Vincent J. Roscigno, a Professor of Sociology at Ohio State University, has published a clever and insightful piece under the above title in the online magazine Counterpunch. The entire article is worth reading, but here are some choice excerpts: Equating the administrative bloating of public universities and the harm it has caused as akin to…
Yesterday I posted an entry about the AAUP Colorado Conference’s efforts to organize part-time community college faculty, who represent the overwhelming majority of community college teachers in that state. Central to these efforts has been the work of Caprice Lawless, President of the Front Range Community College AAUP Chapter and Vice-President for Community Colleges of…
In Colorado, somewhere between 70% and 80% of all community college faculty members teach part-time on term-to-term contracts. Yesterday, July 27, following the AAUP’s successful 2015 Summer Institute in Denver, AAUP-CBC President Howard Bunsis and I traveled to nearby Louisville, Colorado, to join some of those community college faculty members at a mini-Institute (the “Mini-Innie”)…
As Maria indicates in her comment, the first half or so of this post is my own commentary. The material below the line is the item from the Department of Labor. I apologize for any confusion. One can argue that adjunct faculty whose primary employment is outside the college or university at which they are…
What follows is a news release disseminated this week by the Department of Labor. _________________________ Federal enforcement effort finds more than 3,000 Gulf Coast workers owed nearly $3.5 million in back wages by staffing agencies. US Labor Department determines agencies illegally paid wages as per diem reimbursement. NEW ORLEANS — Six Gulf Coast staffing agencies have…
The two great parts of American higher education are the students and the faculty. The administrators are only around to facilitate the learning of the former and the teaching and research of the latter. Or that’s the way we imagine it. Over the past fifty years, the students have become customers instead of learners and…
Majority Rules, the reborn blog of the New Faculty Majority, has a call for contributors: We’re looking for contributions from contingent faculty and allies across the country and anywhere else contingency is a problem for faculty, covering a large number of issues and topics that will help us make and enforce those new rules. This…
Some time ago, the authors of several posts to this blog, including me, took issue with several reports that asserted either that a very large percentage of adjunct faculty are quite satisfied with the conditions of their employment or, at the opposite extreme, that the main cause of their economic exploitation has been their own…
The rampant exploitation of contingent faculty—in particular, of part-time or adjunct faculty—is one of the more disgraceful developments in American higher education over the last quarter century. It ranks with the rampant abuses committed by online for-profit colleges and universities as one of the most pernicious effects of the corporatization of higher education—and, more broadly,…
When Clark Ross sent me “Toward a New Consensus for Tenure in the Twenty-First Century” for possible inclusion in Academe, I was immediately interested. Not only was I seeing the ramping up of attacks on tenure but I have always felt the system too weak, if anything. My family moved every couple of years as I…