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 I agree completely with him that the hiring system is outdated.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.
O Academic Martyr Squad, your paper-grading crosses your defining characteristic–I see you the cross of grading, and raise you the cross of ACADEMIC FREEDOM.
A little backstory…
When I published “The End of the College Essay (An Essay),” I definitely expected a fracas. Here, in no particular order, is what I expected, and could handle:
1) Righteous indignation (the more senior the faculty, the more prestigious the institution–in short, the less likely one is to have graded an average Freshperson paper from the American hoi polloi in the past decade).
2) Disagreement and passionate defense of the essay, even when students don’t want to write it. And this was kiiiiinda my point. If you’re so wedded to the idea, then we need to work to fix it, pronto. The plagiarism, the rush jobs, the general consumer mentality of today’s American college students–these are real problems, and they need to be…
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Adjunct Professors Academic Apartheid.
Academic apartheid: hard words to describe a hard truth. These words accurately describe the situation which is widely ignored,, by most faculty, adjunct and tenured, even as the adjunct crisis of higher education begins to get national media attention. Fuller’s right, too, about what needs to happen to counter our dismal circumstances. We need to work at local levels to “end the exploitation” of adjuncts “relegated to the back of the bus.” But we don’t just need equity for adjuncts: we need reversal of adjunctification.
The Adjunct Crisis 