On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote: > >> hello, guys, it IS a business -- but that doesn't mean that it's just like >> that bizarre fantasy of A Business or of The Business World that you, who >> have never really worked there, have in your head. >> > > From what I have seen, it is a step beneath the business world. When I was > a subcontractor at Goldman-Sachs, I was invited to become a full-time > employee on the strength of my technical expertise. In all these fucked up > community colleges and state universities, that invitation is never > extended. Also, from what I am reading in Marc Bousquet's "How the > University Works", the adjuncts tend to be less male and less white than the > tenured people so you have a caste type thing going on. Meanwhile, the > quality of education delivered by adjuncts is compromised by a number of > factors thus making higher education in the U.S. even more degraded than it > would be if the faculty was full-time. Capitalism really has a way of > undermining its own long-term prospects through these kinds of cost-cutting > measures. > if only the business world were such a paradise. i have to agree, though, that my current Really Big Old Company employer has a much more diverse workforce, including management, than MOS. otoh, I came on as a one-year at MOS and survived the search to get the tenure track slot. I think there are still places where you can get bumped to full-time or tenure track in academia. a (female, fwiw) friend of mine in the UK recently landed full--time gig this way. maybe that's harder in the US. and the last i heard there are bigger schools with more money who will assign funds for what they call "targets of opportunity," which usually involve hires of traditional minorities into senior slots (associate or full). the flip side of this of course is that there are very very unprofessionally run corporations. it's not surprising that a company as successful and flush with cash as goldman-sachs would do things that way. lots more companies don't. none of this of course is to minimize the adjunct issue, or the issue of glass ceilings in academia. i saw it in its full glory at MOS. i'm talking about colleges who think "being like a business" means things like the cost-cutting you're talking about. it means not being responsive either to students or to faculty members and doing things like bending over backwards to keep someone great when you've got them. sorry this is a complicated question and i'm not really doing it justice right now. but i hope at least it's clear where i'm coming from on this. j
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