This guest post was written by Leemon McHenry, a lecturer in philosophy at California State University, Northridge. His article, “Of Brahmins and Dalits in the Academic Caste System” (co-written with Paul Sharkey), appears in the January-February 2014 issue of Academe. In “Of Brahmins and Dalits in the Academic Caste System,” (Academe, Jan-Feb 2014) Sharkey and I blame the corporatization…
In The New York Times yesterday, there’s an article by Rachel Swarns called “Crowded Out of Ivory Tower, Adjuncts See a Life Less Lofty.” In it is this line: Adjuncts say that much more is needed. It shouldn’t just be adjuncts. It should be all of us, from the newest student to the full professor getting…
(This article appeared in the latest issue of the Illinois AAUP’s newspaper, Illinois Academe.) By Keith R. Johnson, Oakton Community College The Great Recession impacted everyone, but it contributed to a real hit for public college and university adjunct faculty. Pressures on budgets over decades have slowly increased higher education’s dependence on adjunct faculty. Now…
The AAUP has long been sounding the alarm about the problematic rise of contingent faculty appointments, which generally come with no job security, few if any benefits, and a fraction of the salary that a tenured or tenure-track faculty member can expect. In the January-February issue of Academe, Chris Nagel looks at the question from…
In his introduction to the 2000 edition of his 1987 book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Russell Jacoby wrote: Intellectuals have not disappeared, but something has altered in their composition. They have become more professional and insular; at the same time they have lost command of the vernacular, which thinkers…
Many of us, and for many years, have been raising our voices against the growth of two-tiered systems in the United States. The sense of security felt by those at the top, unfortunately, keeps them from listening–and this is just as true in academia as it is elsewhere. Let me be blunt: Instead of seeing…
One of the dangers of the over-reliance on (some would say “abuse of” and I would not argue) adjuncts and other contingent hires is that it creates a pressure-cooker environment for those particular teachers, one that sometimes explodes–as it did yesterday for adjunct and Slate contributor Rebecca Schuman. Writing, putatively, about student essays and whether or not they…
In her testimony, Maria Maisto correctly emphasizes that the ACA itself is not the problem but, instead, the efforts by colleges and universities to avoid providing to their part-time faculty the health insurance that the ACA makes available. _________________________ 1700 West Market Street #159 Akron, OH 44313 Testimony for the Record Submitted to the…
Not surprisingly, the following news release reflecting the ideological position of the GOP majority on the committee completely ignores Maria Maisto’s testimony and frames the hearings in which she participated as providing just further evidence of the supposedly devastating impact of the ACA. Notice that Maria’s testimony is not quoted even once in the excerpts…