POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for Euronews, Cristina Abellan Matamoros, Natalia Oelsner, and Marta Rodriguez have reported that a Venezuelan professor’s tweet showing the cracked soles of his shoes and explaining that it will cost him four months wages just to have them repaired has gone viral. The English translation is: “I’m not embarrassed to…
BY MARGARET MORGANROTH GULLETTE In the days since Academe published my essay, “The Monument and the Wrecking Crew: Ageism in the Academy,” which explored the misery of individuals and the high costs to society at large of losing tenure, additional faculty members have written to tell me their formerly hidden stories. The ways of getting rid…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Hauling rocks. Nailing fence posts. Painting walls. Babysitting. Folding sweaters. Making photocopies. Cleaning horse stalls. Laying sod. Pouring coffee. Packaging candies. Watering plants. Driving UPS vans. Delivering pizzas. Delivering flowers. This is just a short list of what many of America’s 768,000 college teachers will be doing this summer to try to…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Bread-bakers depend on the dough’s rest, during which time the yeast rises. The peasant farmer uses winter to carve wood or nail things together. Pickle-makers know it as the cure; those passing hours as the cucumber mysteriously turns pickle. Whatever. Hallmark-Channel-ey platitudes don’t play on the edgy, 24/7 adjunct reality show no…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Rebecca Bodenheimer has contributed a freelance opinion piece to CNN that is very lucid, very galvanizing, and very much worth reading and sharing. In it, she connects to the frustrations being expressed by K-12 teachers in an ever-expanding number of states to the endemic frustrations of contingent faculty at the post-secondary…
BY STEVE MUMME It was a landmark moment when Colorado State’s faculty council voted to endorse the Committee on the Responsibilities and Academic Standing of Faculty’s (CoRSAF’s) proposal establishing “contract” faculty appointments for non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) on campus. The new appointment type effectively brings those faculty out of the shadows and into the mainstream…
Our AAUP chapters of the CCCS, now with members at six of the 13 colleges within the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) are celebrating our fifth year of organizing CCCS faculty. We have been advocating for equitable wages, health-care benefits and due process rights through five years of potlucks, pub crawls, Scrabble games, coffee klatches,…
BY NATHAN S. WEBSTER As a soldier in the US Army, I served in Iraq during 1991’s Desert Storm. So I understand institutional loyalty. I understand sacrifice in pursuit of a larger mission, and pride in a strong community tethered by common purpose. In recent weeks, the University of New Hampshire has gone in a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last June I posted a piece to this blog praising conservative scholar Jonathan Marks for his forthright defense of the academic freedom of Black Lives Matter activist Lisa Durden, who was dismissed from her part-time teaching position at Essex County College in New Jersey after she argued with the odious Tucker Carlson…