Morning reading from J. Fruscione…
In The New York Times yesterday, there’s an article by Rachel Swarns called “Crowded Out of Ivory Tower, Adjuncts See a Life Less Lofty.” In it is this line:
Adjuncts say that much more is needed.
It shouldn’t just be adjuncts. It should be all of us, from the newest student to the full professor getting ready to retire.
The comment is in regard to what CUNY is doing relating to adjuncts–and there has been a little bit of progress, an attempt (that now seems stalled) to turn more adjunct lines into lecturer (and even tenure-track) full-time ones and improved medical benefits–but little more. The union, the Professional Staff Congress, wants better job security for adjuncts as part of the next contract (which has been in negotiation for close to eight years, I think it is, since the last one expired).
None of this, though, is going to solve the…
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Here is a most astute assessment of the current academic labor discourse:
Critics of Academic Hiring Practices Are Not Merely Pining for a Lost Past
Thanks to Werner Herzog’s Bear for this astute post which reveals the weak logic Tenured Radical relies on to “police” the tone of the discourse about academic labor. I agree completely with him that the hiring system is outdated. At most college campuses, the adjunct who teach the majority of the classes are already doing the job for which they justifiably could be hired full-time. Although any solution to the broken academic labor system would of course require political action, in concept, the solution is simple: let’s just hire adjuncts who are already working at the campus, in a system that resembles K12 hiring practices. What would be wrong with that? Why would that be so hard to sell to politicians?
From Colorado Adjuncts:
Lots of established academic hand-wringing in these final days of 2013. It’s like, I know that you told all your colleagues you’d “get some writing done” over the break, and instead you’ve been binge-watching Scandal and eating pot pie all day, so now to assuage your impostor syndrome/productivity guilt you have to do something that has to do with The Field, and so why not weigh in on an Internets War between two veritable nonentities, and then tsk-tsk people on their inappropriate tones, and “comfort” them by telling them that it’s OK, they’re just coddled millennials who’ve never been rejected from anything, ever, and this is how the big, bad world works?
Why not do that?
That’s pretty much the same as writing and submitting for publication a monograph whose peer reviewers laud it as a field-changer. Pretty much.
Oh, but here I go again. Would you look…
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Dig this. It’s got soul.
We’re Constantly in Fear: The life of a part-time professor | San Diego Reader.
Here is Adjunct Crisis’ own John Rall speaking truth to power in San Diego.
The Adjunct Crisis 