BY AARON BARLOW When George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq war was beginning, I attended an antiwar march in New York City. It depressed me, thoroughly; I saw immediately that this crowd was never going to have an impact on American opinion or policy. Everyone (or so it seemed) had arrived to promote their own causes.…
BY AARON BARLOW Jim Hightower, discussing the Uber “defeat” in Austin, TX, writes about the “gig economy”: This “alternative work arrangement” is not a futuristic concept — it’s already here and spreading fast. And it’s not just ride-hiring gigs either. Some 16 percent of U.S. workers are now in this on-call, temporary, part-time, low-pay, you’re-on-your-own…
Colorado’s Community College System (CCCS) continues to pay 75% of its faculty (the so-called “adjuncts”) poverty-level wages. To help our hard-working peers make ends meet this semester, our Front Range Community College AAUP chapter is hosting the first-ever Adjunct Survival Workshop. This event will simultaneously help our peers save hundreds of dollars this year, give…
Academic freedom is something we talk about a lot these days, what with Salaita and Dreger and Wisconsin and all. Less often talked about is the academic freedom of the new faculty majority. When contingent faculty’s academic freedom is talked about, it’s talked about as if precarity were the only obstacle to untrammeled academic autonomy,…
Here’s a creative but effective educational and organizing tool that our colleagues in the AAUP chapter at Front Range Community College in Colorado have published and which merits the broadest distribution: The Adjunct Cookbook, described as “48 pages of foodbank-friendly concoctions,” including “No Bucks Coffee Drinks,” “The Frappes of Wrath,” as well as “high-fat,…
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…
Yesterday Inside Higher Ed published a brief item entitled “Skeptical Reception for New Book on Becoming Adjunct.” The article reported on a new 51-page book, available for free via the Internet, with the remarkable title Become a Part-Time Professor: live and teach anywhere you like. Needless to say, more than a few “part-time professors” have…
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…