Wanted: Adjunct Mentoring Program

Does anyone out there have a working adjunct mentoring program in place in their College? We have been trying to get one in my Community College but have met with resistance by our Vice President for Academic Affairs (VPAA).  When I first mentioned this to the VPAA last semester she responded by saying that it might be a good idea for full time faculty to mentor new adjuncts!!! 

NO!!! 

That shows how little the administration understands us. I told her that our proposal was for seasoned adjuncts to mentor new adjuncts. After all who knows better? After hearing many stories from new adjuncts who were hired, given a generic syllabus, and told to teach, without out any further direction, our adjunct local decided that we needed to step in and help. We created a model based on mentoring programs in other Colleges and Universities. Our plan called for a structured program of orientation, mentoring, observation, and evaluation. 

Blogkeeping: a preview of things to come

Sunday night - or would that be Monday morning - blogkeeping? No, even after midnight, Auntie Mame would still call it Sunday night, middle of the night hours away.


Blogkeeping is catching up odds and ends. Kalte Ente by any other name. I intended to introduce a column for personal reflections so I don't lose my voice in midst of adjunct faculty advocacy, NFM stuff, relevant news and recycled content. I waited too long and now it's deck clearing time. Such are the wages of procrastination. What's coming and what needs clearing out of the way?

On the horizon...
Today's teleconference board meeting focused on NFM's soon to to be rolled out for our 2010 BIG and multi-tiered initiative: adjunct unemployment compensation. Briefly, the first wave gets out information on filing and emphasizes encouraging as many contingent faculty to file as possible. Following stages will address gathering more information on filing experiences state by state and ultimately advocating for legislative change at state and federal levels. On the way there, however, we must all become as well informed as possible.

How Administrators Took Over the University of California

Another excellent piece by Bob Samuels. If you want to understand higher budget mischief in general and, more specifically, what went awry with the UC system, you can't do better than by following Bob's blog, Changing Universities.

How Administrators Took Over the University of California via Changing Universities by Bob Samuels on 10/19/09

In the UC system, we have a saying, "When two administrators walk into a room, three always walk out." The question then is how do administrators reproduce and what effect does their reproduction have on the University of California. While I will not describe the mating habits of administrators, I will show how the growing rise of the administrative class means less money for everyone else, higher student fees, and a loss of shared governance.

According to a 2008 UCLA Faculty Association report, "Over the past decade, the numbers of Administrators in the UC almost doubled, while the number of faculty increased by 25%. The sharpest growth took place among Executives and Senior Managers: 114%. Because Administrators command high salaries and benefits, any increase in their number higher than the expected growth rate for the University results in high costs: rough estimates of the costs of carrying extra administrators at UC range around $800 million."

 The first thing to stress here is that during the last decade, as the number of students increased in the UC system, there were fewer faculty to teach them, but many more administrators to run the show. In this structure, power shifts to the administrative class, while the faculty are pushed out of shared governance. Moreover, due to their high compensation packages, administrators suck up the funds that could be spent on faculty salaries and wages for the lowest paid workers.

As I pointed out in a previous post, "In 2008, there were 397 administrators in the over 200k club making a total of $109 million, and in 2006, the same group had 214 members for a collective gross pay of $58.8 million. This group and its collective salaries, then, almost doubled in just two years." Not only has the administrative class grown in numbers and the percentage of the budget they consume through their salaries, but during the current period of "fiscal emergency," we have seen several million dollars spent on increased compensation for administrators.

UPTE has documented that during the same regents meeting where a fiscal emergency was declared and the furlough system was approved, hundreds of administrators got compensation increases,