On "The Death of an Adjunct"

I haven't written in a long time, and I was not going to respond to this article as people have been posting it, but I'm going to anyway. This is not a surprising or unique story, nor do I believe the system is ever going to change--there's been a lot of talk for many years but no real action on a mass scale. Universities like their cheap labor, after all, and universities have no problems churning out the laborers. And it's not like all the tenured or TT faculty and administrators think adjuncts are worthy of better pay; just take a look at all the naysayers in the comments on the various articles about the study at Northwestern arguing that adjuncts are stronger teachers: so many seem to feel that if you couldn't get a TT job, you must not be an effective enough researcher and/or teacher. I taught a 3/3/1 or a 4/3/1 or a 2/3/1 (for $2,500 per class, all writing-intensive courses, with new preps--my choice [to keep things fresh for me and for the students]--every semester) on top of 25 hours of tutoring per week on top of a TT job search on top of regular publishing for five years after my PhD. I don't regret it because I loved teaching and research; I was able to do what I loved and what I had wanted to do for a living since I was 13 years old; I think/hope my students would vouch that I taught them effectively; and I am proud of my teaching portfolio and my publications. But to work in that culture and under those conditions for any longer was unsustainable. I miss it dearly--I miss my students; I miss having conversations about literature and writing and history and film; I miss critically engaging with interesting ideas and texts that have cultural significance. And I admit that there are at least two times every week when I still want to go back and subject myself to adjuncthood just so I can experience those things again to rediscover my sense of professional fulfillment. But given my own cynicism about the present and future of higher education, it seems a better path for me, at least, to find something new--something just as (or more) rewarding mentally and professionally but far more rewarding monetarily (not to be crass, but home, food, healthcare, utilities, and just not living under financial stress or paranoia are important)--something that won't lead to the kind of tragedy in which this poor woman's story ended.

K-12 Textbook Publishing: Why Students Aren't Prepared for College

This article provides an interesting, clear, if not disturbing description of the process of (ghost)writing and editing textbooks. It indirectly offers a rationale for why the K-12 public education system in the United States suffers, especially when politically biased groups within three very large, populous states with their own rather conspicuous ideological tendencies can control the market. But it also clarifies how the obviously flawed system of standardized testing limits the content and organization of American textbooks, just as it hampers the content and organization of American classrooms. It's no surprise that incoming college students are often not fully prepared for the rigors of higher education if they are fed mediocre (or worse) textbooks taught by teachers chained by teaching to the test. The author, however, does offer some potential solutions at the end, so there is hope for progress in this significant factor of early education.


But one really does begin to question the statewide textbook adoption system. One also wonders why university professors are not allowed to write and publish K-12 textbooks in their fields of expertise to fulfill tenure publication requirements. After all, higher education faculty are the experts in the sciences and the humanities, and ideally, students in primary and secondary education deserve to be educated and enriched by scholarship researched, written, and/or compiled by academics. However, the professionalization of all university disciplines seems to have rendered any publication for general audiences "below" the standards of tenure and promotion in the university system.


For instance, see Peter J. Bowler's Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (applicable to the US despite its focus on the UK). Bowler argues that scientists in the early twentieth century often wrote instructive texts for general audiences because secondary education had become compulsory but universities were still unaffordable for many, which created an audience hungry for educational texts about subjects like biology, physics, chemistry, and math. Scientists who engaged these not-quite-mass-market projects were not looked down upon by their colleagues, professional organizations, or research institutions, and because they were often paid poorly for their teaching commitments, they had additional incentive to share their knowledge with audiences beyond the college classroom. But once universities became more accessible in the 1960s because of changes in financial aid and admissions, and once the masses turned to different forms of entertainment (television, the Internet of the mid-twentieth century), scientists were no longer encouraged to write for the general populace. Journalism became the realm of popular science, and publication in journalistic media or other markets, such as primary and secondary textbooks, would no longer meet the requirements of academic credentialing. And from there, we begin to see the erosion of quality in instructional texts for children, quality contingent not on the accuracy of content but rather on the stultifying demands of a compromised market.


It might be interesting to see what would happen if college professors were again allowed to write for general audiences. Could we galvanize greater interest in academic subjects and improve informal education among the public? (This would depend, of course, on the talents of faculty who, like the scientists profiled in Bowler's book, would likely need to be trained to adapt to a writing style accessible to non-academic readers). Could we alleviate the pressure on faculty who are (unfairly) asked to operate under the publish-or-perish imperative/threat even while publishers and markets for academic monographs dwindle? Could we change the process of textbook composition so that K-12 students might enjoy reading (and K-12 teachers might enjoy teaching) materials that reflected more informed, scholarly content less prone to the editorial intervention of and censorship by groups whose interests have less to do with education than with political or personal interests? Could students therefore become better educated and thus better prepared for higher education?

The Corporatization of University Libraries

The Chronicle recently published a piece discussing the effects of corporatization on academic libraries, which can have wide-ranging effects on undergraduate, graduate, and other scholarly research.

Why We Need Tenure

As a faculty member who is not eligible for and will never be eligible for tenure, I admit that I sometimes find it difficult to support a system that I can never enjoy. I can also admit that I have seen the tenure system abused: professors who are supposedly being protected for the purposes of academic freedom end up treating tenure instead as a shield against being fired for poor performance, teaching poorly (if they teach at all); lecturing about the same material the same way 20, 30, of 40 years later; nominally doing research, which sometimes means they go to conferences occasionally (if they go at all) while retreading old ground. I have also read the stories that suggest tenure is a myth anyway: if 70% of faculty are contingent as I am, that means 70% of faculty are not eligible for tenure, and that does not include the number of professors who are on the tenure track but have not yet received tenure; meanwhile, professors who do have tenure can be fired for causes that should be protected by tenure (e.g., espousing ideas or publishing research that criticizes institutions that provide funding to the school by which the professor is employed or that otherwise fly in the face of the establishment). Many of my friends who do not work in academia do not understand tenure since other professions do not have such a system in place, and it can be hard trying to explain why colleges and universities enjoy this privilege while other equally important institutions do not.


Nevertheless, tenure is an important system (ideal? goal?) that protects academic freedom and integrity. Cary Nelson, President of the AAUP, recently wrote an editorial in The Chronicle that argues why we must have tenure. Interestingly, Nelson targets the parents of college students in his article; given the amount of obscurity and controversy around tenure, his purpose is both to inform and to persuade.


I absolutely believe we need to reform the system, yes: let's extend eligibility to contingent faculty; let's compel universities to clarify their tenure requirements so that young faculty are not in the dark about how to achieve this coveted status; let's make sure that the requirements for receiving tenure are reasonable rather than Herculean; let's make sure abuse of tenure continues to be an anomaly rather than becoming a norm. But Nelson's reasons are valid. The comments on the article are also revealing about this controversial aspect of higher education. 

For-Profit Colleges

I watched this PBS documentary a couple weeks ago, and it made me really angry:


Frontline: college, inc.


There seems to be a fundamental problem with the idea of an institution whose supposed intention is to open up higher education to those who would not otherwise be able to have access to it but then charging them more than traditional non-profit universities so that lower-income students attending for-profit colleges will eventually be saddled with even more debt (tens of thousands of dollars of greater debt) than students attending public state universities and liberal arts colleges. Here's Stephen Colbert's note on the same issue:


Colbert University


The Colbert clip includes a quick interview with Andrew Hacker, one of the authors of the recent book Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do about It. I strongly recommend this book: it's a quick read, it convincingly presents in clear terms a lot of major issues contributing to the diminishing quality of higher education in a lot of universities today, and it offers some potential solutions. 


For the other side of the for-profit university debate, see this interview with a CEO of one of the online for-profit schools: "Online Learning and the World of For-Profit Education."

Student Excuses for Not Attending Class/Missing Assignments

A funny for you.
I once had a student miss 3/4 of a semester; he was conveniently gone during the period of the term when all his papers would have been due. His excuse: he was in jail. I did not ask why. He later withdrew from the class.

Is a College Degree Worth It?

Here are a couple recent articles on whether a college degree is worth achieving, especially given the current economic crisis and rising unemployment:


Brad Tuttle, "College By the Numbers": This basically runs down a lot of statistics in recent reports about higher education from around the Web.


"A College Degree Pays off--and Then Some: A Report": This provides a link to a College Board report that summarizes the various benefits of having a college education. The benefits are not simply economic (e.g., employability, salary) but also social (job satisfaction, marriage rates, involvement with children, health, voter participation, volunteerism). In a sense, this report suggests the ways in which having a higher education benefits not just the individual but also his/her family and community.

Entry-Level Jobs Going to Public State University Students

This somewhat brief article in a recent issue of the Wall Street Journal suggests that entry-level jobs in large companies are going to students who have graduated from large state schools, such as Texas A&M and University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). I'm not sure how reliable the study is, and the comments on the article bring up some major problems with the reporting in the article. However, one might see that it makes sense that large recruiting companies would make it easier on themselves to recruit from large state schools: to use crude economic terms, public universities are going to provide greater supply to meet the corporate demand. But this article does raise the question of whether larger state schools really do train their students with the "practical skills" they need for entry-level jobs better than elite liberal arts schools or Ivy League universities. Are the educations received at state schools more "useful" or "utilitarian" than those received at smaller, private institutions?

The BP Oil Spill and Academic Freedom

In this much-discussed article, Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), reflects on British Petroleum's hiring of university professors to conduct research with the intention of investigating, solving, and preventing a future oil spill like that in the Gulf. The researchers hired by BP are restricted by confidentiality agreements that seem out of order with academia's investment in academic freedom. The comments on this article reflect the controversy over this issue.

Research Universities and Corporate Funding

If one wonders about the pressure corporate ties to academic research can have, check out this link, which is a Huffington Post article about Toyota's relationship with Southern Illinois University. When one of SIU's professors, David Gilbert, conducted lab tests on Toyota vehicles to find out whether electronic flaws in the cars' computer systems might have been at fault for unintended acceleration, his findings did not please the automaker. When Toyota discovered that the professor was testifying before Congress in Washington, the company was quick to remind the university that "Toyota regularly contributed to the university – including a $100,000 check to the auto-tech program in late 2008 – and 'due to the outstanding reputation your automotive technology program has, we donate much more than money,' including cars." Although Professor Gilbert is protected by tenure for speaking out about his findings, apparently one of Toyota's marketing representatives who is also an SIU alum opined to the university chancellor, "'I believe he should not be an employee of our fine university.'" That use of the personal pronoun "our" seems problematic; granted, the Toyota sales rep is an alumnus of the school, but in some ways, his use of that inclusive pronoun also suggests a vaguely proprietary relationship between corporation and research institution, as if the automaker's financial and other contributions to the university meant that Toyota owned SIU (either literally or metaphorically). This is yet another example of the dangers posed by the corporatization of the university.