This is a picture of a stagnant pool at some very
badly managed construction site near Cincinnati. Unwise construction?
Bad
management? Sounds like higher education to me.
The Chronicle of Higher
Education has a very end-of-Augusty thing going on—its
Almanac of Higher Education 2012, subtitled "The State of Academe,” in
which their clerks and interns and junior executives (I'm guessing) present a
bunch of stuff they published or republished in the past year.
Here's their view of
themselves:
The Chronicle takes the
measure of higher education in the 2012-13 Almanac, our annual compendium of
college and university data. Choose a section below to start browsing.
Well, you can choose a
section if you want, but be aware: it’s behind a paywall.
Oh well. You can see some
of it. Like this:
Campus leaders and college
professors encountered urgent calls for change in how they do business in
2011-12.
Economic and technological
forces continued to reshape campus workplaces. Administrators closed and
consolidated academic programs and had to rely increasingly on adjunct
instructors, who now make up 70 percent of the professoriate. And leaders also
face stagnation in their own ranks.
Let’s see, there are those
“forces” again. They’re like earthquakes, or hurricanes, those things. But
then, there are some attempts by humans—puny though they are in the face of
“forces—and they have done a few things, like closing this and consolidating
that.
And don't forget, they're
"facing" stagnation. That dull and sluggish, crew, that stale and
inactive few? Yes, they’re facing stagnation?
Makes you wonder how that
managed to do all that closing and consolidating, facing the forces as they
were.
So how did they do
it? Well, they just did what they've been doing for the last 40
years—"rely increasingly on adjunct instructors, who now make up 70
percent of the professoriate."
The CHE language about
these "leaders" is that, even as they faced stagnancy in their own
rank tribe—or something like that—they "had to rely" on us.
Oh, the poor feeble little
things! I mean CHE and the Stagnant Ranks both. I mean, the system has been
relying on us every year, for the past forty of them, "increasingly,"
though fat times and lean.
Please guys, take some
time off. Read up. Try this-it’s a CHE article.* Don’t you read them? It will
tell you something about “Professor Staff,” by which is meant the majority
adjunct and contingent faculty that has been keeping higher education
afloat—you rely on us!—for a couple decades.
Well, the CHE article’s
ok*, as is the one in Inside Higher Education*, but better you should read the
whole report, out from Campaign for the Future of
Higher Education and based on research and analysis from The New Faculty Majority Foundation.
That will help you find
out what’s going on—what’s been going on—in higher ed, and while you’re
at it read this as well—Debra Leigh Scott’s “How the
American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps."
I could give you a link to
a Forbes blog where Debra's very fine piece has been discussed and commented
on, but I just don't feel like it. Sorry. Not in the mood. No, not now. I just
feel too mad. Forbes doesn't work. For me. Right now. Well, maybe. Ok.*
Look, join New Faculty
Majority, will you? Membership in NFM may be your first step in fighting back
against this “stagnant” and hardly “new” normal, or it may be an “adjunct” so
to say, to your union membership, or your membership in other adcon activist
groups. But find out about NFM, and
join.
It’ll help build a face
for all of us, nationally, so that “industry journalists” and “leaders” won’t
keep wasting our time with dumb ideas—that it’s only been recently, for
instance, that Higher Education has “had to” (or chooses to) “rely on” the
exploitation of its majority faculty.
So, that’s your homework,
and mine, and then we can all go back to school, teaching, grading, organizing,
recruiting, advocating and challenging.
*
Here they are—I just stuck ‘em down here because,
well, they’re ok, but they don’t need top billing either. http://chronicle.com/article/Adjuncts-Working-Conditions/133918/ http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/08/23/adjunct-survey-paints-bleak-picture-working-conditions
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/08/21/killing-and-reviving-the-american-university-in-five-easy-steps/
