I haven’t reblogged anything for quite some time, but this piece is timely and resonates with most of what I have written about the need for tenured faculty to recognize that higher education is near death and the crisis we face is an adjunct crisis because tenured faculty are becoming adjuncts. It is happening not because there isn’t enough funding but because tenured faculty, and adjunct faculty (the greatest number of whom suffer from some kind of complacency, even if it is just that they don’t have the time), are not resisting forcefully enough, a condition which has been ongoing for decades. Will we rise up, achieve true solidarity (beginning with equal pay for adjuncts), and muster the power of the full professoriate, tenured and adjunct?
Pancoast makes a number of cogent points here:
Time for the Professoriate to Lead the Way
by William Trent Pancoast
It’s about time for working folks to stand up for themselves. Walmart workers haven’t been able to get it done. The old line unions are still reeling from the ongoing attacks begun by Reagan and continued by the right wing.
It looks to me like it should happen on our college campuses, and it should for starters be about adjunct instructors having a chance to make a living wage with benefits. That will require that tenured faculty support adjuncts. Much of the bargaining success of the United Auto Workers resulted from skilled and unskilled (high wage and low wage) belonging to the same union. Tenured faculty, making $50,000-$175,000 annual pay with health care and retirement, and adjuncts, making piecework of roughly $400 to $1000 per credit hour taught with no benefits, must join together. They need to form…
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The Adjunct Crisis 