Having followed all of the comments on Sean Kennedy’s post and the follow-up post from the AAUP leadership, I’d like to offer several observations: It is very clear that no one has been prevented from expressing his or her opinions or from doing so without constraint. The comments do, however, collectively serve to illustrate why…
Yesterday a guest blogger posted to this site an “Open Letter to Professional Staff Congress (CUNY) President Barbara Bowen.” The leadership of the AAUP has authorized the posting of the following response to that posting: On behalf of the AAUP, we want to stress, as prominently noted on the masthead above, that opinions published on…
I have never been a fan of student evaluations, even when I have received perfect scores, whatever that means, and I have never, ever, ever, given any incentives for students to complete their “student evaluations.” No, this will not be a revelation on how I was born-again and now my teaching life focuses immaturely on…
The National Association of College and University Business Officers NACUBO) issued its survey of private, non-profit four-year colleges last week. The results – a snapshot of the health of the higher education community – speak to the condition of the patient. It’s clear that the patient is suffering. The problem is that the origins, symptoms,…
Latham, Aaron. Orchids for Mother. New York: Little, Brown, 1977. Aaron Latham has written seven books, only two of them novels. Of the two novels, only one can be categorized in the espionage genre. Nonetheless, Orchids for Mother stands as one of the major American contributions to the genre. The novel focuses on the competition…
The other night I decided to take in some Bergman. I had a few choices, thanks to Amazon’s instant video streaming service. It made it possible for me to avoid my old standby, “The Seventh Seal” (“Det sjunde inseglet”). While it does feature a young, gaunt, and very Nordic looking Max von Sydow, whose hair…
Sean Kennedy is a doctoral student at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The PSC is in the midst of negotiating a new contract with CUNY. Kennedy originally wrote and posted this letter in mid-May. It now has nearly 200 signatories. Dear Barbara— I write as a union member and CUNY contingent…
The “real problem” behind the exploitation of adjunct faculty is quite obvious: universities have continued to produce a reasonable number of Ph.D.’s but no longer are willing to hire a reasonable number of them into full-time, never mind tenure-track, positions. This situation will change when enrollment in graduate programs starts to contract, and even to…
I don’t know if the world needs another review of Become a Part-Time Professor: Live and teach anywhere you like, but I am now following in the footsteps of my truly esteemed colleagues Aaron Barlow and Hank Reichman, reviewing it after having downloaded this “book” and thumbed my way through the dumb thing on my smartphone…
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.…