You may have read Negotiating Your Way to a Fair Adjunct Experience on Vitae. I am not linking to it because I have no interest in helping the Chronicle get more pageviews, even the modest number this blog may provide. Anyway. The piece is about how adjuncts should negotiate and be willing to walk if […]
It is your fault! The arrogant libertarian troll (aka Jason Brennan) argues that (1) adjuncts should have known what the risks were and how bad the system is and (2) they have better options. In other words, adjuncts, it’s your own damn fault. Adjuncts should have known how hard it is to get a decent […]
A question from a commenter in response to my rant against academics who criticize adjuncts (and others) when they complain about academia: How is this issue the same / different than the more general issue of the have vs. have not or the powerful vs the non-powerful? What about the academic environment makes this different? […]
Columbia University, I Love You! I’m serious! Its MFA program got me started as a teacher and a writer. And I still don’t regret that career path or that I had to borrow $35K — if it weren’t for that teaching fellowship, I’d have borrowed twice as much. But in retrospect I see now […]
Me and my big mouth. I bet the world that it couldn’t show me one example of a securely employed academic risking his or her neck for contingent teachers. And I lost. So now I am desperately learning the lyrics to Der Kommissar. Rebecca Schuman is getting in on the act. When this petition — […]
Welcome, wilkommen, bienvenue, come on in! Last week, to my surprise, my Writer’s Manifesto went modestly viral (more like a slight cold than Ebola). So while I have your attention, I want to do some awareness-raising about the plight of adjuncts. Not that I really like the idea of “raising awareness,” because said raising […]
1. Alice Doesn’t Work Here Anymore I left my adjunct teaching position in the middle of last semester for a job offer I received after a year of searching—applying for positions like academic advising, admissions recruiting, community education with non-profit organization, and reception at a massage therapy clinic. (This is what the job market in […]
Once again I want to stress that my intention is not to undermine experienced organizers, who know a lot more than I do, or to talk down to my colleagues. I was inspired to write these posts because (a) I’ve been seeing a lot of distracting discussion about rhetoric and (b) in my experience […]
This morning Al Jazeera ran an op-ed from one Tarak Barkawi, who teaches at the New School here in my beloved New York City.* Barkawi is rightfully upset about the “neoliberal assault on academia” — meaning the reliance on contingent labor, the budget-slashing and the combining or shutting down of entire departments. It’s an interesting […]
I will preface this post by emphasizing that I don’t want to be trollish or to undervalue the hard work of activists. I know that adjuncts have many experienced negotiators and organizers on their side. And I am excited, even gleeful, at the possibility of making life difficult for those who have been screwing over […]