Disposable Teachers

 = adjuncts and other precarious academic knowledge workers, also Dissident Voice article, "Cutting to the Bone on College Campuses through Reducing, Reusing, Repurposing" by Paul Haeder / April 28th, 2012

It’s the equal pay for equal work thing, stupid. Union strong and proud. (Bumper sticker on 1972 VW Rabbit, Vancouver, Canada).

Sure, that might be the mantra for the "new faculty majority"  [increasingly organizing into faculty unions. Actually New Faculty Majority's is "Faculty working conditions are student learning  conditions" but close enough], but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/ contingent/ temporary/migratory/ irregular/ at-will/ auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.

Haeder continues...

My fellow colleague, philosophy adjunct Keith Hoeller, lives a typical story of teaching 20 years at 10 colleges to cobble together a living. “The use of adjunct faculty is higher education’s way of outsourcing,” he recently said. 

For this Puget Sound region, all 3.3 million of us, the April 20 teach-in – “The Solution to Faculty Apartheid” was somewhat historic.

Jack Longmate's detailed notes on the April 20, 2012 Teach In: "The Solution to Faculty Apartheid," comments and sharing enabled, accompanying power point slide show on overloads will also be posted separately

Haeder describes the adjunct workforce...

[T]he disposable and interchangeable workforce ... now affects more than 100 million workers. This transitory nature of our lives makes for “fragmented everything”: no community roots, loss of extended family connectivity, lack of depth of knowing the political landscape of a community, and a sense of Diaspora for many workers who go from warehouse to school to low-paid job just to barely survive. 

It seems the writing on the wall, written by administrators and politicians in the 1970s, has passed by the tenured faculty. Or they just ignored it.Contingent faculty have been living the reality of the script – a world of more and more part-time jobs to put together poverty or near-poverty wages. 

Some tenured faculty, such as Jonathon Rees at More or Less Bunk, do see the writing on the wall and recognize that tenure ≠ immunity. He reminds colleagues that "If we don’t hang together, we’ll all hang separately" and asks, "What can tenure track faculty do about the problem?" Ultimately,

This is the time to fight “fragmentation of the time and place of work”

 Continue reading the rest of the article at Disposable Teachers | Dissident Voice, including details about the April 20 the Green River CC Workshop / Teach_In, more about the author, and comments on the general state of highered disposables. Add More or Less Bunk to your feed reader too.