Tuesday, February 3, 2015

So What Are You?

We ran a little survey this morning, asking readers what kind of situation their situation was in.

It's anectdotal as all get out, and it's limited to the first 100 respondents. There were also a handful of comments or "others," including: retired, postdoc, grad students teaching elsewhere while finishing a PhD, etc.






7 comments:

  1. I don't believe this propaganda at all. I know you'll delete my comment because you've made this graph above to counter a claim that everyone knows is true: This sad website is just a place for a few juco part-timers to gather and bitch about how they didn't work hard enough in grad school and ended up losers.

    Part-timer numbers reach 30-50% around the country, but apparently not here where you claim only 5% are part-timers.

    This is bullshit, as anyone who reads this page can tell you. What a waste.

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    Replies
    1. It was just a record of the votes of the first 100 people who voted on the survey. We had about 7000 hits yesterday, our biggest single day since the reboot last year, and I'm sure that the numbers would vary depending on the day and time the survey was offered.

      I'd bet all the adjuncts were in class teaching, because what I know of that world - and there ARE a lot of Misery members who come from those ranks - they are often the busiest teaching professionals in the academy.

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    2. I wondered when this "accusation" (still not sure why it's an accusation, or "juco" a putdown (though it's definitely an anachronism)) would come up.

      I, too, was surprised not to see more adjuncts in the results, and came to the same conclusion. Besides being busy, adjuncts are less likely to feel safe logging on from campus (or to have access to a computer on which to do so). I'm one of the full-time, non-tenure-track respondents, and I don't log on to Cassandra's account from school.

      I suspect that many people on here have relatively heavy teaching loads, but that category includes plenty of tenure-line and tenured faculty (including some at community colleges). Even among tenured faculty in the U.S., I suspect that professors who spend most of their time teaching a few upper-level and grad classes and doing research (and some service) are in the minority. They just feel like the norm when one is in grad school at an R1 (and to the very few who go straight from an R1 grad school to the tenure track at an R1).

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    3. I am also surprised by the number of adjunct respondents. I agree that it is likely to do with poll timing and ability to vote. I am an adjunct. And some of my Jucos are my best students. Motivated by having been in the "real" world.

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  2. While I feel like I teach at a juco, sadly, I do not. My students might as well be of that caliber though.

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