#Adjunct Reading Room: blogs & posts of note

…there always more than just a few don't miss posts out there. Often I do miss them though or, if I catch them, don't get back to read more attentively (which skimming on the fly is not). Today's post (started two days ago!) reviews several recent blog posts and blogs I read regularly. Posts like this will help me keep up and remind you about blogs you might want to add to your own list. Give them a visit.  And yes, a real life adjunct Reading Room would look far shabbier than this image. A contest and online photo-stream forays come to mind,

Don't overlook less mainstream sources of insightful commentary on academia and academic labor -- and in our own voices -- by limiting your reading to higher ed media and adjunct stories. Even cast your digital reading net beyond the Ivory Silo™ to include K12 bloggers. Advertising and other funding are factors too. Who influences editorial content? Follow the money and affiliations. You may not agree with independents, but at least they are less likely to be wearing a collar.

This is not to say don't read read mainstream higher ed media. Do read them -- just not to the exclusion of other sources or as a substitute for developing your own. The wider you cast that net, the better.

Blog Posts

Disposable Teachers

 = adjuncts and other precarious academic knowledge workers, also Dissident Voice article, "Cutting to the Bone on College Campuses through Reducing, Reusing, Repurposing" by Paul Haeder / April 28th, 2012

It’s the equal pay for equal work thing, stupid. Union strong and proud. (Bumper sticker on 1972 VW Rabbit, Vancouver, Canada).

Sure, that might be the mantra for the "new faculty majority"  [increasingly organizing into faculty unions. Actually New Faculty Majority's is "Faculty working conditions are student learning  conditions" but close enough], but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/ contingent/ temporary/migratory/ irregular/ at-will/ auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.