A call for public #adjunct discussion of #COCAL_Updates + Sunday Matinee

…because reactions to "adios Updates" post are not landing in comments on blog post or social media. Although about making resources public and open, comments and discussion have not been. Likewise, the original notice ("...in addition to Joe Berry’s regular COCAL updates"), posted publicly went without comment.

On Facebook, discussion appears to be 100% backchannel via pm and closed group -- or groups. Elsewhere, I have no idea, but transparency and open discussion would be more productive. So I'm working on an "Updates Update" Precarity Dispatches post to clarify and (I hope) encourage open discussion, even volunteers for a collaborative Updates Archive Project

blog updates—new pages & other confusion mitigation

…#PFR, short for Precarious Faculty Rising, is taking shape as a network. Yesterday, I changed the look and name (again) ►. Today, I added About, PFR Network, Canada and Global pages, and consolidated NFM to a single tab by adding, not just the main website link, but also the whole kit and kaboodle—Facebook, Twitter, Foundation, LinkedIn, G+ Community—to the newsletter archives on this site.

Happy Birthday, NFM!

…From: Peter D.G. Brown, 

Who says that TT faculty can't be important allies in the struggle for equity?

Four years ago today, I put out a call on this e-mail list (see copy below), convening activists around the country to forge a new national organization. It soon adopted the name New Faculty Majority and quickly became an important voice for contingent faculty around the country

Congratulations to all who have worked so hard to build what is the only national organization to advocate exclusively for contingent equity! A special word of deep appreciation and admiration goes out to Maria Maisto, who has served in leadership position since our earliest beginnings in 2009.

Best wishes to all as NFM enters its fifth year ~Peter

Ed note: What about a Peter D.G. Brown Award for tenured faculty? His support went well beyond just nudging. A willingness to cross boundaries or herd cats in a good cause should always be recognized. Nominations, anyone?

Atlanta Area Meet & Greet, Jan 25

…for contingent faculty, NFM friends, members & anyone interested in meeting us to learn more). In the neighborhood? Please drop by for a visit this coming Friday, January 25 1:30 - 5:30 pm at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 265 Peachtree Street NE, Atlanta, Georgia 30303, in the Spring Room (lower level)

New Faculty Majority and the NFM Foundation invite friends and member to attend all or part of a meeting designed to update participants on our activities, introduce NFM to those who are not familiar with its work, and engage in conversation about issues related to the relationship of "adjunct" or "contingent" faculty working conditions and student learning conditions.

Discussion topics will include

What is equity for adjuncts? Will it ever become a reality?

New Faculty Majority Treasurer & (founding) board member William Lipkin asks, explaining, 

I am currently 'celebrating' my 50th years of adjuncting. Why would I subject myself to such exploitation for such a long period of time? Well for the first 35 years I had a 'real' job in the private sector, not teaching, which allowed me to raise 2 sons and give me and my wife a good lifestyle. During that period I taught a couple of courses a semester at night or on Saturday and had very little interest in pay, benefits, support, governance, etc.?

Once I realized my real passion was in teaching I left my other job and became a professional adjunct, or as we call ourselves in New Jersey - 'Roads Scholars' - traveling the state between schools in order to earn a living.

Then came the wake up call!

Monday rambles: NFM pit crew & other notes, COCAL. protests

As you may have noticed, board member and blogger (here and on Cringing Liberal Elite) Alan Trevithick has joined our NFM Facebook pit crew. Now to find the perfect NASCAR gear for him. Matt and Maria are on too but may not be as active. No gear for them.

Tomorrow is a NFM board meeting / conference call 11am EDT. If  anyone has last minute questions, email or post them as comments. Mostly, it's a catch up meeting, reports, structural/admin items. Tomorrow there will board news to announce. Now there is Foundation news: 501(3c) status approved. Member Forums will launch soon on the main site. We are also working on a membership drive. Since it's still in the formative stage, we'll asked for your opinions, ideas and reactions. Then expect to be reading a lot about that here and on our social media network. You may even come to think of the drive as needing a leash law. Why a membership drive? Easy. The stronger our membership base the more we can accomplish.

#NFM a strong voice for #ContingentFaculty @ 3rd #CFHE Gathering

Despite possible impressions to the contrary, the New Faculty Majority was well represented, highly visible and a strong voice to make adjunct and contingent issues a priority at the Third National Gathering (left) of the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education (CFHE), hosted by the Michigan Conference AAUP in Ypsilanti, Michigan May 18-20. 

Gary Rhoades including New Faculty Majority Foundation board membership in his Saturday morning introduction signaled our presence, further highlighted by a highly visible NFM presence that included active participation and presentations: President Maria Maisto, VP Matt Williams (right), Treasurer Bill Lipkin, Board Member Alan Trevithick, Esther S. Merves, the Foundation’s Director of Research and Special Programs, and member Daniel Maxey. Additionally, members of NFM’s Board of Advisors, Elizabeth Hoffman,  Associate Vice President,  Lecturers, California Faculty Association, and Richard Moser, of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, were also heard in support of a strong and continuing focus on contingency.  

Guest Post: Alan Trevithick responds to faculty trends

A shortened and tamer version of this appears, retitled, in this month’s Anthropology News (AN), which is a monthly publication of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Although the NFM web address, the article still gets NFM in front of the AAA, an important academic professional organization representing anthropology, a major discipline.

Canary, Eagle, Phoenix: How to Respond to Faculty’s Fall

A mournful trend: the steady replacement of full-time tenure or tenure track faculty - call them  “traditionals" - with part-time and/or limited contract instructors, “adjuncts” or “contingents.” Call them adcons.  First most evident at community colleges, this trend is now everywhere. For instance, see Nichols and Nichols' Money over Mind, Inside Higher Education, about Vassar College. 

All disciplines are blighted, as Marshall Sahlins noted in a 2008 AN issue, that in the country at large, “70 percent of all faculty are adjuncts,” and this “academic demi-monde” has been “noticeable enough” more recently even at University of Chicago.

First the canaries die. Then the eagles start keeling over.  

Confessions hits the beltway

Beltway Blips covers the Twitterverse reception of "Confessions of a Tenured Professor"  by NFM Board member Peter DG Brown. Coverage (including my tweet on those same tweets) is ongoing, updated as new tweets appear ... Visit, vote, share, link.... let's keep this going viral and in the mainstream social media, not just buried in the academic press. If I'd blogged the article as planned and expected when it came out, we'd have missed this. As good as the article is, and good it is, the reaction, commentary, comments, blog posts, tweets, shared links, and so on complete the story... Please join the conversation by adding your comments.


insidehighered.com - 4 days ago

InsideHighered: Confessions of a Tenured Professor 

—

I must confess right off that I did not become a contingent labor activist until I turned 60, a mere six years ago. Until then, I was a fairly typical senior professor, passionately involved in teaching my students and interacting with my tenured colleagues on a variety of faculty governance 

REACTIONS (four pages so far)


Just  few among many blog reactions, these collated by Beltway Blips

Bad Feminist Bitch. Ph.D. — Thank god for this must-read piece in IHE today. I very seldom keep up with academic news any more, but an old Internet friend posted the link on FB. It happens that she herself is also an unemployed adjunct, but I probably only clicked it because in my head she's filed under the category "mommy" rather than "academic"--I met her online via a mommy forum--and "mommy" is where most of my identity lies these days. ...

Why Does Academia Treat its Workforce So Badly? Megan McArdle :: The Atlantic — A piece on adjuncts in Inside Higher Ed has been attracting a lot of attention among academics of my acquaintance.  Its description of academic life is shcokingly brutal--shocking even to me, who knows enough PhDs to be acquainted with the dismal facts: ... 

[my note: the Atlantic piece includes copious comments, some must read and others more likely to infuriate. Review them and add your own]

Academic Labor Market Exploitation Outside The Beltway | OTB — ... This might seem a ridiculous question, given that most people think professors are overpaid, underworked prima donnas who can never be fired.  But she cites Peter D.G. Brown’s recent Inside Higher Ed piece explaining that, if it was ever the case, it’s not longer true: ...

News(letter Issue 1) from New Faculty Majority

If you aren't a New Faculty Majority member or haven't received your copy yet, the 1st issue of the NFM newsletter is available online. Future issues are scheduled for monthly publication, articles already being assembled for issue #2. Please forward and share the newsletter widely. 

We're targeting early May (I'd like to say May Day! but don't want to jinx it) to roll out (softly) our Unemployment Insurance Initiative ("take the initiative" ~ "file for your rights"). 

Obviously, Unemployment benefits for adjunct faculty and contingent academic labor will be a major focus in May issue ~ but not the only one. Other May newsletter topics include (but are not limited to) articles on how to form chapters and steps in planning a health care initiative for NFM members. 

You're invited - indeed strongly encouraged - to recommend topics, ideas for future features and to inquire about submitting articles for future issues. 

follow us @NewFacMajority &  on Facebook

First Year Highlights

One from Column A (see previous post) ... Board member Peter Brown's recap of NFM's first year. We get frustrated because there is so much to address. Sometime it feels as though we are dancing as fast as we can just to stay in place. Seeing the year neatly laid out for examination is reassuring. Still no rest though: we intend to keep on dancing.  


The following has been condensed from "Highlights of NFM's first year." The complete version will appear, along with other articles, in the first issue of the NFM Newsletter.

The Idea

In 1996, the Coalition for Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) was formed in Washington, DC….began organizing conferences every other year at different sites and also established an adjunct listserv. By 2008, some activists felt strongly that the time had come for even more than just these two initiatives.

We envisioned a national organization that could advocate on a continuous basis for the more than one million contingent instructors who now constitute the majority of teachers in American higher education. Early in January 2009, I met with Joe Berry in Chicago to discuss a national organization. A pioneer in organizing adjuncts, Joe is a leader in the movement for adjunct and contingent equity and, as a non-tenured activist, more appropriate to initiate action. When he declined to convene 

a preliminary organizing committee

, the next step was to take the discussion national.

Invitation, first steps

On February 2, 2009, I sent an invitation to the adj-l list to form an organizing committee. The message included:

This new coalition is not designed to supplant or be in competition with unions or any other currently existing organization. I would like to see a fully independent national organization advocating exclusively for contingent faculty equity 52 weeks of the year. It should be led by adjunct and contingent faculty working together with tenured professors, both inside and outside union structures to foster a national grass-roots movement of contingent academic labor across the country.

Within minutes, the first enthusiastic responses poured in, forming an organizing committee of about a dozen activists, who formed an online group and held their first “meeting” via a telephone conference call three weeks later.

Taking a Name

At this initial meeting, the principle of majority rule was adopted as the group decision-making procedure. Deborah Louis and Maria Maisto were unanimously elected to co-chair the NCAE coordinating committee, and I gladly relinquished my role of convener.

Initial efforts focused on drafting a mission statement and by-laws and developing procedures for communication and fundraising. A press release followed the next day.

Since last February, most of the original organizing committee has stayed on in some capacity. New members have joined. We soon learned that building a national organization is more challenging than talking about forming one. The organizing committee formally adopted our official name in March 2009: New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity.

Structures

Matt reports on the Staffing Summit

from NFM VP Matt Williams: Maria and I had a great day yesterday as we attended the AAUP Summit on Higher Education Staffing for Ohio held in Columbus.  The meeting was attended by about 50 state and local AAUP, AFT, NFT, NEA, OEA, and OFT representatives along with Maria and myself from NFM and several graduate students from Ohio State University. The meeting took a very favorable change in course toward our issues, specifically Ohio Senate Bill 129 that seeks to overturn Ohio law with respect to the exclusion of graduate assistant and part-time faculty labor from collective bargaining in the state.  We received a very supportive hearing, and Maria did a great job getting her message across.  The meeting concluded with a consensus that Senate Bill 129 should be the top legislative priority for the three unions during the coming months.  There was a sense of collective agreement on the need to reverse this arcane provision of Ohio law. The meeting was also attended by two members of the state legislature as well as by a staffer representing a third. The staffer left the meeting very enthused about the issue and intent on informing his colleagues in other offices throughout the State House.  Maria and I, in consultation with AFT's lobbyist, have determined that she and I should spend time visiting every member of the legislature in our effort to seek their support for the legislation.  SB 129 is not a slam dunk, to be sure, but looks promising in as much as the issue is beginning to receive coverage in the press.  Regards, Matt Williams, VP, New Faculty Majority Note: spread the word... join NFM and AFT in working toward passage of Ohio HB129. Write, fax or email an Ohio legislator. Sign the petition (coming soon). Wondering how to find a legislator and then how to write a legislator?  Follow New Faculty Majority on Twitter too ~ @NewFacMajority