Laura McKenna has written an excellent article for The Atlantic, titled “The Cost of an Adjunct.” I include the paragraph that references the AAUP’s analysis of the contingent component of the professoriate. Ms McKenna, however, is somewhat confused about the estimated percentages of tenured, tenure track, full-time “term” appointments, and part-time faculty. The AAUP summary states…
Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the controversy surrounding the decision last November by the Board of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies to reject a proposed fellowship program named for the prominent scholar Stephen F. Cohen and his late mentor and friend Robert C. Tucker, apparently because of…
I have always been a trivia buff. This interest has had some professional usefulness. For almost a decade, I have written the questions for the annual middle-school and high-school scholastic bowls held at our campus. I wish that I could also say that some bit of trivia has inspired a scholarly article, even one that…
The Illinois State Senate’s Democratic Caucus has released a report on administrative bloat in the state’s colleges and universities. Although much of the focus is on executive compensation and expensive perks, there are many acknowledgements that the issues with executive compensation are indicative of proportionately high compensation throughout the administrative hierarchies of our institutions and…
Tidyman, Ernest. High Plains Drifter. New York: Bantam, 1973. An award-winning screenwriter, Ernest Tidyman won an Academy Award, and Edgar Award, and a Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay of The French Connection. He also wrote the screenplays for the film adaptations of the series of novels that he wrote about the…
The federal data that will be presented in this series of posts was analyzed by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NCIR) in collaboration with the American Institutes for Research. The NECIR story on the data and its implications, written by Jon Marcus, who is currently an editor at the Hechinger Report, is available…
This is a guest post from an instructor at Louisiana Tech, who writes anonymously for fear of retribution. I see so many of my colleagues suffering, mostly in silence because what else can they do? They fear losing their job every day as it is. Their stories are painful to hear—increasing debt, depending upon parents to…
In what passes for “business” these days, institutions of any sort become potential cash cows for those at the top, structures allowing extraction of wealth while providing a minimum in return. Until, say, twenty years ago, educational entities were somewhat exempt, operating on a slightly different paradigm. Their mission was not to enrich those at the…
