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Showing posts from December, 2009

Double Adjunct Pay = Raise Number of Full-Time Professors

In a meeting of chairs in University College on Wednesday, I suggested that we should advocate doubling adjunct salaries. This would, it seemed to me, address several problems currently plaguing the university. 1. It would put the university in a better moral position. Exploitation of the people who work for you, the people who bring in the tenure dollars you operate on, is immoral. 2. It would make it less profitable to teach up to 86% (History) or 69% (English) or 80% (Humanities) of your classes with adjunct professors. If it is less profitable to do so, then it's easier to think about how to hire more full-time professors, even in hard economic times. 3. Absent the cash cow that adjuncts are, we would think better about more fully staffing departments. A larger set of full-timers leads to a better sharing of committee work and to better teaching. Forrest Williams liked the idea, and added the thought that if department chairs all refused to open new sections with adjuncts, anno

Discussion about adjunct teaching and lectureships at John Jay

A very interesting discussion, I think, about teaching as contingent faculty http://jj-english-lectureships.blogspot.com/

Adjunct Professor Without Insurance

Westminster loses revered professor Doug Wright » Philosopher of the arts-engaged students, faced cancer without insurance. By Brian Maffly The Salt Lake Tribune Updated: 12/04/2009 04:46:21 PM MST Doug Wright, a Westminster College philosophy professor revered for his ability to show students and colleagues the artistic wonder of everyday life, has succumbed to cancer. Many Westminster students claimed Wright as an important mentor in their lives. Jennifer Niedfeldt, an honors student from Salt Lake City, took four of Wright's courses, including his famous "Meaning and Movement in the Arts." "He used humor to connect with other people. He was the least judgmental person you would ever meet. Even if he didn't know you, he had this love of you and what you could be," said Niedfeldt, who graduated in May with a degree in environmental studies. "He would find that small, vulnerable part of a person and make them feel really safe." Wright, who died las

Adjunct Faculty: From the Chronicle

David Keller passed this along: November 1, 2009 When Adjuncts Push for Better Status, Better PayFollows, Study Suggests By Peter Schmidt If adjunct faculty members want to improve their working conditions, they might be better off focusing less on bread­and-butter concerns and more on securing their place at the table, a new study suggests. The study, being presented this week at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, examined 30 North American colleges at which full-and part-time adjunct faculty members had gained benefits or some other improvement in their workplace. It concluded that adjuncts had made the most progress at colleges where they tried to transform the campus climate to be more inclusive of them, rather than simply fighting to change one employer practice at a time. "Contingent faculty leaders ten