In the late afternoon on Thursday, September 24, between 80 and 100 faculty and students at Miami University attended a presentation by CBC Chair Howard Bunsis on the university’s finances. The event was hosted by the relatively new but quickly growing AAUP advocacy chapter at the university. The presentation received fairly detailed coverage in the…
Michael Behrent, the president of the Appalachian State University chapter of the AAUP, and John Steen, Program Coordinator of Scholars for North Carolina’s Future (with contribution from Jim Carmichael, professor at UNC Greensboro and president of the AAUP’s North Carolina Conference) have an op-ed today in The News & Observer or Raleigh, NC entitled “Outrageous move to foster runaway…
::SIGN THE PETITION:: The plight of contingent faculty has been getting a lot of attention in the past couple years, and not just in academic journals with a focus on higher education issues. Mainstream media are catching on and publishing stories about the increased proportion of adjunct positions to total faculty numbers, the pitiful wages paid…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…
Phil Magness keeps attributing the growth in the percentage of part-time faculty to the rise of the for-profit universities. But his own chart seems to show that that impact has been less than one might expect. Notice that the percentage of part-time faculty at all institutions is 47%, only .4% higher than the total for…
Another element of the broader issues addressed in Aaron’s post is the disparity in the nature of adjuncting–of teaching part-time–in different disciplines and in covering different levels of courses. The adjunct faculty in professional schools very likely have full-time employment outside of the university. The same is true for the great majority of adjunct faculty…
This morning word came via AAUP Contingent Faculty Committee member Joe Berry’s indispensable COCAL Updates of the death last week of John Hess, following a six-year battle with Parkinson’s Disease. John has been described by many as, in Berry’s words, “one of the fathers of the contingent faculty movement.” The description is well-merited; John’s work…