Wednesday, October 15, 2008

adjunct bs

~on~

though i count myself fortunate to be working in the field, this article from inside higher ed reveals exactly why working in the field is so difficult. i think this sums it up well:

“Wal-Mart is a more honest employer of part-time employees than are most colleges and universities,” said A.G. Monaco, senior human resources official at the University of Akron, and yet academics are “the ones screaming about how bad Wal-Mart is.” Academics “have to stop lying” about the way non-tenure-track professors are treated, he said.
considering the polemics i launch against walmart in the classroom, maybe should redirect my efforts to chastising the "degree industry" for its treatment of laborers. i mean, even with union representation, compensation is still pretty scant. even more so when you consider that i make less than $2k per class, whereas a full time instructor makes just short of $5k per class. and, qualitatively, what's the difference in instruction that warrants such a disparity? i don't know, but I know that it's a 5:2 ratio of adjuncts to full-timers, and they (wisely on their part) keep the full time and part time instructors in separate unions.

this, if anything, definitely revitalizes my motivation to go back and finish my phd - it's not worth it otherwise. but then again, with a flagging economy and a similar ratio of adjuncts to professors across the country, it seems like job security in academia has an inverse relationship to the price of tuition.

~off.

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