October is National #Bullying Prevention Month

…not the only item on the PF blogging agenda, which includes National Adjunct Walkout Day, Adjunct Chat's PD project, #ccourses ~ among other topics. Since this is Bullying Prevention/Awareness Month, I did not want to delay opening a long planned academic bullying series post. Although most of the months' designated websites emphasize schools, bullying and mobbing ~ as many of us know all too well ~ is very real in academic workplace too.

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, in which schools and organizations work together to stop bullying and cyber-bullying through activities, outreach and education. The month not only tries to raise awareness of bullying in schools, but also works to raise awareness of workplace bullying.

So is bullying in online groups and volunteer organizations. Building and maintaining trust is central to both organizing and preventing online bullying. Whether serendipity or morphic resonance, today's #ccourses' webinar is about building trust online and off. That will probably be the next post in the series. Reading Room will feature related links this month, and I hope to get to at least some of the bullying and related posts in drafts

October is National Bullying Prevention Month, CSEA Local 1000 AFSCME, AFL-CIO...and now for a video and more links, with a focus on workplace and academic bullying and mobbing to reinforce group think and as a retaliation tool

Sunday Matinee: #Bullying & Mobbing

Opening with Developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld discussing the bully syndrome in order to understand how bullies are made and unmade

Quick Reference Guide For Parents on the College Search

Cross-posted at the Adjunct Project.

Many of us have been suggesting for awhile now that, in order for adjuncts to continue gaining momentum, we need to get the issue out into the public eye. We need to get parents and students on our side, or at least make them aware of the situation. Obviously, the mainstream media attention we have begun to garner is helping in that endeavor. The more we dispel the myth that all college professors are overpaid and underworked (ha!), the better off we will be when it comes to gaining public support for our mission.

Which is why I was particularly heartened by an email I received this week from the parent of a high school senior. In the email, this parent astutely asserts that she is affected by colleges' exploitative practices because she is a "future consumer."


Very true, and well-said. Business practices affect the consumer, whether he or she is willing to recognize it or not. This parent is clearly one who seeks to explore these practices before she patronizes the school. She is exactly the kind of parent to whom we should appeal.

New admin in the college workplace: just not getting it

SOMETIMES I THINK NOBODY GETS IT

At my community college we have a relatively new upper administration. The President is just finishing her 2nd year and the Vice President for Academic Affairs (VPAA) just finished her first year here. Neither one has strong academic background and the VPAA has not yet learned the 'culture' of the College. For example in the Spring semester, she cancelled classes with 9 and 10 students in them (some were required for the students to graduate) and then complained that enrollment was down! 

Jack Longmate on Reich, fairness, adjunct work & the economy

 With great pleasure, we welcome a guest post from New Faculty Majority Board Member and long time contingent faculty activist, Jack Longmate (shown left at TESOL 2009), who writes...


Robert Reich's June 6 post [and June 3 SF Gate column], entitled "Fairness is crucial to economic growth," makes a point that I remember Terry Knudsen of Spokane making at a legislative hearing in Olympia several years ago about improving the pay for adjunct faculty. 

Reich writes, 

"The only way the economy can grow and create more jobs is if prosperity is more widely shared... You want to know the real reason the economy crashed in 2008 and why recovery has been so anemic?  Because so much of the nation's income and wealth have become concentrated at the top that America's vast middle class doesn't have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going."  

Clearly when adjunct faculty are provided poverty-level income and when they have no job security, they are hardly in a position to be be they kind of consumers who would revive the economy.  

Letter to Texas A&M on behalf of Professor Bradford

*Below, Attached, and By Fax*

                                                                                                June 4, 2012

President Maria Hernandez Ferrier

Texas A&M University-San Antonio

One University Way

San Antonio, TX 78224

Dear President Ferrier:

I am writing on behalf of New Faculty Majority to protest San Antonio A & M's non-renewal of Adjunct Professor of Criminology Sissy Bradford, and to request your immediate intervention.

Given the facts of the case, we are gravely concerned that it appears that in rescinding Professor Bradford’s courses at the same time that Professor Bradford has been speaking publicly about the incident involving the display of religious symbols on a new building entrance, and at the same time that she has objected to the university's handling of the threats against her, the University is engaging in retaliation against her.  If true, this would violate the principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech that the university is committed to uphold. We urge you to reaffirm those essential principles by renewing Professor Bradford’s appointment for the fall semester. 

College Affordability? For whom?

A little story: one that occurs to me as I wait high above a rather nice golf course, Eagle Crest, waiting for the start of a weekend powwow of those who have signed on with the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education. It regards, my little story, college affordability.

One evening, as I crossed the Triboro Bridge into Queens, to teach my single community college class there, I realized something. I had to take a loan to get to my job. This is because my E-Z pass, though it may have thought it was sucking the $6.50 out of our checking account (what does E-Z Pass care?) it was actually getting it from the overdraft protection that bankrolls our household's continued between-semester-contract operations. 

And that money, of course, we would have to pay back, with interest. The repayment would start when the first one or two of the three colleges I teach at got around to sending me a check. Sometimes they take a couple of weeks, sometimes a month. So I was taking a loan to teach  college. 

 What do you think? Cost-effective? Sustainable? Fair?

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates 20March12

Email joeberry@igc.org, to subscribe to regular updates in brief and links by email. More about Joe Berry.  

Updates in Brief and Links

CHICAGO

What does it mean to do progressive work today? What are the core qualities of successful organizers? How do we build the organizations and movements that these times call for?

For folks in and near Chicago, Eric Mann of the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union in LA will be in Chicago March 22, 5:30 - 7:30 PM, at the Jane Addams Hull House on the UIC campus to do a talk   on Transformative Organizing: A Theory and Practice for a Social Justice Revolution. He will talk about his new book, Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer, a very good book distilling his 40 years of organizing experience. He has been very supportive of contingent issues and one of his children is a contingent faculty person.

 About: Eric Mann is the director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles and a founder of the Bus Riders Union. The Strategy Center is a "think tank/act tank" that trains organizers and initiates high visibility environmental justice, mass transportation, and civil rights campaigns. The BRU is the largest mass transportation group in the U.S. and the subject of Haskell Wexler's feature length documentary: Bus Riders Union. 

He has written seven books and is the co-host of the weekly radio show, Voices from the Frontlines, on KPFK Pacifica 90.7FM in Los Angeles. He has published more than 200 articles that have appeared in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, Boston After Dark, Worldwatch, Socialist Register, Black Agenda Report, Black Commentator, AhoraNow, and The Nation. 

Union staff job opening (organizer) for grad union, AFT 6300, at U of IL, Chicago

WEST COAST

More on CA Fed Of Teachers deal with Gov. Brown on dropping the Millionaire's Tax for a compromise with his less progressive initiative, Labor Notes

INTERNATIONAL

• Mexican private universities growing fast, quality concerns [not sure how many of these are for-profit or who the faculty are exactly, but I can guess] World University News
• In Columbia debate of private higher ed, both non-profit and for-profit.  World University News 
• In Russia private higher ed expanding. World University News
• Research paper on contingent academics in Australia  [We are the majority there too.]

Research Project, Teacher Unions, Outsourcing

• Appeal for info for research project on grad employees:  Nancy Poole, LIS/Educational Studies, UNC at Greensboro, is collecting stipend.tuition/responsibilities information for graduate assistants at all levels, nationally. I would like to include our Canadian colleagues as well. Please visit the The Graduate Assistant Project site and fill out the form (it can be as anonymous as you want ;=) You can see the results of all the data collection at once by clicking on the spreadsheet link.  Please pass this on to all of your graduate assistant contacts.  This information is open to all who may have a need to be informed.

• Romney says taking on teacher unions is Feds role. AFL-CIO blog

• Universities moving to outsource instruction to outside private entities, not just hiring contingents internally on second tier. [This is a serious threat, which Fox, of course, really likes. No longer having the institution as the employer would make organization of these faculty much harder] Fox Business News  

Email joeberry@igc.org, to subscribe to regular updates in brief and links by email. More about Joe Berry.  

How Well ARE Students doing after they graduate? Oregon: Call Home

February 9, 2012, Senator Ron Wyden D-OR introduced S-2098, titled the “Student Right to Know Before You Go Act." (watch unveiling on YouTube)


I just got off the phone with the Senator's office, where his helpful staff assured me that my well-reasoned demands—that this bill include "transparency" in regard to the phantom work-force that now runs higher ed—would be heard. 

Reading Room: Patterns in Academia

Actions. Protests. Campaigns Occupations. Summits. Conferences. Conventions. You know the boundaries are blurring when cops pepper spray not Berkeley but UC Davis (the 2nd whitest UC campus in the system) students and there is a movement to Occupy MLA, about which most of the conversations take place on Twitter. You doubt? Then search and follow the OccupyMLA or OMLA with or without hashtags. See for yourself. 


Change and transgression are in the air. So why am I posting a collection on annotated links from a book blog? Easy... we need intel from multiple perspectives, not just the usual academic media, a few blogs written by academics and mainstream media. It's also a change of pace. We need that too

Cathrine Hasse and Stine Trentemoller (Academia): Cultural Work Place Patterns in Academia. Rex J. Pjesky (West Texs A&M) and Daniel Sutter (Troy): Does the Lack of a Profit Motive Affect Hiring in Academe? Evidence from the Market for Lawyers....

Names 101: Administrative Term; Adjunct. is a Falsehood

Editor's note (forewords, like afterwords, being traditional and jealously guarded prerogatives): hopefully the perennial but yet to be resolved topic of what to call ourselves and why will draw contributors and commenters out of silent seclusion for lively but respectful dialog and productive discussion. Over the transom contributions in the name of your choice (subject to personal editorial standards) are welcomed and cherished. Confidentiality and troll free zone guaranteed. 

The yet to be named (appreciate the irony?) series opens with a piece from Thomas Paine 2nd.  Naming suggestions invited for this series, the first of many Discussions for Change to follow. A more detailed preliminary post and true foreword will follow in due course. 

Here's to more common sense in the profession. (Aside to TP2 wannabes: don't nick this nic. It's taken).

The Administrative Term, "Adjunct," is a Falsehood 

The dictionary stresses that "adjunct" is an auxiliary role. Yet here I am staring down at a contract with the term "adjunct" next to my name and realizing that I will be as central in my classroom, and as much an authority over my curriculum, as I was as an associate professor. Since 9/11 I have had a gradual, rude awakening that the field I had embarked upon as a chipper graduate student at MIT was dissolving into a "managed education" nightmare where the noble role of a professor, and the profundities of the world presented by such, was being undercut at every turn by a generation of under-educated managers. A majority of these people have no roots in teaching, research or the arts. They just don't "see" what they are destroying.

A shallow business culture has replaced the passions and commitment once embodied by men and women of letters, and this ethic is beginning to permeate the rest of society. Money is earmarked for plush office furniture, dining hall remodeling and administrator salaries. This money is taken wholesale from faculty and staff salaries. Students and their parents are prevented from seeing the shift in priorities, the intellectual pogrom as it were, because the expensive marketers hired by these same administrations insist on calling all teachers "members of the faculty."

Yet we "adjuncts" are under pressure from every quarter to do the same job of a properly paid professor. Students, parents, evaluation rituals, and an endless stream of administration memos ask us to rise to the occasion and do our part to fill in the gap left over by the insincere budgeting. And this compensation begins right at the starting gate. I recall how the department chair who hired me waved my résumé in the air and excitedly showed it to a colleague. He had no hesitation in praising my professional value. I was lead to believe that the administration hired me because they needed an authority on my subject and no one else at that college could handle the material. They boasted that I would receive the "highest pay" for an adjunct, yet this was less than half that of professors who were younger, less experienced and with fewer children to feed. It's a total disgrace.

How can any of this be happening? Who am I actually adjunct to? To whom or what am I a supplement?

Adjunct Night at the Movies, BYOP

Your average (adjunct) college professor earns less than a sanitation worker..... 


Please take a few minutes to watch the video below about working conditions for adjunct faculty who comprise over 70% of the total teaching staff at the college in question. Appreciate the very "Network moment" courage too of someone, "mad as hell" and "not going to take this anymore!"  Then forward the It is indeed rare among the precariously employed. We're no John Galts, but Peter Finch's Howard Beale (unfortunate outcome not withstanding) suits.

Accompanying note:

"The gutting of higher education in America has resulted in a corporate model of employment utilizing affiliate college professors who earn less than garbage men and train conductors. This exploitation is reprehensible, immoral and indefensible. This abomination solely serves the interests of college presidents, boards of trustees and administrators at the highest level, while bankrupting teachers, adversely affecting students, tuition payers and ultimately all stakeholders in the educational arena. It must end."

What are your experiences? How do they compare? Are you ready to shout out, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" ? If not yet, when...

The Future of Work

this bit of research on the Gartner site; while it dates back to August has some interesting speculation about the Future of Work.
“People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,”
“In addition, simulation, visualization and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
-       Tom Austin, Vice President and Gartner Fellow
Gartner points out that the world of work will probably witness ten major changes in the next ten years. Interesting in that it will change how learning happens in the workplace as well. The eLearning industry will need to account for the coming change and have a strategy in place to deal with the changes.

via upsidelearning.com

So much of this applies as much to teaching and learning possibilities.
"De-routinization" of work (or teaching) could return to autonomy to teachers, already implied in Downes. Work swarms and teaming fit in at PLENK 2010 but seem less likely candidates for the entrenched academic mind.
And on down the list. Just because it could happen doesn't mean it will though.

Posted via email from Meanderings

explaining the profession

One view of how it looks from the inside, at least among the tracked and tenured...

"College professors take a lot of heat from the general public, and we deserve much of what we get; and humanities professors get the worst of it. And arguably, English professors the worst of that: we represent, apparently, the absolute nadir of contemporary culture.

I said that to some degree we deserve it; what I did not say, you’ll notice, is that it’s true. Untrue, but we deserve it? Well, yes: I think that college professors as a group, and English professors as a high-visibility (and high-risibility) subset, have done a terrible job of explaining just what it is that we do, and actively countering the most pernicious caricatures of our work that circulate in the larger culture."

Read the rest of The Tender-Hearted Professor at the fake chinese rubber plant blog

Ominvore visits the academic workplace

A collection of annotated (best kind) links to book reviews, essays, online articles, blog posts... all in one place for your reading convenience.

From Workplace, a review of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace by Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm, and Andrew Ross. Clive Bloom sheds few tears for Middlesex's strangely underpopulated philosophy department — or any other corners of an academy short on recruits and long overdue for the axe. Breaking out of the academy may seem daunting, but scholars' skills transfer to many other jobs. Teachers without technology strike back: Many professors don't find that the latest technology helps their students learn. In the conversation about ebooks and academe, the distance from cup to lip is great and involves many challenges. Geoffrey Nunberg on why Google's Book Search is a disaster for scholars. Open peer review in humanities journals: Is an experiment by Shakespeare Quarterly the shape of things to come? The Internet is calling into question one of academia’s sacred rites — the peer-reviewed journal article (and more). If it doesn’t exist on the internet, it doesn’t exist; as time has gone on, it’s proved to be a truism, perhaps the paradigmatic truism of our times. Finishing School: Christopher Beam on the case for getting rid of tenure. Never mix, never worry: Here is a brief (and incomplete) history of the academic couple. Hot at their own risk: Professors seen as very good-looking can be cast by colleagues and their students as lightweights, known less for their productivity than for their pulchritude.

The academic workplace, reposted from the Bookforum's aptly named blog, Omnivore