Reading Room: An unsettled moment in #highered

Found the Omnivore piece below languishing in drafts, hopefully not too late. Scott McLemee's Occupy piece may seem a tad outdated and even superseded by now. However, with the International Student Movement's November 7-20 Global Weeks of Action just around the corner, the piece is still timely, a reminder of the global. 

What a fall calendar: Campus Equity Week 2011 next week (and still resources and exhortations to post!); then Campaign for the Future of Higher Education the 1st weekend in November with ISM actions starting the very next week and peaking November 17 on International Students Day... all against the backdrop of ongoing Occupations. Is it just me or could movements use "action planners" to coordinate schedules? What about cooperative actions?

And the rest? Hate, humanities, culture wars, information overload, protests... all relevant. Mind the ellipses: you know the drill. Here four means at least one link. Catch the missing ones online

So, Another President doesn't know how many adjuncts?

Do see this wonderful post of Jonathon Rees at his More or Less Bunk site.
"Three or four presidents of my university ago (they come and go so fast these days that I’ve lost count), I asked the man what percentage of courses on campus are taught by adjuncts. He said he didn’t know."

I told you there were more-anybody have any more such stories? It's truth time, don't you think? Get up, stand up-preferably in scary ghost costume.

For Campus Equity Week. Cheers, Alan Trevithick

still writing & occupying but why

I'm working my way through blogs, FB pages and Twittiverse and have the outlines of a Why I Write blog post in hopper ~ unless I burn out before getting to it. Today, after all, is National Day on Writing and composition adjuncts are legion in the academy. Ethan has been addressing numbers in his series but not yet by discipline. Just getting counted is the first step. In the meantime, there is still OWS. This ~ Occupy Mordor, below ~ caught my fancy. There are clever posters but not enough much humor, the price of earnestness.

Where are All the Faculty? Ask Somebody: Including USED

If you are just tuning in, look at some previous posts on the matter of misreporting, here, and here. 

Ok, we’ve done Peterson’s and Collegeview, now let’s look at some Federal numbers. Again, this is just for one of the places where I work—Westchester Community College—but you should ask questions about your institution(s) as well. Maybe everybody but WCC is reporting more thoroughly?

Maybe. 

Remember from previous posts that I think there are more than 1000 faculty at WCC, and that 85% or more are adjuncts-or “Part-time” in the reporting. So, look at WCC:

Part B - Employees by Assigned Position - Part-time staff

Number of part-time staff by faculty status and primary function/occupational activity

That’s from the National Center for Education Statistics, US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.

Therein, for 2009, we find that part-time faculty are listed at 311.  Full-timers are said to be 167. That’s 478, no? Check my math. Now off you go to the WCC Facts and Figures-Faculty for 2009? 170. All full-time. No part-timers at all. Where are the missing faculty?

Shouldn’t they all come out, like ghosts, for Campus Equity Week?

Peterson's, and Collegeview: Where do they get their information?

NOTE: Thanks to commenter below-I should have pointed out, there are more than 1100 faculty at WCC, and therefore the info given to Collegeview must refer only to full-timers. So, why?  Who left out the majority of the faculty? More later.

Ok here's another, and my query:

I am an adjunct prof at Westchester Community College (WCC) and elsewhere. Your faculty numbers for WCC are not correct. There are more than 1100 faculty at WCC, but your numbers indicate a total of only 174. Where did you get your numbers from? This is a serious difficulty. I am sure that the WCC Office of Institutional Research and Planning can help you correct this. 

I hope other people are looking at their colleges. On these types of sites and, by the way, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics—don't get me started, I have to grade a zillion exams!—there are strong hints of very dicey reporting practices, for many colleges and institutions, not just WCC

Do you know what your institutions are telling the public, and state and federal government?