By David Kociemba

This is the seventh in a series of Academe Blog guest posts arranged by the AAUP Committee on Contingency and the Profession in celebration of Campus Equity Week. For information on and resources for CEW, see the national website at http://www.campusequityweek.org/2013/.

There’s a new benefit worth tens of thousands of dollars that will cost your institution nothing—but they’ll fight to deny it to you anyway. It’s the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Act, which forgives certain kinds of education loans of individuals working in public service jobs… if they’re certified as full-time. There’s the catch: qualifying for this program by working 30 hours a week in public service also might qualify you for eligibility for health care under the Affordable Care Act. Unlike the ACA, however, hours working multiple part-time jobs can be combined to meet eligibility requirements.

Where does the problem of contingency show itself most clearly? How have we arrived at this strange moment?

For me, this veil started to lift between 2007-2009 when  open positions in a department  normally filled within two or three academic years were neglected. Programs identifying five full time faculty to best teach, advise, and curriculum design were still viewed on the ground as the best practice. Then, we get to the state level or in a private college Provost level attempts to shore up the college investments and protect the administrators **before** the market crashes of 2006-2008. You and I were indeed correct to pursue the publish or perish model; we were also people who taught our students while looking the other way as we noticed increasing demands (from the students, their needs — not the needs of the admins or their ever present desire to push three job descriptions…

By Maxwell John Love

This is the fourth in a series of Academe Blog guest posts arranged by the AAUP Committee on Contingency and the Profession in celebration of Campus Equity Week. For information on and resources for CEW, see the national website at http://www.campusequityweek.org/2013/. 

Growing up in a rural town in Wisconsin, I spent my weekends and summers with a pitchfork and straw bedding down calves on a local farm. I went on to study political science and Afro-American studies at the UW-Madison only a few miles from the hospital where I was born.

Now, as the Vice President of the United States Student Association—the nation’s oldest, largest, and incredibly diverse national student association—I find myself wondering what I am doing in DC attending meetings at the Department of Education or on the Hill. What I don’t find here in DC is a real regard for the struggle…

Guest Blogger Dr. Elizabeth Keenan teaches music history at Fordham University and Columbia University. With the exception of a one-year VAP, she has been adjuncting since 2007.

I’m an adjunct at two different private universities.* In those positions, I’ve encountered numerous tenured and tenure-track faculty who were allies to adjuncts, and numerous faculty who were not.  After Monday’s post critiquing ineffective tenured allies, I want to be a bit more productive than deconstructive. One of the things that I’ve learned from my long years studying feminist activism is that critique has its place, but positive actions should emerge from it.

Here are some handy tips, if you have tenure (or are close to getting it), and you’d like to be an ally:

By Joe Berry

This is the first in a series of Academe Blog guest posts arranged by the AAUP Committee on Contingency and the Profession in celebration of Campus Equity Week. For information on and resources for CEW, see the national website at http://www.campusequityweek.org/2013/.

The year was 1999 and all over the Internet and the mass media something approaching panic was building over the predicted collapse of all digital databases and Internet communications, due to what was named Y2K or “the millenium bug.” Many IT “consultants” made a lot of money off this panic, which turned out to be a total nonstarter in terms of a crisis.

However, as Y2K entered the common vocabulary, inspired part-time contingents in over 100 California community colleges and their various organizations had a brilliant idea. Why not use the Y2K rhetoric to dramatize the need for more equitable pay for part-timers–who, by law, are…