Adjunct Symposiums in Next Week in LA and Boston | Adjunct Action. Next week will be a big week for the Adjunct Action campaign, as adjuncts on both coasts gather to strategize about organizing efforts occurring at colleges and universities in Boston and Los Angeles. On Friday, November 1, contingent faculty from across Boston will gather at at the Boston Central Library to discuss the next steps for the organizing efforts there. In September, Tufts adjunct faculty voted to form a union, and this week, adjuncts at Lesley University filed for a union election. Ellen Schrecker, from Yeshiva University and NYU, is scheduled to speak, as is Anne Johnson, the director of Generation Progress at the Center for American Progress. The first Adjunct Action symposium was held in Boston in April.
Click here to RSVP to the Boston Symposium. In Los Angeles, a symposium will be held on Saturday, November 2nd, where adjuncts at area colleges and universities have been involved in organizing efforts since late summer. Click here to RSVP to RSVP to the LA Symposium. Un-Hired Ed: The Growing Adjunct Crisis. Share this infographic on your site! <a href=" src=" alt="Un-Hired Ed: The Growing Adjunct Crisis" width="500" border="0" /></a><br />Source: <a href=" Embed this infographic on your site! How our best and brightest can work tirelessly for 8 years only to receive food stamps, debt, and no career. [citations] Essay on report comparing student learning from instructors on and off the tenure track. The National Bureau of Economic Research this month issued a working paper containing a preliminary report on a study of the learning outcomes of students in courses taken during their first term at Northwestern University.
The study considers an impressively large sample, "15,662 students taking 56,599 first-quarter classes" and, its authors claim, offers clear statistical evidence that the students learned more in courses taught by non-tenure-track faculty members than in courses taught by tenured and tenure-track professors. Not surprisingly, the study received extensive coverage in higher education publications like Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as attention from the mainstream media. Unfortunately, that coverage tended to misrepresent the study’s findings by claiming it shows either that "adjuncts are better teachers" or that "tenured faculty are worse. " Why is this so significant? So what does the study establish? It may not, but no matter. Adjuncts Should Do As Little Work As Possible. By Marni I was talking to my brother-in-law one day.
He is a tenured professor and has been one for over 30 years. In other words he gets the good salary and all the perks. He informed me that administrators just LOVED adjuncts. I replied, “Well, of course, we are cheap.” He replied that this was not the main reason. Administrators love us because we are pressured to give the grade away. Schools are rated on retention and graduation rates — not actual learning. At many schools student evaluations determine if you will be invited back. Adjuncting is a good job if you: Don’t prep.Assign the least you can get away with.Grade by doing a brief scan.Never grade finals — just give the student the grade you would have given him or her without the final. My last point is statistically significant. I do not adjunct anymore. And finally, to reinforce my opinion that this is really what the school wants. Tags: Grading #IAmMargaretMary. Could Grad Students Regain Union Rights? Some Hopeful Signs. Tuesday, Oct 15, 2013, 4:20 pm BY Rebecca Burns Graduate students at NYU who work as teaching assistants, research assistants and graduate assistants are demanding their right to collectively bargain.
(GSOC-UAW Local 2110) In one iteration of an ongoing joke in The Simpsons about the lot of graduate students, Lisa throws bread on the ground to feed a group of ducks, only to have a crowd of scraggly students converge instead. A professor with a whip appears and barks, "No food for you grad students until you grade 3,000 papers. " Whips aside, the scene captures the thin line between education and exploitation for advanced degree candidates, who often go deep into debt for the privilege of spending years grading Sisyphean towers of paperwork. Data on federal loan recipients released recently by the Department of Education distinguishes between graduate and undergraduate student borrowers for the first time.
The letter continues: CFP: The Problem of Contingency in Higher Education | CFP. October 08, 2013 | Filed in: CFP by Sean Michael Morris, Jesse Stommel, and Robin Wharton The case of Margaret Mary Vojtko made much more public a conversation that’s been heating up in academe. Vojtko, an adjunct professor at Duquesne University, passed away at 83, shortly after the university didn’t renew her teaching contract. Although many facts and facets about the woman’s life, wages, health, and relationship with her employer have been uncovered and discussed -- and opinions aren’t equal on all sides about her story -- Margaret Mary has quickly become the patron saint of the discussion of fair labor practices related to adjunct and contingent workers. The plight of the adjunct is not only very real, it also serves as a marker for the kinds of employment available for those who receive an advanced degree.But the problem doesn’t stop with those underemployed teachers (who make up an estimated 68-75% of higher education instructors).
Tags: Contingency, Academic Labor, Contingency CFP. Though Defiant, Senator Accused of Plagiarism Admits Errors. The Part-Time Ph.D. Student - Advice. By Leonard Cassuto My department recently graduated two Ph.D.'s of rather, ahem, mature vintage. Kristina Harvey entered our Ph.D. program with an M.A. in hand 10 years ago. Jacqueline Grindrod spent four years as a master's student and 12 more in the Ph.D. program before her successful defense. Two more disgraceful examples of grotesquely elongated time to degree? Not exactly.
Part-time graduate students in the humanities and related fields used to be a common sight on the U.S. educational landscape. That is a historic change. My department's graduate program followed the national trend in its shift to an exclusively full-time model. The national shift away from part-time graduate-school options has some eminently reasonable motives. But when we eliminate part-timers, we may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Harvey is a high-school teacher. But Harvey didn't go to graduate school for vocational enhancement—at least that wasn't her main reason. Dave Colander thinks so. Essay on report comparing student learning from instructors on and off the tenure track. I-Team: As Tuition Costs Rise, Public Teachers Don't Earn More. At Lehman College in the Bronx, like campuses across the country, students have to sacrifice just to afford yearly tuition hikes.
This year, junior Michael Bell swore off paying for the subway, just so he could pay for his credits as tuition went up more than $300. "I actually had to stop taking public transportation. I actually had to buy a bike," he said. Bell would like to think his higher tuition pays for higher teachers’ salaries, but the CUNY payroll reveals an unexpected surprise. "That says to me the priority of the institution in which we are learning is not the education of its people," Bell said.
Michael Arena, a CUNY spokesman, suggested the university’s recent offer of early retirement for many tenured professors may be a factor in the payroll decline. Despite those departures, the colleges have been hiring more full-time faculty," Arena said. In some cases, public universities have hiked tuition at the same time they've launched ambitious capital spending schedules. The Corporatization of Higher Education. The Corporatization of Higher Education Photo by origamidon, 2010, via Flickr creative commons In 2003, only two colleges charged more than $40,000 a year for tuition, fees, room, and board.
Six years later more than two hundred colleges charged that amount. What happened between 2003 and 2009 was the start of the recession. By driving down endowments and giving tax-starved states a reason to cut back their support for higher education, the recession put new pressure on colleges and universities to raise their price. When our current period of slow economic growth will end is anybody’s guess, but even when it does end, colleges and universities will certainly not be rolling back their prices. If corporatization meant only that colleges and universities were finding ways to be less wasteful, it would be a welcome turn of events. Rank Tyranny Robert Morse, who heads the team that makes up the college and university rankings for U.S.
The Rise of the Administrators Beyond the GI Bill. Top 10 Reasons Being a University Professor is a Stressful Job. College Professors Have Least Stressful Job In America, CareerCast.com Says. College professors have the least stressful job in America, beating out seamstresses, according to a new ranking from CareerCast.com, and it's causing a lot of outrage online. As more high school graduates enter universities, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts professors to be an occupation that will only become more in demand.
CareerCast.com noted some of the top ranked universities in the U.S. pay their full-time professors a hefty salary, though an advanced degree is usually required: Harvard University pays full-time professors $198,400, with a 7:1 professor-to-student ratio, while University of Chicago professors receive $197,800 per year with a 6:1 ratio. Among public universities, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is highest paying, with an average wage of $162,600 for its full-time staff Susan Adams at Forbes made the case for why profs have the easy life: University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. "The time off is incredible. No. The Least Stressful Jobs Of 2013. Why American Students Can't Write.
In "The Writing Revolution," Peg Tyre traces the problems at one troubled New York high school to a simple fact: The students couldn't write coherent sentences. In 2009 New Dorp High made a radical change. Instead of trying to engage students through memoir exercises and creative assignments, the school required them to write expository essays and learn the fundamentals of grammar.
Within two years, the school's pass rates for the English Regents test and the global-history exam were soaring. The school's drop-out rate — 40 percent in 2006 — has fallen to 20 percent. The experiment suggests that the trend toward teaching creative writing was hurting American students. Reuters The Author of 'The Writing Revolution' Responds to the Debate Fiction and poetry certainly have a place in America's schools.
Wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock A High-Tech Solution to the Writing Crisis Technology alone can't fix America's schools. Adapted from rvlsoft/shutterstock What the Best Writing Teachers Know. Sacrifices and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in Academic Careers. By the time my third week of sitting on the floor came around, a simple realization had begun to torment me: It’s all come true. Only a couple of months prior, I had, to my delight, been offered an academic job in London. However, because they wanted me to start as soon as possible and I needed to surrender my passport for a work visa application, I could not go home to the United States ahead of my start date. Instead, I sank two months’ worth of living expenses into moving south, and with me I brought the sum total of my worldly possessions in Cambridge, a modest three suitcases and three small boxes of books.
The North London apartment I’d found was lovely, blessedly quiet, full of natural light, and facing a river. It was only available for rent semi-furnished though, so until my furniture order was belatedly delivered, it was also looking pretty bare, and the only comfortable position I’d found to work was the floor. What actually filled me that evening was absolute horror.
Education & cultural capital. Khanh Ho: Professor Wang Ping: Keynote Poet for Groundbreaking Conference at UC Berkeley. I first encountered the writing of Wang Ping as a kid, sitting on the floor of a bookstore. Her prose was a beautiful thing: an eagle that swept me up into a world I thought impossible to ever occupy. There was such brutal honesty in her verbiage. Every word was a whisper in my ear. Sprawled out on the bookstore floor, I never thought I would ever meet her. Wang Ping is now a figure in the national news. Few people know this ugly little secret, but hers is not an extraordinary story; this is part and parcel of the academic world. Wang Ping has now become the emblem of a new age in academia -- a period when women in the university are standing tall, rising up and talking back.
"Dumb teacher, dumb scholar, dumb woman" -- this is one of the sad lines in the poem, a moment that demonstrates the psychological torment, the self-laceration and pain of living in a world that can blame you for your inadequacy because of your breasts.
Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education. The exploitation of contingent labor, a shrinking middle class, administrative elephantiasis: the turmoil in academia is a microcosm of American society as a whole. A few years ago, when I was still teaching at Yale, I was approached by a student who was interested in going to graduate school. She had her eye on Columbia; did I know someone there she could talk with? I did, an old professor of mine. But when I wrote to arrange the introduction, he refused to even meet with her. “I won’t talk to students about graduate school anymore,” he explained. “Going to grad school’s a suicide mission.” Unmaking the Public University The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. The American Faculty The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. The Marketplace of Ideas Reform and Resistance in the American University. Wannabe U Inside the Corporate University.
Higher Education? Crisis on Campus A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities. About the Author William Deresiewicz. Thinking About Grad School*? Don’t Go! | Wellesley Underground. *That is, if you are thinking about entering a Ph.D. program in the humanities. by Ella Dean* ‘00 (*Ella Dean is the author’s pen name) Let me start by saying that if I had read this piece, over a decade ago, I would not have been convinced.
In my naïve arrogance, I would have thought “But I’m better than her. I can do it.” And I would have been totally convinced of my superiority, my specialness, my intelligence. So for all of you special, brilliant women, please read my cautionary tale with empathy. I decided to go to grad school because I was bored on the job (working at a nonprofit, trying to make the world a better place) and because I missed school. I applied and was accepted at multiple schools. Grad school was, in short, a grind. But I made the best of it and applied myself. And then I applied for jobs. No. In my third year out, I got another full-time position as an adjunct.
Friends, that year kicked my butt. And I still didn’t get a tenure-track job. And no job in sight. *Why? Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go - Advice.