#ClassDismissed…@mmstrikesback adds #adjunctsdomatter = #adjunct #hashtagblitz

…did you catch the #ClassDismissed catalog of academic complaints, mostly faculty and with an emphasis on adjuncts? This Facebook timeline message appeared: "Please tweet ‪#‎adjunctsdomatter‬ with ‪#‎classdismissed‬.. I am having one of those epiphany moments. Another good add on option:  #studentsmatter.  Presumably, "anything" refers to education, but what's to keep you from trying unexpected combinations that could prove even more interesting. Here are recent examples (all but one with just #ClassDismissed). What tags would you add? What would  students tweet? K-12 teachers?

Seriously? We are bringing academia down? We are holding it up! #adjunctsdomatter #classdismissed.  — vocemom (@MMstrikesback) May 8, 2014

#ClassDismissed continues to be a powerful expression of endemic race and class bias in higher ed.  — ChristineKaratnytsky (@ckaratnytsky) May 7, 2014

tools…using them—not being one

…this might not be a post either: call it an extended meta blogging update…planning out loud. Feel free to contribute your 2¢ worth. Let the musing begin:

Tools

I've been exploring Diigo blogging and sharing tools. Using is the best (only) way to learn a new tool. These turn annotated bookmarks into blog posts. If truly useful and making blogging/online information sharing quicker, easier — more efficient, then they will become part of the repertoire. If not, then not — and will fade from regular use. Until then, expect more Diggo blogging and auto-blogging. 

Special Projects

Keith Hoeller's links and commentary, a weekly annotated links post will include links to articles by and about Keith. I'm not the only one who has long thought he should have his own page or blog. Hardly believing he didn't, I started saving links on Delicious in 2008. The project starts with bookmarking and then blogging entries from Keith Hoeller's PT Faculty Links & Commentary on Diigo. Eventually, we'll find them a cyberspace home on the range of their own so they don't have to crash in random locations like a homeless adjunct. The Washington PartTime Faculty Association had a web page...but on a now defunct platform that disappeared from cyberspace taking all the WPFA pages with it...and there you thought nothing disappeared from cyberspace.  

Movie Marathon: #Labor & #Adjunct Organizing…#NormaRae & #KeithHoeller

…A film festival! Let's make a marathon out of it. More from Barbara Wolf's A Simple Matter of Justice, plus classic labor movies. Here's a 2013 list from Freelancers Union by Sara Horowitz: 

... [of t]he best labor-related movies that'll make you want to fight for the underdog. Who doesn’t love movie night? People often ask me about my favorites, so I’ve put together a list of my top labor-related movies. Many of them are based on actual events. Of course they’ve been dramatized, Hollywood-style, but they're still great stories. Documentaries will come next. Enjoy!

.... Norma Rae (1979), this one's for @mmstrikesback

A user's tour of the #PFRNetwork's flagship

…blog—that would be right here & an exercise in the promised short post. I hope the tour will help you navigate this rather crowded, feature packed page

Next comes the guest post by MMStrikesBack on the recent Labor Notes Conference, an original meld of report and reflection. It's longer too but well worth the read...and now...

Welcome to the Tour

@NatM4Equity endorses #NAWD…gets FB page—@MMStrikesback writes @NEIU BoT—#WeAreNNMC petitions

…"again" on letter writing (here) and petitioning about NNMC (here and here). National Mobilization for Equity (NME) already has a page plus blog, recently added Twitter, even more recently endorsed National Adjunct Walkout Day and is now on Facebook. Still, a whole post in a title that will still fit in a tweet with characters left over for a link should qualify as a social media sub-genre or at least a hat trick So what do I do for the rest of the post?...besides make it a short one. With pictures. PS be sure to catch and sign the petitions as you scroll down...all the way down

Cover and profile photos for National Mobilization for Equity on Facebook

Here's the endorsement from the NME Action page:

An #adjunct, @MMStrikesBack, writes @nytdavidbrooks

Shirley Temple, The Little Princess*

…about his op-ed,The American #Precariat, in Sunday's @NYTimes…

 Dear Mr. Brooks,

You may have noticed a new phrase emerging in academic circles sweeping higher education journals, newspapers, websites, twitter and blogs. Precarious, contingent, or adjunct faculty are living in poverty like low wage service employees. Adjuncts are forced into this new economic climate to accept jobs offering semester only contracts (if that) and low salaries as well as few opportunities for health insurance and retirement benefits.

Recently our classes have been cut even further by universities insisting they can’t afford the cost of insuring us with the new health care law. And now we have the cuts in food stamps which is eroding our ability to sustain our families that helped us survive our low wage higher education teaching jobs. We happen to be teaching all over the United States in every academic discipline you could imagine. As 79% of the professors employed, you can imagine this is causing some of us adjuncts to stand up and organize for better working conditions and a more viable future for our colleagues as well as a better learning environment for our students.

David Brooks Phones It In

 In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare, and also means a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and must sell their labor to live

All of us who work under these definitive conditions have one thing in common. We, like you so cleverly noted, are forced to “rely on friends and family” and “we lack faith in American possibilities.” Not now, we don’t.

Chicago @LaborNotes Conference

…@MMStrikesBack reflects on the #ContingentFaculty Session…

Late at night on April 3rd, I found out through a conversation with a friend that the 2014 Labor Notes Conference was starting the following day, April 4-6 at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, near Chicago O’Hare. Joe Berry would be leading a session for contingent faculty and labor organizers from 2:00-5:00 pm. My friend said we could go for free as long as we emailed Mr. Berry. As I had just finished reading his book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education, I felt it was fate itself that had given me the opportunity to hear him speak, and I emailed him to ask if I could attend. Berry wrote back right away and said that he would be expecting me tomorrow at the session.


I arrived late because I was parked in a lot that was very far from the hotel, and another late arriver and I could not figure out how to get over to the actual meeting.

It was quite funny, really, both of us trying to climb over a wall of sorts, with a steep incline, but he was very friendly and cheered me up.

At one point, the man said, “Well, you're a very pessimistic type of person, aren't you?”

And I said, “Well, I'm an adjunct. I've been through a lot recently.”

Anyway, when we got there I couldn't find the workshop, and the people who ran it were not happy I hadn't registered, but one woman in a maroon sweater showed me where the room was. Because I didn't have a program, though, I didn't even know the title of the session. But I knew I was looking for Joe Berry who had changed my life with his book. I told her about it, and that was enough information for her to help me find the room.