Too much of anything can turn something essentially good into something really bad…..is this what this has become? This mornings *Chronicle of Higher Education* includes an article: The Adjunct Crisis Is Everyones Problem by Sarah Kendzior. Heres the author note: Sarah Kendzior is a St. Louis-based writer who covers politics, media and education. Here are some excerpts: [begin excerpts] Academia...[is] not an industry in which one works for pay but one in which you must pay to work. New Ph.D.s are expected to move around the country in temporary postdocs or visiting professor jobs until finding tenure-track positions - or stay where they are and work as adjuncts with no job security and an average wage of $2,700 per course. While making an income below the poverty line, a new Ph.D. is expected to spend thousands of dollars on job interviews at conferences in expensive cities and write paywalled papers for free. There is no escaping the consequences of academias reliance on contingent labor. If you do not experience the adjunct crisis directly as an academic, you may well experience it as a citizen: as a student, a parent, or a professional facing a similar contingency crisis in your own field. Here are the reasons why you should care. While low-wage workers without college degrees are told to get an education, adjuncts are asked what they thought all that education would get them. The plight of the adjunct shows one can have all the education in the world and still have no place in it. Since the recession, academias pay-to-play business model has been adopted by other professions, including law, policy, and media - all of which increasingly rely on unpaid or low-wage labor. That should not be accepted as the new normal but rejected as a crisis... Hurting researchers hurts research. Theres this huge labor force here to do the bench work, the grunt work of science, biologist Gary McDowell told The Boston Globe in a recent article. But then theres nowhere for them to go. McDowell was talking about the rise of postdoctoral fellowships in the sciences as a path to nowhere, but the same applies to adjuncts. In the current market, only 15 percent of American scientists are expected to find tenure-track jobs. As a result, many Ph.D.s leave academia and abandon their research in the process. The lack of a career track means that discoveries are derailed. When the ability to continue research becomes based on independent wealth, the quality of research and diversity of topic declines as more researchers are forced to leave the field. Exploiting teachers means harming students. If you know anyone in college, odds are good that they are taught by an adjunct. If you are a parent, odds increase every year that your child will be taught by an adjunct - while the tuition at your childs college or university rises. Debates continue over the quality of adjunct teaching but the fact remains that contingent instructors do not receive the same support and resources as their tenured colleagues. Most adjuncts are not the freeway fliers of legend but teach at only one campus, according to the 2012 report on part-timers from the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. But whether they teach at one, or three, they struggle with low pay, no benefits, and no job security. Even the most talented teachers would find their ability to perform challenged under such conditions. As Rebecca Schuman and others have noted, the percent of adjunct faculty should be included in any publication that ranks universities, as it is a leading indicator of a institutions commitment to students. It can be fixed. Like many industries, academias problem is not unemployment but poorly paid employees. While other university officials -- including college presidents and coaches - see their salaries rise, the adjuncts wages remain stagnant or fall. Many universities could afford to pay adjuncts more but instead allocate funding toward administrative salaries and lavish infrastructure. Reversing that trend means refusing to accept the adjunct crisis as an academic problem. It is a social problem... Supporting the adjuncts call for higher wages and job security means supporting a system in which tuition money goes to education instead of exploitation. [end excerpts The article is online at: Ken Pope 3 COGNITIVE STRATEGIES THAT DENY, DISCOUNT, & DISMISS TORTURE: HOW INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, GOVERNMENTS, & CULTURES ENABLE TORTURERS: Quando dou comida aos pobres chamam-me de santo. Quando pergunto por que eles sao pobres chamam-me de comunista. (When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.) --Helder Pessoa Camara, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, who challenged the military dictatorship (1909-1999)
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 02:16:37 +0000
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