movie break

…now showing…last of the profs aka the great train wreck…still on topic…#academiclabor featuring the #adjunct as Gunga Din, post inspired by The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, Fordham UP, 2008, the  most recent entry in  the Academe blog series, Reviews of Recent Books Concerning Current Issues in Higher Education,

Donoghue thinks (2008) it's too late to turn back and that we've already passed the tipping point. Asked at the beginning of the interview above to describe last profs in ten words or less, he replies, "a train wreck with no survivors."

#highered news roundup

…from all over, mainstream, alternate and highered media. In addition to rss feeds, I subscribe to daily news alerts from the Chronicle, Inside HigherEd, the New York Times and The Guardian Higher Education Network as well as assorted business and alternate press that carry higher education news on occasion. Yesterday the Grey Lady ran a bumper crop, including a the usual MOOCapalooza entry 

This morning's higher ed media (they take the weekend off) had a good haul too, so I'm following up the admitted frivolity of Adjunct Wheels with serious news. 

• October 26, Weekly Highlights from the Guardian Higher Education Network (authentic assessment, social mobility, Open Access, libraries)

• Daily News Updates from Inside HigherEd: money, Flatworld closes its open, Pearson, Quick Takes, BlogU and more

• Academe Today (Chronicle, no web view that I could see, email only, subscribe here): good adjunct piece behind pay wall (love the irony, not ~ but it's already being widely and informally shared)

• Utne Reader's Best of the Alternate Press, always interesting ~ nothing higher ed today.

• Forbes Weekly Digest: Oct 29 - Nov 05, 2012, by topics and people followed, no web view, email only ~ manage here: Udacity Amara partner to offer courses in many languages; global private tutoring market; hurricane (Sandy) effect on education (IT, lessons for students).

November 4, 2012 HigherEd Alerts

Confessions redux

From the June Higher Ed Insider Update "In Case You Missed It" column: 

"And our most commented article? An essay by Peter D.G. Brown, Distinguished Service Professor of German at the State University of New York at New Paltz and founding member of the board of directors of New Faculty Majority: The National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity on why he's an advocate for adjuncts despite being tenured."

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: ...

CAW Brief, "One Faculty Serving All Students"

Both CHE and IHE have published their reports on and reactions to CAW Brief, "One Faculty Serving All Students": it's too early yet for responses on the COCAL sponsored adj-l list where a link to brief has already been posted. In order to follow reactions, I "starred" (new tool) the IHE story (only one showing up on search so far) for a news alert to aggregate single story media coverage.

Coalition on the Academic Workforce brief, "One Faculty Serving All Students" ~ http://www.academicworkforce.org/CAW_Issue_Brief_Feb_2010.pdf

In "Principles for 'One Faculty'" from Inside Higher Ed: "Coalition of academic groups issues standards for how colleges should treat those off the tenure track. AAUP declines to join statement." http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/caw

(Personally, I'd be more impressed with the coalition's brief as an "extraordinary accomplishment' if it were more representative of the academic landscape outside the humanities.)

From The Chronicle's "Coalition Seeks Better Conditions for Those Off the Tenure Track": 

The key to securing better workplace conditions for the growing number of full- and part-time faculty members who are not on the tenure track lies in setting standards for how all faculty members should be treated, according to a document released by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce.

The coalition, whose members include disciplinary associations and other faculty groups, calls on colleges in its issue brief to give contingent faculty members better pay. (cited from http://chronicle.com/article/Coalition-Seeks-Better/64054/)

Please share your comments and reactions...

Lost Trust ~ UC Crisis, Bob Samuels in IHE

Bob Samuel's blog Changing Universities is one of many but still a standout among the websites, mainstream and local news pieces, columns, op-eds and members only listserv ruminations covering the University of California budget crisis and protests. I have been saying, blogging and tweeting so ~ as anyone checking in here regularly can't help having noticed. As president of the University Council-AFT, which represents lecturers and librarians at the University of California, Bob knows the UC system and academic labor in California. He is also on the New Faculty Majority board of directors Today, Bob's column about the UC crisis appears in Inside Higher Ed, which is covering the story better than CHE but, so far, still behind the blogosphere / twitterverse. Titled "Lost Trust," Bob's column analyzes two contrasting narratives to explain the crisis: "There are two main narratives battling to define the current crisis at the University of California . While the California situation is an extreme example of what is happening to public higher education these days nationally, these dueling narratives can be found in many other states as well." Go here for the entire article: http://www.insidehighered.com/ views/2009/ 12/07/samuels  Searching Google News for "University of California budget crisis" yields a flood of stories, 391 and links to hundreds more, from Time Magazine and New York Times to academic and activist blogs and Workers World, from local to international and all the virtual newspaces in between.

Adjunct Solidarity

OK so you've probably already seen this but just in case, here's Scott Jaschik's report, Adjunct Solidarity, for IHE on the Weber U letter writing campaign.

"Given that Weber State isn't known for its activist professors, administrators there were surprised recently when letters and e-mail messages started to arrive -- not from adjuncts or their tenure-track colleagues at the university, but from New York, California and elsewhere -- as far away as Japan.....And the Weber State plan struck many adjunct activists at other campuses as salt in the wounds -- enough so that they needed to let the university know that someone was watching. The Coalition for Contingent Academic Labor organized the letter writing to the university's senior officials, and distributed a sample that said, of adjuncts at Weber State:...the letter-writing campaign is part of an effort to let colleges know that people are watching the decisions they make about adjuncts."

Steve Street commented on the adjunct listserv adj-l:
A clap on the back to John [Hess, COCAL-CA] for starting this campaign and to all who emailed, as well as to IHE for breaking the story and keeping on top of it.

That & New Faculty Majority Day are not the only campaign stops for the Visibility Express...

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.