#adjunct/ion Oct2015 #2, 13 links

~ Adjunction = adjunct collection. Collected on OneTab through October 13, 2015: adjunction Oct2015 #2, 13 links, saved to Diigo and rss reader, posted to the Precarious Faculty online Reading Room. Focus includes academic labor, workplace, media, actions, adjunct stories.

tags: adjunct contingent faculty adjunct-stories academic labor #PFR adjunction Adjunct-OneTab-Archives

•   Adjunct Stories, #Adjuncts’ Stories of Job Insecurity | @PSC_CUNY.... 
•   Student-Worker Alliance protests outside DUC for adjunct rights | Student Life 
•   Creative writing program most recent to suffer from major cuts- The GW Hatchet 
•   Experts and Adjuncts: The New Model for Higher Education | The Academe Blog 

Joe Berry's Sept6 COCAL Updates

… in brief & links. Edited for length (omitting extensive "see below" items), redundancy (previously appearing in another post), time and formatting considerations. To subscribe to complete list by email, see information at bottom of page. 

Adjuncts... dba "you're not essential"

Good local newspaper op-ed adjunct unemployment insurance rights, Kansas City MO

IHE blogger (a CC dean) asks for free work from adjuncts (Ed note: a questionable characterization I disagree with after reading the post)

Near Emmaus responds to anthropologist Sarah Kandizor's Al-Jazeera article on adjuncts, plus links to other ensuing online discussion among anthros and other posts referenced, commenting.

Really, How Many Adjuncts Teach Where you Are?

Full text of email I just sent to Peterson's. Check out your place. Now, where do they get this sort of misleading info?

Hi there Peterson's-I don't really know who to contact here but wanted to tell somebody at Petersons that some of your information on Westchester Community College is very much outdated. To wit:

www.petersons.com/college-search/westchester-community-college-faculty-000_10004477_10007.aspx
Westchester Community College - Faculty
Total: 524
Full-time: 32% full-time
Student/faculty ratio: 18:1

That # and that percentage may have been true 20 or so years ago but no longer. FT faculty now comprise less than 15% of total faculty.

You should check with the WCC office of institutional research about this. I will be happy to talk to you more about this if you wish.

Dr. Alan Trevithick
Board Member, New Faculty Majority
and Adjunct
Westchester Community College
Fordham University
Laguardia Community College

Names 101: By Any Other Name

Guest post by New Faculty Majority's Anne Wiegard, previously published in Cortland Cause, SUNY Cortland's UUP chapter's April 2011 newsletter. Every year, Cause wins awards in a competition of all the SUNY chapter newsletters.



Students unhesitatingly call us “Professor,” for that is who we are to them. They do not know that almost everyone else we work with is either confused or in conflict about the proper designation for faculty teaching off the tenure track.

Sadly, though contingent academic employees are faculty, they know that communications addressed generally to “Faculty,” are often not actually intended for them, in the same way that women in the 1950s knew that memos addressed generally to employees were usually understood to pertain only to males.  Men were the norm, so a memo only applied to women if specifically qualified, as in “Female Employees” or perhaps given a separate category altogether, as in “The Secretarial Pool.”

Names 101, the catalog description + addenda

Behind and between, as usual. I'll start with a few words about the title. Names 101 is a series or regular feature (depending on its endurance level and mine). Since the series actually started with the guest post, "Administrative Term Adjunct is a Falsehood" by Tom Paine #2, the introduction is something of an afterthought. I also have a guest post by New Faculty Secretary Board Member and Secretary Anne Wiegard (English, SUNY Cortland) in drafts but ready to roll, plus a few more "promised." A series introduction is overdue. With it comes an invitation to comment or contribute a guest post (email to vanessa.vaile@newfacultymajority.info)

Any faculty member, even among the Tenured and Tracked clans, and, one would hope, most other staff and administrators are no doubt aware that what to call NTT faculty (researchers and librarians included) can be a thorny topic calling forth strong reactions. Some find the adjunct designation "highly offensive." Others don't mind as long as you don't call them adjuncts (hinting at hidden tier lines within the NTT tier). Still others could care less and consider the fuss a bit much. As one commented, "like pilots arguing in the cockpit while the airplane is crashing." There is also a contingent, if one can use the term, who feel that calling themselves Adjunct is an act of defiance. If that weren't enough, unions, professional associations, administrators, Department of Labor, faculty handbook job descriptions, keywords and standard online search terms can't agree either. Maybe we need a whole new, baggage free name

Both the Contingent Academics List and the New Faculty Majority  ~ full name ~ Coalition of Adjunct and Contingent Faculty try to cover both bases, give a nod to each. Periodically, the subject will come up on list, although it hasn't for a while. Let's take the initiative: describe, explain and name ourselves.

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?