speaking of names and other changes

Yesterday I renamed both this blog and  its companion Facebook page Precarious life and times. Not to worry though -- visitor won't end up in strange places like some did with the domain shift. This change does not affect either url. The Facebook iteration has already been moving away from primarily adjunct issues toward a broader focus on the workplace, economic and social changes accompanying the spread of precarity. Until very recently, this one hasn't been moving at all.

Seiltänzer (Tightrope Walker) Paul Klee (cropped)

What will change? Content. Adjuncts, casuals and other insecure academic labor will still have a prominent place. There more widgets, posts and collections on related topics, and a "What we can do" category coping and resisting.

What is precarity and who's precarious? The category includes more than academic precariat. Is insecure employment the primary or even sole marker of precarious populations? Is it the only benchmark? The connection with the economy and economic inequality is obvious. Disposable and marginalized groups are particularly vulnerable. Their initial precariousness, whatever the cause -- disability, age, race, gender, social and legal status, etc., inevitably pushes them further down in the workforce and decreases mobility options, often drastically.

Could all precarious people together already be the majority? That would bring us full naming circle to the ❝new precarious majority❞...

On naming ourselves…Transitional Faculty

…or "transitional scholar" (or pedagogue, teacher, etc), who is sometimes also a "Transitional Traveler" or homeless as in the OpEd News article cited below. 

Source: www.opednews.com

"Transitional Traveler" This article is about changing the perception through euphemism. We have changed the wording of "Genocide" to "Ethnic Cleansing." We have changed the wording of "Shell Shock" to "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." And, as much as I do not like this practice, I believe it can and does work on some level. So I wish to try it with "homeless," and change that to "Transitional Traveler." There, I wrote it.

More...by way of illustration, change "travelers" to "faculty" (or term of your choice)

Now to managing all these Transitional Travelers [Faculty]: we need to stop the scapegoating; we need to stop the blaming.  Even if it is someone's own fault (which can be debated about what 'fault' means) about how they got on these streets [permanent NTT], who cares?  All the Moral Indignation in the world is not going to help fix or manage them.  It's not going to do anything other than keep Us out here.  Calling Us names will not help.  So if you are going to behave this way, we do not need your help.  And if you're not going to help, get the hell out of the way.  A lot like an American Bureaucrat, you're obstructing.  Also try and remember that lots of these people have been ... abused at as well.  So blaming them is not only punitive but it's, again, immoral. 

We need to have Our basic needs met.  And we are getting some of that, as good church folks are helping out with their time and food.  But as far as the State is concerned, we're on Our own.  As far as the cities [colleges and universities] are concerned, we are on Our own.  As far as housing [next semester's teaching assignment] is concerned... we are on Our own. 

Thanks + HT to James Armstrong II and his OpEdNews - Article: "Transitional Traveler" for the idea...Besides being reminded of just how precarious any we all truly are, another takeaway here needs to mindfulness of the very real problem of our colleagues who are homeless adjuncts or on the brink. Stop looking away. Paul Haeder has sent some excellent ideas, do-able albeit perhaps not likely solutions, to blog separately.

What's in a name?

Following a recent "what to call ourselves" conversation (yes, it's that season again but this time with a global turn) on Twitter, Australian sessional (one of us by any other name) blogging as "Sessional Academic" at Hyperlink Academia decided to explore the matter further and asks "What's in a name?" 

http://hyperlinkacademia.blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-in-name.html 

SA writes,  "I think the challenge here is to seek a better term for casual teaching and research staff - what is a title that sets us up for a greater, more secure position at our universities?  Something more specific, with agency and meaning about the contributions we make to higher education" and invites your suggestions

Also, take a look at @UniCasual's (University Casual or adjunct) Casual Voices, analogous to the Adjunct Project, http://www.unicasual.org.au/casual_voices 

Names 101: By Any Other Name

Guest post by New Faculty Majority's Anne Wiegard, previously published in Cortland Cause, SUNY Cortland's UUP chapter's April 2011 newsletter. Every year, Cause wins awards in a competition of all the SUNY chapter newsletters.



Students unhesitatingly call us “Professor,” for that is who we are to them. They do not know that almost everyone else we work with is either confused or in conflict about the proper designation for faculty teaching off the tenure track.

Sadly, though contingent academic employees are faculty, they know that communications addressed generally to “Faculty,” are often not actually intended for them, in the same way that women in the 1950s knew that memos addressed generally to employees were usually understood to pertain only to males.  Men were the norm, so a memo only applied to women if specifically qualified, as in “Female Employees” or perhaps given a separate category altogether, as in “The Secretarial Pool.”

Names 101, the catalog description + addenda

Behind and between, as usual. I'll start with a few words about the title. Names 101 is a series or regular feature (depending on its endurance level and mine). Since the series actually started with the guest post, "Administrative Term Adjunct is a Falsehood" by Tom Paine #2, the introduction is something of an afterthought. I also have a guest post by New Faculty Secretary Board Member and Secretary Anne Wiegard (English, SUNY Cortland) in drafts but ready to roll, plus a few more "promised." A series introduction is overdue. With it comes an invitation to comment or contribute a guest post (email to vanessa.vaile@newfacultymajority.info)

Any faculty member, even among the Tenured and Tracked clans, and, one would hope, most other staff and administrators are no doubt aware that what to call NTT faculty (researchers and librarians included) can be a thorny topic calling forth strong reactions. Some find the adjunct designation "highly offensive." Others don't mind as long as you don't call them adjuncts (hinting at hidden tier lines within the NTT tier). Still others could care less and consider the fuss a bit much. As one commented, "like pilots arguing in the cockpit while the airplane is crashing." There is also a contingent, if one can use the term, who feel that calling themselves Adjunct is an act of defiance. If that weren't enough, unions, professional associations, administrators, Department of Labor, faculty handbook job descriptions, keywords and standard online search terms can't agree either. Maybe we need a whole new, baggage free name

Both the Contingent Academics List and the New Faculty Majority  ~ full name ~ Coalition of Adjunct and Contingent Faculty try to cover both bases, give a nod to each. Periodically, the subject will come up on list, although it hasn't for a while. Let's take the initiative: describe, explain and name ourselves.

Names 101: The Precarious Brigade

I'm not sure how or even whether the UK Precarious Workers Brigade fits into 'naming' series (or whatever I end up calling it and about which I have yet to post an already belated introduction). For now, I say yes. Consider the definition, precarious workers in culture & education, and decide for yourself. Including creative workers (how Gramsci) expands scope and should remind us that college instructors in creative disciplines are predominantly adjunct/contingent faculty. Further, the precariat identifies with other labor areas defined below

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class … "Unlike the proletariat – the industrial working class on which 20th century social democracy was built – the precariat's relations of production are defined by partial involvement in labour combined with extensive 'work-for-labour', a growing array of unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings." Guy Standing

I came across the page just today, serendipity via a link post at Defend Education Ohio, just one of many in the Defend Public Education network. All are now in my feed reader: expect to see more of them,

Selections from Related Clippings (note inclusion of How the University Works)

Names 101: Administrative Term; Adjunct. is a Falsehood

Editor's note (forewords, like afterwords, being traditional and jealously guarded prerogatives): hopefully the perennial but yet to be resolved topic of what to call ourselves and why will draw contributors and commenters out of silent seclusion for lively but respectful dialog and productive discussion. Over the transom contributions in the name of your choice (subject to personal editorial standards) are welcomed and cherished. Confidentiality and troll free zone guaranteed. 

The yet to be named (appreciate the irony?) series opens with a piece from Thomas Paine 2nd.  Naming suggestions invited for this series, the first of many Discussions for Change to follow. A more detailed preliminary post and true foreword will follow in due course. 

Here's to more common sense in the profession. (Aside to TP2 wannabes: don't nick this nic. It's taken).

The Administrative Term, "Adjunct," is a Falsehood 

The dictionary stresses that "adjunct" is an auxiliary role. Yet here I am staring down at a contract with the term "adjunct" next to my name and realizing that I will be as central in my classroom, and as much an authority over my curriculum, as I was as an associate professor. Since 9/11 I have had a gradual, rude awakening that the field I had embarked upon as a chipper graduate student at MIT was dissolving into a "managed education" nightmare where the noble role of a professor, and the profundities of the world presented by such, was being undercut at every turn by a generation of under-educated managers. A majority of these people have no roots in teaching, research or the arts. They just don't "see" what they are destroying.

A shallow business culture has replaced the passions and commitment once embodied by men and women of letters, and this ethic is beginning to permeate the rest of society. Money is earmarked for plush office furniture, dining hall remodeling and administrator salaries. This money is taken wholesale from faculty and staff salaries. Students and their parents are prevented from seeing the shift in priorities, the intellectual pogrom as it were, because the expensive marketers hired by these same administrations insist on calling all teachers "members of the faculty."

Yet we "adjuncts" are under pressure from every quarter to do the same job of a properly paid professor. Students, parents, evaluation rituals, and an endless stream of administration memos ask us to rise to the occasion and do our part to fill in the gap left over by the insincere budgeting. And this compensation begins right at the starting gate. I recall how the department chair who hired me waved my résumé in the air and excitedly showed it to a colleague. He had no hesitation in praising my professional value. I was lead to believe that the administration hired me because they needed an authority on my subject and no one else at that college could handle the material. They boasted that I would receive the "highest pay" for an adjunct, yet this was less than half that of professors who were younger, less experienced and with fewer children to feed. It's a total disgrace.

How can any of this be happening? Who am I actually adjunct to? To whom or what am I a supplement?