This is what gives me hope: administrator churn is much higher than tenured proffie churn. We may be able to wait out the storm–but in the meantime, faculties have to hang together lest they will surely hang separately. I don’t believe your chair is being fully honest with you. I don’t buy the “our hands are tied” line–and who are “they” going to hire to teach a history course without hir approval or the department’s input?

The whole thing reeks of a hinky scheme, Jonathan!

On the other hand, I have taught two seminars online for various complicated reasons. It can work well but both the instructor and the student have to work really hard to keep the energy flowing and the high-level analysis sparking off of each other. Too many students try to take the easy way out and fake their way through it – the challenge is to make real skiving off impossible or as close to this as can be but that takes an enormous amount of effort on the part of the faculty.

Tenure may not be worth what it once was these days, but it does give me the prerogative to not make that my problem. Besides, the administration undoubtedly prefers having that class taught by adjuncts for the reasons outlined in the post above.

I also can’t imagine handing the course over to an adjunct (a non-tenure-track full-timer, maybe, if there are multiple sections of the seminar, and (s)he can offer up-to-date instruction in a specialty the department doesn’t otherwise offer). A department that does that is, to my mind, declaring pedagogical bankruptcy.