Friday, January 27, 2012

NFM, MLA,AAUC: Too Many Letters-but it's all about Adjunct/Contingent Equity

Professor Michael Berube, new President of the MLA, will be attending Saturday's Reclaiming Academic Democracy: Facing the Consequences of Contingent Employment in Higher Education National Summit, sponsored by New Faculty Majority and held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) - http://www.nfmfoundation.org/National-Summit.html.
It’s wonderful to see this, and to see it covered in CHE.
If I can expand a bit on one of Professor Berube’s hopes in that CHE article, I hope that we’ll look back on 2012 as the year when we “got the ball rolling" and finally got accrediting agencies, students, traditional faculty, administrators, and policy makers inside and outside of government, to understand what non-tenure-track faculty have been saying—insecure and underpaid “contingency” cannot be the model for higher ed faculty, and we must get to work on solutions, learning as we go from those same non-tenure track faculty who are doing an excellent job, under trying circumstances, as the nation's majority faculty—and who will do even better with the proper support! Please, everybody, let’s get on board and make some loud and gladsome noises!