CAW Survey to Document Adjunct Work

Although adjuncts and contingent faculty know what "adjunct work" is and what it is like, our "lived experience" knowledge tends to the anecdotal, validity-as-data overlooked and discounted. The perceptions and conventional wisdom held and bandied about by non-academics, even academics and administrators, are often inaccurate. That's putting it kindly.

To remedy this information gap big enough to hide battleships in, CAW (not a crow calling but acronym for the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a group of disciplinary and professional associations and faculty unions -- is undertaking a major documentation effort to verify and record the working conditions and needs of adjuncts. Laying bare unacceptable but accepted working conditions that non tenure track faculty face daily is Too many adjuncts and their supporters find complaints rebuffed by administrators citing "the happy adjunct" myth, examples (real for a minority but not the group at large) of adjuncts who love being adjuncts, or who aren't worried about health insurance or retirement benefits because they have other, full-time jobs. Mainstream media lap it up too and pass it on, spreading the misinformation of mass

Respected and much-cited national databases on academic working conditions habitually focus on full-time, generally tenure-track professors but fall short on information about the real majority at many if not most institutions.

Robert Townsend, assistant director of research and publications for the American Historical Association, a coalition members, explains the current survey: "Although the majority of U.S. faculty are now off the tenure track, information about their working conditions is sorely lacking. Most of the limited data that exist on the working conditions of the contingent academic workforce are too generic to be of much use in really understanding how these professionals are being compensated and treated."

Get counted: take this direct link to the survey, http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VNNNRVS
Coalition for Academic Workforce, http://www.academicworkforce.org/members.html

Complete article in Inside Higher Ed, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/27/adjuncts

Hat tip to NFM Board Member Peter Brown for sharing

It's National Punctation Day!

Ross, this one's for you... and. Dear Readers, for you, to forward to

"Most of us who are picky about punctuation—we like to think of ourselves as fastidious, thank you very much—are content to silently grumble when we come across an errant apostrophe on a restaurant menu, or a meaningless set of quotation marks."

from The Book Bench: It's National Punctation Day! : The New Yorker

Some take it further: this is why Jeff Rubin launched National Punctuation Day.

stretched to the breaking point

"Mass higher education has brought social mobility to millions worldwide, but as access expands and academia is stretched to breaking point, standards are in steady decline, writes Philip Altbach

It might seem a contradiction that widening access would bring inequality to higher education, but trends show that is exactly what happens. Institutions that cater to mass access provide vastly different quality, facilities and focus than do elite institutions, and this gulf has widened as access has expanded worldwide. Furthermore, mass higher education has, for a majority of students, lowered quality and increased dropout rates.

However, even if these consequences have become inevitable and logical, they do not justify a move to reduce access but rather call for a more realistic understanding of the implications of 'massification' and the steps needed to improve the problems created by dramatic increases in enrolments."

Finish reading Times Higher Education - Trouble with numbers

rereading the university

Higher ed as a beached whale, cartoon by Peter Nicholson in The Australian

More annotated links about highered topics ~ colleges, curricula, students, reform, change and so on ~ from Omnivore, the Book Forum blog: rereading the university

a novel & a history

Adjunct life on interwebz groupz and listservz is all gobsmacked (but in a good way) by the prospect of an echte adjunct novel, Alex Kudera's Fight for the Long Day + protagonist with his own Facebook page, telling it like is (at least the author's particular lifeslice). Will non-adjuncts buy it, read it, get it? Will it - gasp - go mainstream? Make a difference (be still my beating heart)? Until then, we still have to get up in the morning and sally forth teaching. For many that means composition and with it, commenting on student writing. We're fighting a long day too. 

Academic blogger, if not still adjunct then recently enough so to count, Dr Davis writes in A History of Freshman Composition — Teaching College English, "I studied under Jim Berlin and he would not agree with much that was written here, both in terms of history and in terms of whether it was good or bad. I found the article startling (freshman comp began as a remedial course?) and interesting (classes did that?).

Freshman Comp, Then and Now says:

Over the almost four decades that I’ve been a college English professor, I have seen many changes, some good and many bad. One of the worst changes is the transformation of the freshman composition course.

I was not teaching college (or anything else) in the 70s, but I taught as he did when I first started in the mid-80s. You might be surprised by how well it worked."

So did I - and remember being taught that way too. What about you? Anyway, read both and maybe the novel too. Or write your own.