Carols for this #Christmas Eve...Mr Magoo's & a #college version

...with thanks to +George Station for the seasonally appropriate and timely reminder about Mr Magoo's Christmas Carol. You'll be back to regular schedules all too soon. I cannot say the same for myself despite (or due to) Janus posts due on multiple blogs. Until then, I and my sundry personae will be out and about on social media and re-blogging elsewhere. The college version Carol from the archives, covers routine topical posting and is as timely now as it was in 2012. If you need more post-season caroling about the state of education, check out Ken Previti's 2014 Christmas Carol post on Reclaim Education, another Education Blogger Network blog. [Ed note: opening paragraph edited/updated 1/2/2015]

...from the archives, Saturday, December 29, 2012: A College Christmas Carol

Starbuckaroo & #adjunct comment blitzing too

Skeptical all-agog-ness at news of Starbuck's (not quite) free higher ed degree offer abounds on adjunct enclaves around the tubz. On the adj-l list, which had been quiet until Anna Spiro posted a link to the NYT Starbucks OpEd. Conversation picked up. Ana Fores posted,

I wrote a letter, which was published, and I encouraged folks on Adjunct Justice to join me & write in, to give their own point of view. I am sure some heeded the call, but I don't know who.  

If we want to have our voices heard, we need to do so in the mainstream media, especially in papers such as the New York Times with its huge readership. Write in your comment. I think they may still be taking them!

#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and rearranged the order to lead with the NY Times OpEd, related links and commentary, including a copy of Keith's unpublished letter to the editor, plus a link to the published response letters—all above the fold.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...

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.

Oh my, pundits & profs. Oh Humanities!

…let the juxtapositions speak for themselves…with zeugma like these, who needs more words?

You can also view Oh, humanities! on Storify.

A College Christmas Carol

…at Remaking the University, Chris Newfield compares "A Christmas Carol" to current stories of struggling, indebted students. 

Elsewhere, Stephen Downes comments on the NYT article that Newfield references below, "T[he students] need a broader array of social supports, and most of all, a society determined to help them out of poverty, rather than blame them for being in it. But I see no sign higher education as a sector has any real interest in that."  

Here Newfield calls for that to change and tasks senior college officials with working to restore the bankruptcy option...lest Marley's fate await them... 

As Scrooge leaves his counting-house on Christmas Eve, he encounters his cheerful nephew, who tells his Uncle Scrooge that Christmas is one of those "many things from which I might have derived good, [but] by which I have not profited, I dare say."   The good, the nephew continues, is to have the one moment in the year in which "men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Scrooge dismisses this feeling and, with a final dig at his long-suffering clerk, leaves his office, only to be confronted by two amiable gentlemen who are soliciting "some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time."

Scrooge asks them, "are there no prisons?" 

#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

highered defunding, the future of work

Don't skip over the NYT links in Chris Newfield's recent posts on taxation and higher ed financing in California. They are more than just props. The Squeezed Middle and its tale of workplace changes are our story. 


In case you may be foolish enough to think that's not where you are: remember and respect the saying about the state as bellwether. Consider both posts and NYT articles as background reading for talking about higher ed policies and how to change trends. 

Liquidating tenure

Those with it want to keep it. Those without it, want it or at least something resembling security (a tricky concept and contested in these times) and pay equity. Consensus, of the workable kind, in the academy, among professional and labor groups, is in short supply, with stance running to the tier-centric. Everyone has a plan just not the same one.

Love, crave it or resent it, for those in the academy, tenure is an intrinsic part of the culture. From the outside, whether viewed nostalgically as quaint (like high button shoes) or regarded as anathema to American values and Western world civilization as some think they know it, tenure seems more anachronism than necessity.

"Liquidating Tenure" (occasional links & commentary), an academic blog newly added to my "adjunct blog" list, comments on tenure positions from the recently published NYT-staged debate. Isn't the picture illustrating Bruccio's post, both real and totally irresistible?