Louis Proyect wrote:
In the June 18, 2008 edition of "Inside Higher Education", there was
an interview with Frank Donoghue, the author of the newly published
"The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the
Humanities" caught my eye, especially with what he had to say about
adjunct professors in the humanities field.
Q: Many advocates for adjuncts say that tenure-track (and especially
tenured) professors did nothing or far too little as academe was
restructured. Is this true? Why do you think this happened?
A: Certainly most tenure-track professors were oblivious as the
teaching workforce was restructured, and very few predicted how dire a
problem it would become. Had we identified the casualization of the
teaching workforce as a problem when it began to take hold in the
1980s, we might have been able to correct it. Paul Lauter referred to
the misuse of adjuncts as a "scandal" in 1991 in Canons and Contexts,
and he may have been the first to use language that strong. That we
could have done much about it over the past twenty years presupposes
that professors set hiring policies. At most institutions, professors
have a lot of input in the hiring of other professors, but not in the
hiring of adjuncts, either the people themselves or the terms of their
contracts. Decisions about adjunct labor have, by and large, never
been made by faculty, but have instead been part of larger
administrative policies.
Since a number of young adjunct professors in New York I am friendly
with have told me some real atrocity tales about finding a
tenure-track position, I decided to read Donoghue's book. In a way, it
might as well be titled "Peak Education" since it describes a downward
trajectory ending in disaster in the same fashion as "peak oil"
theories, except with academia the prospects seem far more grounded in
objective reality.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/the-last-professors/
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I'm slightly more familiar with junior college faculty pay than
universities, but at least at community colleges faculty negotiate
collective bargaining agreements and participate in shared governance
(for what that may be worth) that affects pay for adjuncts/part-timers.
Freeway fliers - faculty who hold down part-time positions at multiple
community colleges, with no benefits or permanent status, are a
well-known phenomenon. Are you saying there's no way faculty at
universities can play a role in conditions for their colleagues and
increased casualization of their workforce?
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