Comments on: Original sin: What responsibility do tenure track faculty have for the rise of adjuncts?

By: “Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna be different this time?” « More or Less Bunk

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 13:02:22 +0000

[...] he’s in very good company. If the Cal example or the UVA example in this post weren’t enough to convince you that it’s open season on college professors, then [...]

By: Alan Trevithick

Alan Trevithick — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:57:29 +0000

Was talking to who’s listening and, ok, good on you. You’ve had the news for awhile. That’s wonderful.

By: Jonathan Rees

Jonathan Rees — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:45:59 +0000

Alan:

If you’re asking about me, I spent the last year trying to organize ours along with the rest of the faculty because we’re all in this together.

By: Alan Trevithick

Alan Trevithick — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:33:41 +0000

I am not concerned much with “us as conservatives,” which seems to be where this meditation begins, but i certainly agree with this: “The real nature of the culpability that tenure track faculty bear for the adjunct problem is a sin of omission, not comission.”
Good start. We can blame you now, though, most of you, for much worse: wringing your hands in a show of despair and sympathy- well, when you’re not sitting on them in a determined campaign to do nothing. So, we’re watching, as you can imagine, to see when and how every “tenure-track people…..start thinking about the financial predicaments of people besides ourselves, especially adjuncts.”

By: sethkahn

sethkahn — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 23:00:16 +0000

As a tenured, promoted faculty member in English, I’m with you most of the way here, but think our responsibility runs deeper than this. Those of us who take reassign time need to be very aware of who teaches the courses we get reassigned from.

I’m not arguing we shouldn’t take sabbaticals, or take reassignments for administrative work, or whatever–but we do need to be MUCH more sharply aware of when and how much of that we do, and people who take reassign time habitually, who exploit it for their own personal or professional gain, etc–they *are* just as bad as managers who hire adjunct faculty willy-nilly because of cost.