About a month ago, Hank Reichman posted on Become a Part-Time Professor: Live and Teach Anywhere You Like by Lesa Hammond. At the end, Reichman suggested that Hammond might want to find out a little more about the real situations of adjuncts and suggested a study she might want to take a look at. Today, Hammond responded.…
While the intellectual in me has always been a bit suspicious or patronizing of persons who read their daily devotional or Bible, I must confess that I have turned to literature in my life in what must be a very similar capacity. I have found comfort, reaffirmation, suffering, joy–I have been a participant and spectator…
A few hours ago, Aaron posted a story about the situation at Northern New Mexico College. I’m told that this is a blog written by Northern New Mexico faculty. Here are some low-lights: 1. “In the last 60 days, Northern New Mexico College has removed or lost over 25% of its full-time faculty. In addition, 4 program directors,…
This morning, a team of my students presented on the value of comedy in society. It was a fine presentation: They even cited a number of studies concluding that laughter is good for one’s health–but included the caveat that the studies were way too small to be considered conclusive. As this is a First Year…
Colleagues and I who are more deskbound than individuals who teach P.E. have joked about, I mean entertained the thought of, teaching walk jog run classes. We should be able to do it, even if our advanced degrees are in accounting, biology, or English. A fact that many faculty do not know is that in…
The following media release was issued today by the Faculty Association for the California Community Colleges (FACCC). With members at all 112 California community colleges, FACC describes itself as “a statewide professional membership association that advocates solely for all California Community College faculty. Since 1953, FACCC has provided focused representation for the community college faculty…
The following piece by Christopher Newfield, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, first appeared on the blog, “Remaking the University,” which he runs with UCLA Professor Michael Meranze. It is reposted by permission. Must innovation disrupt everything so that society might have new and better things? Widespread fatigue with this idea…
I often return to the quote, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” by William Butler Yeats, which I first became aware of through his Irish countryman and fellow poet and Nobel Prize recipient, Seamus Heaney. I don’t take this utterance to mean that what we…