#adjunct Links & Commentary from #KeithHoeller (weekly)

…Issue #1 blogging materials and words from and on behalf of legendary (but social media averse) adjunct activist, Keith Hoeller. This project is still in Beta, so expect changes. I edited the the auto-blogged bookmarks to tidy up format, added the vintage image of a 1907 classroom, and rearranged the order to lead with the NY Times OpEd, related links and commentary, including a copy of Keith's unpublished letter to the editor, plus a link to the published response letters—all above the fold. And there is still plenty to read after it, maybe too much. Have patience while I work out the kinks. I'm getting my blogging mojo back. With that comes more and better content posted more often. I'll work on the shorter posts thing too. Promise...

Bill Lipkin reports on the AFT HigherEd Conference in Baltimore

The weekend of April 11, 2014 saw one of the best AFT Higher Ed Conferences I have ever been to. The theme was 'Reclaiming the Promise of Higher Education' and there was a strong focus on contingent and adjunct faculty issues and solutions.

President Randi Weingarten opened the Conference with one of her rousing speeches. I had to compliment her after the speech for the concentration she put on contingent and adjunct faculty and our situation in the United States. She even took the time to explain the differences between adjunct and contingent positions and the various problems connected with each.

#Adjunct Professors Unite…on radio

…right about NOW (Mon Oct 1) at 12:00 noon (EST), NewFac prez Maria Maisto,  along with SEIU Local 500 VP Kip Lornel, and Senior Chronicle Writer Schmidt will be guests on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a Washington DC  social issues radio program on NPR affiliate WAMU that follows the Diane Riehm Show. Join them now or visit later. 

A Message from the NJ State AFL-CIO

…via colleagues Robin Brownfield & New Faculty Majority board member Bill Lipkin 

The New Jersey State AFL-CIO Mourns the Passing of Nick Yovnello

It is with deep sadness that we inform you of the tragic loss of Brother Nick Yovnello, who passed away in a car accident Saturday afternoon. Nick served as that President of the Council of New Jersey State College Locals and was a dedicated union leader for over 40 years.

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates, late May

To subscribe to regular Updates, email joeberry@igc.org.  More about Joe Berry.  Updates are also archived at chicagococal.org. Follow COCAL International on Facebook 

Updates in brief and links

Around the Adjunctiverse

'Junct Tour is home again! Catch up with road trip posts on 2255 Films, Chris LaBree's blog, the Homeless Adjunct and 'Junct Tour Event page.

Josh Boldt has a post about media aggregation on the Adjunct Project plus new Forum and Job Board 

Carol Leitner, former Westchester CC adjunct sues, says she was fired for expressing opinions (which included support for Arizona's controversial 2010 immigration law, and student complaints.)

Rowan AFT adjunct union endorses no-merger with Rutgers-Camden resolution

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates, Mid-May

Check & click new Petitions Feature. Are you shopping an adjunct or higher ed petition? Email link to vanessa.vaile@newfacultymajority.info to add to add here. 

To subscribe to regular Updates, email joeberry@igc.org.  More about Joe Berry.  Updates are also archived at chicagococal.org. Follow COCAL International on Facebook 

Updates in brief and links

Petitions

• Ana’s Adjunct Pay Petition
• Petition OR State U admin to recognize graduate employees' bargaining unit 
• Support forgiveness of student loans
• Tell Vice President Biden: Don't Blame Faculty for the High Cost of College; Most Are "Working Poor!"

Around the Adjunctiverse

Susan Schacher, of Peralta CCD, Laney College, Oakland, CA gets major award.

In her 24th year as a part time temporary instructor and contingent activist at Laney College, Susan is the recipient of the Margaret Quan Part Time Advocate of the Year award presented by the FACCC, the Faculty Association of the California Community Colleges.  

• Watch for the Adjunct Tour interview: Duquesne adjuncts to request voluntary union recognition with USW and university declines to recognize union
• More from Debra Leigh Scott, finishing Day 2 on the road with the Adjunct Tour, blogging about disrespected adjuncts as being like stupid sluts at 'Junct Rebellion.
• Why adjuncts unionize, Kalamazoo College MI and their blog Raritan Valley CC (NJ) adjuncts eye raises 
• Utah Valley U adjuncts protest new requirement to reapply for their jobs each semester, more here
• A Gannett story on adjunct faculty use at ULM
• Collection of back posts on Chronicle adjunct / community college blog, The 2-year Track
• A somewhat limited but unnerving, ominous article on contracted academic "coaches" and the company supplying them
• Washington State union adjunct gives unemployment benefits advice.Another (Business Insider) PhD adjunct [from UC Berkeley] on food stamps and yet another (newser, a conservative content mill) recycle the original Chronicle article. Finally, NPR (where it has been replicated on NPR sites across the country) 

HigherEd, Mundo Bizarro

• AFL-CIO blog on Rutgers study on recent grad debt and unemployment, also see comments
• Yet more on consequences of student debt [in depth story, no mention of us contingents]
• A passes new regulations governing for-profits
• Federal consumer board investigating for-profit Corinthian
• CUNY (NY) activists fight for greater access, lower tuition and fees,  and roughed up by cops, in Alternet. Ed (not Joe) note: Alternet runs excellent articles on higher education and labor issues: following highly recommended. Consider spending comment time there to get heard outside the Ivory Silo™ of highered media.
• Severe police attacks on Quebec student strike demonstrators, another account, an adjunct union's evaluation of the "deal" and a good summary update article on the whole Quebec anti-tuition struggle 

Taking Action

• Midwest School for Women Workers: Workers’ Rights, Women’s Rights, Human Rights, July 25-29, 2012, The University of Iowa Labor Center, Iowa City. Visit the Midwest School web page or contact the University of Iowa Labor Center at 319-335-4144 or labor-center@uiowa.edu with any questions. 
• There is another one, also in June, on the West Coast, in SF Bay Area (Sonoma) this year, also July. Check UALE page for details on both. [both are great events, highly recommended]
• NYC cabbies, another group of contingent/precarious workers organizing

Visit COCAL International for information on the  Tenth (X) Conference on Contingent Academic Labor in Mexico City, August 10-12, 2012 at Universidad Nacional Autónimo de México (UNAM), Mexico City. Join International COCAL listserv online or email adj-l@adj-l.org with send "Subscribe" in the subject line. If you have problems subscribing, e-mail vtirelli@aol.com

Adjuncts Strike Back

No empire just adjuncts, but there are a lot of us. This particular iteration of adjunct discontent may seem old news, displaced by another. Yes, perhaps so, but not the underlying conditions. Watch for Return of the Adjuncts ... perhaps coming soon to a campus near you.

Reactions to The Bidens’ tax returns stir adjunct discussion. The discontent ~ psychic pain might be more accurate ~ expressed here is more complex than it might appear at first.  It operates on multiple levels, not diffuse but directed at more than one specific target. 

Teach-in & Workshop, Green River CC, WA

Tomorrow, April 20. It's not national and on too short notice for outside the area. That's not the point. Instead of yearning for major conferences we cannot afford to attend, information silos for preaching to the choir and any silverbacks there by accident, why not begin at home? Hold more local workshops and teach-ins to educate the public and build contingent faculty networks. Share workshop ideas, fliers, plans, materials. Here's one tomorrow that you probably can't make but can take ideas from. Planning your own? Send us the information to post and share.

WHAT: Teach-in and Workshops – Adjunct Faculty In a System of Apartheid. 

WHY:  More than 75 percent of all college faculty members are adjunct/ temporary/at-will. Students and parents are unaware of the sweatshop conditions of their professors.

WHEN: April 20, 2012 – 1-2 p.m. & 2:30-3:30

On the precariat

Among candidates in the "Naming Games" (a periodic event among adjunct/ NTT/ contingent faculty), precariat and variants on it keep come up more as the tanks of globalization roll through our cavalry lines. Back in 2002 when I was doing the Valencia AAUP Chapter newsletter and webpage, I fancied "precarious faculty" for its "call a spade a spade" directness. At that time, Canadian NTT faculty were called that as often as sessional. Every one working without a safety net.

Since then, the global precariat has grown, extended increasingly to "knowledge workers" of all stripes, and become a more widely identifiable term. It's back in the running. In the UK and NL, the Precarious Workers Brigade brings together artists, designers, writers, teachers, "insecure" university lecturers, freelance web workers ~ knowledge workers in education and culture.

Whether or not a variant or some other terms catches on among us remains to be seen. Self naming of a large, diverse group is ultimate crowdsourcing. By definition, no individual, group, organization or even consortium of organizations controls the process. Making it stick later with the Department of Labor is yet another matter.

In the meantime, I'm exploring the precariat here and around the world, primarily but not exclusively, knowledge workers (go Gramsci!) to aggregate and curate sources. I added sites and alerts to the feed reader to bundle and widgetize, started a Storify series (first entry below) and am also developing a "Welcome to the Precariat" newspaper in Paper.li.

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates 27March12

 in brief, with links

A great quote  "Capitalism teaches the people the moral conceptions of cannibalism are the strong devouring the weak; its theory of the world of men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough where the biggest swine gets the most swill." - James Connolly 1910.

Mundo Precario

Another, this time international, conversation of what to call ourselves. [I personally have come to favor "precarious" even over "contingent"]. Hyperlink Academia blog

Yet another article about overpaid and underworked professors (WaPo) that ignores the contingent majority [written by a former college president who assuredly knows better, since his old institution, New School U, spent big bucks fighting an adjunct unionization campaign] and discussion of his article on IHE

• CHE on bad court decision regarding U of IL Chicago petition for joint (TT/NTT) bargaining unit and open letter from union to administration offering to accept two separate units in same local union.
• Accreditation as a means to aid adjuncts by considering staffing ratios and working conditions as factors in accreditation. CHE

How Well ARE Students doing after they graduate? Oregon: Call Home

February 9, 2012, Senator Ron Wyden D-OR introduced S-2098, titled the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act." (watch unveiling on YouTube)


I just got off the phone with the Senator's office, where his helpful staff assured me that my well-reasoned demands—that this bill include "transparency" in regard to the phantom work-force that now runs higher ed—would be heard. 

CC President is Hardly a Tireless Advocate for Faculty

My title here is in regard to a recent article in a local on-line paper about Dr. Joseph Hankins, President of Westchester Community College, one of my workplaces.  Dr. Hankin is a very nice man, with a terrific sense of humor—let's see how all that works out—who is now being celebrated for his 40-year tenure as chief exec at WCC.  

My strong view is that, whatever his other virtues, he cannot count among them that he's been a tireless advocate for faculty, least of all the adjunct faculty who do most of the teaching at WCC. Indeed, Dr. Hankin has presided, in his decades of leadership at WCC, over a continuous decline in the professional status of the faculty—the core of any college or university. When he arrived, there were roughly as many full-time as part-time faculty teaching at WCC. At this time there are perhaps 15% of the total faculty who enjoy full-time employment status and the professional courtesies and benefits that go along with that fast-disappearing status.

None of this, of course, is any surprise to NFM members and friends: I invite any and all who have suffered from the continuing degradation of the faculty, and especially the exploitation of adjunct/contingent labor, to share in this space or elsewhere their stories. Dr. Hankin is surely not the only community college—or university—president who is being celebrated for his many achievements even while the status of the key contributors—faculty—continues to be undermined.

Some attention to such matters is particularly appropriate as Campus Equity Week (October 24-30) approaches.

Cheers,  Dr. Al (Trevithick)

Westchester Community College, LaGuardia Community College, and Fordham University; New Faculty Majority, and blogger at http://cringingliberalelite.blogspot.com/.

Precarious, Precarisation, Precariat?

That's us. Precariously employed, objects of precarization, members of the academic precariat. I had a rather different post mentally laid out ~ a survey of affordable, non-institutionalized (e.g. involving neither conferences, unions nor other organizational affiliations) actions / acts of resistance available to the weary, disheartened adcon approaching semester's end, unsure and even less optimistic of what the next semester might bring. I'll still write it, but this caught my eye while searching keywords related to our condition.

Caveat: the article excerpted below does not specifically address academic labor. Yet it is relevant to the precarious working conditions of adjunct and contingent faculty.

I. Precarious literally means unsure, uncertain, difficult, delicate. As a political term it refers to living and working conditions without any guarantees: for example the precarious residential status of migrants and refugees, or the precariousness of everyday life for single mothers. Since the early 1980s the term has been used more and more in relation to labour. Precarious work refers to all possible forms of insecure, non-guaranteed, flexible exploitation: from illegalised, seasonal and temporary employment to homework, flex- and temp-work, to subcontractors, freelancers, or so called self-employed persons.

II. Precarisation at work means a growing transformation from guaranteed, permanent employment to less well paid and more insecure jobs. On a historical and global scale, however, precarious work is not exceptional. In fact the idea of a generalisation of so-called guaranteed working conditions was itself a short lived myth of the ‘welfare state’ era. In the global South, in eastern Europe, as well as for most women and migrants in the north – altogether the great majority of the global population –, precarious working conditions were and are the norm. Precarisation describes moreover the crisis of established institutions, which represented for that short period the framework of (false) certainties. It is an analytical term for a process and hints at a new quality of societal labour. Labour and social life, production and reproduction cannot be separated anymore, and this leads to a more comprehensive definition of precarisation: the uncertainty of all circumstances in the material and immaterial conditions of life of living labour under contemporary capitalism. For example: wage level and working conditions are connected with a distribution of tasks, which is determined by gender and ethnic roles; residence status determines access to the labour market or to medical care. The whole ensemble of social relations seems to be on the move.

via metamute.org

in section III. Precarisation, the article moves beyond usual discussion of part-time/ temp labor to frame precarisation as a "complex and contested process" with the potential to transform traditional understanding and postion of labor ... but also with the potential to become farce and ideological football. Section IV connects precarious and migrant labor.

Posted via email from Academentia

KUDOS: Scott Jaschik, EWA Award, Education Reporting

IHE editor and co-founder Scott Jaschik is among Education Writers of America's 2008 National Awards Contest Winners (in Education Reporting) for his series on adjuncts in academia, which earned a first place for beat reporting in the small media

Scott Jaschik won this award for a set of 2008 articles in Inside Higher Education (IHE) on the rising use of adjunct professors. His articles focus on issus such issues as how colleges treat their workers, the impact on students of being taught by professors without tenure, and the effectiveness of unions and other groups that say they protect faculty interests. Links to the articles can be found here.

His winning entry included the following articles:

• "New Form of Adjunct Abuse”
• “Bias Against Older Candidates”
• “Tenure as a Tarnished Brass Ring”
• “Evaluating the Adjunct Impact”
• “Revolt in the Adjunct Ranks”
• “Exception to the Rule”

If you have not read them, now would be a good time. If you already have, there's always rereading...

Image credit ©Wilson Center 2011. Post edited July 18, 2014 to add labels and replace image gone AWOL.