal Arts courses (without any explanation), perpetual chicken-without-a-head last minute section adds and drops, and zero pay scale improvements across the past five academic years, to say the least. However, in the lead for first place among this pack of problems remains local and state-wide administrative refusal to address the problem of contact hours....when it comes to adjunct contractors, the college does not compensate for the hours worked. 

The American Association of University Professors has contacted President Krise, asking him to withdraw the university's legal objections against PLU's contingent faculty. The American Association ...

Wanted: qualified part-time teachers for Brookhaven, Cedar Valley, Eastfield, El Centro, Mountain View, North Lake and Richland colleges.

 

To teach credit classes for the colleges in the district, adjunct instructors must hold a master's degree which includes 18 hours in that specific teaching discipline. Transcripts from foreign institutions must be evaluated based on U.S. standards before they are submitted.

Persons interested in teaching developmental education courses must have a bachelor's degree in the subject area or a bachelor's degree and “significant course” work in the subject at the undergraduate level. Additionally, they must have high school or college teaching experience in the subject matter; graduate-level courses in pedagogy related to the teaching field may be substituted for teaching experience.

I just signed a petition to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate, and President Barack Obama: Total outstanding student loan debt in America has passed the $1 Trillion mark.

…on all workers around the world, including #adjuncts. Note too stories on adjunct organizing and the state of higher ed. The CHE article on the federal government instructing institutions of higher...

Articel by Henry Giroux:

"At a time when higher education is under siege all over the globe by market mentalities and moralities, there is an urgent necessity on the part of the American public to reclaim the academy in its multiple forms as a site of critique and a public good, one that connects knowledge and power, scholarship and public life, and pedagogy and civic engagement. The current assault on higher education by the apostles of neoliberalism and religious fundamentalists makes clear that it should not be harnessed to cost-benefit analyses or the singular needs of corporations, which often leads to the loss of egalitarian and democratic pressures. Universities should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic minded and critically engaged citizens - citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance. Universities are some of the few places left where a struggle for the commons, for public life, if not democracy itself, can be made visible through the medium of collective voices and social movements energized by the need for a politics and way of life counter to authoritarian capitalism."

[read on]

In Boxes, Outing Stories The beauty of writing for Dissident Voice is that many people contact me with all sorts of stories.... investigative pieces on the people and corporations and governments that have been fleecing our culture, our economy and more importantly our environment and education.

 

Truly, a column on education has to cover the dumb-downing of society, the shifting baseline syndrome, the myopia of consumerism, the media mush that is not just accidently  covering the meaningless, but is with subterfuge and overt glee turning our society into middle of the KFC bucket news consumers.

....

For, now, though, it’s the crash and burn of Apollo, the group holding the University of Phoenix line of triple exploitation – faculty get paid squat and have no rights and are pushed into curriculum they do not agree with (adjuncts, all of them); the corporation is for-profit with the One Percenters raking in $200,000 a year for mushy admin jobs and the curdled mulch at the top of the One Percent raking in millions; and the outfit gives-delivers-pushes out bad education with the benefit of the 90-10 rule: ninety percent of the bucks coming in can be from federal and state grant and loan programs while the rest can be from the private sector.