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! 

Magical Thinking in Higher ED-NEVER STOPS

More Magical Thinking

You should all really have a look at this column in Inside Higher Ed: Castes and Higher Ed, Gloria Nemerowicz. It is just another in an apparently endless line of “reformist” essays featuring a tenderness of feeling for the poor and the downtrodden, conjoined to a faith in the power of higher education that is rendered ridiculous by some inability or unwillingness to look at the caste system in our colleges and universities. Look:

“Income and wealth inequality in the United States, which has become even more pronounced since 1967, continues to interfere with the national need for an increasingly sophisticated and skilled workforce and citizenry.”

Yikes! Does this author really not know that at least one very sophisticated and skilled workforce—the one doing all the higher ed teaching—is, well, you get the idea.

Furthermore, In regard to the author’s own institution, while the Pine Manor College website claims, no doubt truthfully, that "The College employs nearly 200 individuals, including full- and part-time faculty and staff, http://www.pmc. edu/fast-facts, the US Department of Education reports via IPEDS that PMC has 53 employees whose primary task is instruction, and almost half of these are part-time.

DO have a look and make polite comments in response.