Overuse and Abuse of Adjuncts Threaten Academic Values. The increasing exploitation of contingent faculty members is one dimension of an employment strategy sometimes called the "two-tiered" or "multitiered" labor system. This new labor system is firmly established in higher education and constitutes a threat to the teaching profession. If left unchecked, it will undermine the university's status as an institution of higher learning because the overuse of adjuncts and their lowly status and compensation institutionalize disincentives to quality education, threaten academic freedom and shared governance, and disqualify the campus as an exemplar of democratic values. These developments in academic labor are the most troubling expressions of the so-called corporatization of higher education.
"Corporatization" is the name sometimes given to what has happened to higher education over the last 30 years. The most striking symptoms of corporatization shift costs and risks downward and direct capital and authority upward. What to do about it? Surviving the post-employment economy - Opinion. A lawyer.
A computer scientist. A military analyst. A teacher. What do these people have in common? They are trained professionals who cannot find full-time jobs. Since 2008, they have been tenuously employed - working one-year contracts, consulting on the side, hustling to survive. They spent thousands on undergraduate and graduate training to avoid that hustle. Unemployed graduates are told that their predicament is their own fault. Changing your major will not change a broken economy. People devalued In the United States, nine percent of computer science graduates are unemployed, and 14.7 percent of those who hold degrees in information systems have no job.
It is not skills or majors that are being devalued. Academics face particular derision for their choice of profession. It is true that the academic job market has been terrible for decades. Best of bad options Despite the dire employment conditions of higher education, young people continue to enrol in graduate school.
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] I Got Fired For Tweeting. Until last week, I worked at a food truck downtown. We sold grilled cheese and milkshakes.
One of the unusual things about this particular food service job was that the owner used customer comments and pictures on social media—especially Twitter and Instagram—to monitor his workers. Grilled cheese: gamified. And it was explicitly framed as a game for workers. Members of whichever 'crew' got the most positive feedback on social media each month would win a $25 iTunes gift card. But compliments are hard to track online. Anyway. I was making sandwiches, another worker took the order and a third made the milkshakes and watched the grills. I asked some of the group as they were picking up their orders if they had intended to not tip. Well. Shout out to the good people of Glass, Lewis & Co. for placing a $170 order and not leaving a tip. Two days later, I got a text from the owner asking if I was free to talk on the phone at some point.
What did I get out of this? Judge Rules for Interns Who Sued Fox Searchlight. Negotiating Tactics Play Role in Gender Pay Gap - Real Time Economics. Larry Gagosian’s feet of clay. Carol Vogel has a good summation of the craziness at Gagosian right now. Within the space of a week, the largest and most important art gallery in the world suffered three massive defections: first Jeff Koons announced he would have a major show with archrival David Zwirner, then Damien Hirst said he was leaving Gagosian entirely, and then Yayoi Kusama said that she, too, was leaving. It’s hard to overemphasize how unthinkable even one of these moves is, let alone three at once. Gagosian is the gallery you move to, not the gallery you move from.
At every other gallery in the world, the big fear is that if they’re successful and help one of their artists become a global star, then Larry will swoop in and sign that artist up, grabbing all that juicy future income for himself. And if Larry really loves you, he’ll do the kind of thing that no other gallerist could even dream of: a simultaneous show of spot paintings, for instance, in eleven different galleries around the world. A Case for Purpose and Meaning at Work. Two recent surveys have revealed that a majority of American workers are not fully engaged in their jobs. As a leader, it’s important for you to strive to keep purpose and meaning in the lives of your staff; otherwise, your business will inevitably suffer. The first survey, conducted by Gallup beginning in the fourth quarter of 2010 to explore workers’ engagement levels, developed an employee engagement index that is based on responses to 12 actionable workplace elements with proven linkages to performance outcomes.
These include productivity, customer service, quality, retention, safety and profit. Additional research showed significant linkages between engagement at work and health and wellbeing outcomes. Gallup notes that a strong relationship has been identified between employees’ workplace engagement and their respective company’s overall performance Kids drawing and Newspaper drawing by Chelsea.
The Long Legacy of Cheating at Harvard. The 'Busy' Trap. Anxiety: We worry. A gallery of contributors count the ways. If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!”
“So busy.” It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do. Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Brecht Vandenbroucke Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Our frantic days are really just a hedge against emptiness. I am not busy. Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. Phd-job-crisis-640x4627.gif (640×4627) Graphic Tales of Larceny. University of Pennsylvania Dean Faked PhD. The University of Pennsylvania is keeping mum on the resignation of a dean of its graduate school, who duped the Ivy League school into believing he had a doctoral degree from Columbia University.
A report this week by the Philadelphia Inquirer raised questions about the pedigree of Doug Lynch, vice dean of the graduate school of education, who claimed to have received a master's degree and a doctorate from Columbia University in 2005 and 2007, respectively. Neither of those claims is true, according to Columbia officials. Lynch did received a master's degree in 2010, and has entered -- but not yet completed -- the doctoral program. But UPenn, having found out about the bogus claims earlier this year, decided to keep Lynch in a leadership role, school officials told the Inquirer. "He mistakenly believed that it was complete," University of Pennsylvania graduate school spokeswoman Kat Stein told the newspaper, referring to his doctoral degree. Lynch then resigned. The business of universities is … education? Excellence? Job placement? | Emanuel Derman. Every day I seem to come across new articles or incidents concerning universities that indicate the increasing strength of the tidal forces pulling at them and their denizens: Ethical problems: University of Pennsylvania sloppy about hiring someone with a fake PhD, then reluctant to fire him.
Profit-making as a dominant goal: The New Yorker on Stanford as Get-Rich U. Universities used to be safe jobs whose sole glamor was intellectual. Now not only university presidents but even faculty can make large amounts of money by patents, connections with business, consulting, boards, angel investing. There are massive discrepancies in salary across the faculty. The relentless desire to grow at all costs: NYU faculty complain. Part of the trouble is the perplexity as to where universities lie in the spectrum of higher learning vs business. Now, universities are different. They patent algorithms. Pharma companies reside on their premises. Office of Personnel Management establishes new intern guidelines - The Federal Eye. Posted at 10:27 AM ET, 05/10/2012 May 10, 2012 02:27 PM EDT TheWashingtonPost By Timothy R. Smith Starting in July, students and recent graduates will have a clear path into the federal workforce, under new rules the Office of Personnel Management will issue Friday.
The rules, which establish three separate Pathway Programs, are in response to an executive order issued by President Obama in December 2010 that shut down the Federal Career Intern Program. OPM’s new Pathway Programs will have three routes for students and graduates to enter the federal workforce. A new Recent Graduates Program would offer a developmental program to people who have recently graduated from qualifying educational institutions or programs. Participants would have two years after graduating to apply for the graduates program. The existing Presidential Management Fellows Program, the government’s leadership development initiative, is being kept, with changes expanding the eligibility window for applicants. The Best Internships For 2012. The Uses and Misuses of Unpaid Internships. The Murky Ethics (and Crystal-Clear Economics) of the Unpaid Internship - Derek Thompson - Business. Unpaid internships are on the rise. Tell us your stories -- and your opinions -- about working for no pay Update!
Read the our double-barreled commenter response. In defense of unpaid internships, here. Against unpaid internships, here. Reuters My name is Derek, and I was an unpaid intern. I begin with a confession, because the unpaid internship has become something of a dishonor, if not a scandal. Of the 10 million students at four-year colleges in the U.S., more than 75% have at least one internship before graduating. If you've ever had an unpaid internship, there is a distinct chance that you participated in unlawful activity.
The Labor Department has strict guidelines for unpaid interns, and every year, thousands of companies dutifully flout them. Every unpaid intern I know -- and every unpaid internship I've had -- broke at least one, if not all, of these rules. And, increasingly, it is what college graduates do with their full years. But I worry the problem is somewhat intractable.