BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY Guidance issued late last year by the United States Department of Labor heightens the potential for faculty on contingent appointments to get unemployment compensation over breaks between semesters. The guidance, Unemployment Insurance Program Letter No. 05-17, explains the unemployment compensation standards applied to contingent faculty members and increases the likelihood that they will be…
BY APRIL FORD In this, the second and last part of my mini-series about being a “terminal” adjunct on the market for a full-time teaching position in academe, I embrace my present fate (I’ve been rejected by every institution I’ve applied to since December 2016) and express my dismay in epistolary form (based, to some…
BY HANK REICHMAN In 2012 voters in Alameda County (including this blogger), across the bay from San Francisco, approved Measure B, a parcel tax, to provide the Peralta Community College District, which has campuses in Berkeley, Alameda and Oakland, an extra $8 million each year. The funds were designated to “support affordable college education including:…
BY RYAN RIDEAU Guest blogger Ryan Rideau is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Higher Education program at Virginia Tech. I am currently working on my dissertation that examines the experiences of non-tenure track faculty members of color at predominantly White institutions of higher education. I am seeking participants for this dissertation. Participation in this study…
BY LARRY JAFFEE Larry Jaffee is an adjunct assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology in Manhattan and an adjunct lecturer at St. Joseph’s College in Patchogue, NY. Faculties across the country have expressed disapproval with President Trump’s immigration ban. At my Manhattan-based campus it’s a critical issue since about half of our student population…
BY ROBIN MEADE I can’t title this article “I Won” because I already used that title. But now I have won a $125,000 settlement and reinstatement after being fired for criticizing the administration of Moraine Valley Community College. The fact that I keep winning in court should provide everyone with hope and embolden those in…
BY APRIL FORD I’ve been on the job market since January. That’s no time at all in academe time, and already two-thirds of the applications I’ve sent out, at an average of ten per week, have met form-letter deaths. My favorite rejection so far addresses me as “Sir Ford,” and closes with “good luck out…
BY MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ Guest blogger Michael Bérubé is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He is past president of the Modern Language Association. He first published this post on his Facebook page; it is reposted here with his kind…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Our work advocating for faculty may seem to be eclipsed, at present, by national events, but the stellar AAUP members in our Colorado Community College System (CCCS) Chapters, befriended now by scores of authors, activists, lawmakers and organizers around the country, tirelessly persist, in this, the Age of Persistence. It looks as…
BY AARON BARLOW Kevin Birmingham, who teaches at Harvard as an adjunct, gave a talk last October on accepting the Truman Capote Award. It is reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education and I’d recommend that each of us who is tenured or on the tenure track read it. Birmingham writes: I sometimes wonder when the ripples widened…