This brilliant essay gives many examples of what we will lose as a result of adjunctification and corporatization: we will lose a great part of our civilization. The first to go, it has been said, when fascists take over, are the intellectuals. We aren’t being shot, but one of the effects of corporatization is to render intellectuals, through deprofessionalization, incapable of attending to knowledge, and to education, which extends culture over generations. That this process is “invisible” makes it that much more insidious. And, the public doesn’t have a clue.
Put simply, universities traditionally have pursued a three-prong mission: 1) to provide excellent educational opportunities, 2) to support scholarly research and study, and 3) to encourage both professional and community service.
There has been a lot written recently about how the adjunct situation has negatively impacted our students’ education – and this blog will be addressing that extensive problem in a future post. But it is the second of the three-prong mission I’d like to talk about now, since I’m not seeing as much attention focused on this equally serious problem.
The adjunct labor abuse problem is becoming more widely reported: Seventy-five percent of America’s college faculty earn less than $25, 000 a year. Often hired one semester at a time with no healthcare or retirement benefits, paid per course an average of $2700, faculty are now academia’s migrant workers.
Historically, it has been the responsibility of our institutions of…
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The Adjunct Crisis 