We often like to bat around the miseries of adjunctery on this blog. And in the last couple of days we've been discussing whom to blame for the mess and what we might do about it. Here's an article from that bastion of feel good liberalism, The New Republic that tells you not to complain to your students about it because they aren't going to give two shits anyway.
Fair enough. I don't know that I have the answer exactly, but in the corner of the inter webs where I hang out in my meatspace identity this article has elicited no shortage of mockery. I can't decide what I think, but that may just be incipient senility.
The Flava:
There's a persistent hope that if only college students knew how little their professors were paid, they’d storm the barricades on their instructors’ behalf, or at the very least be so moved by their instructors' plight as to somehow improve their lot. The latest example comes from Carmen Maria Machado, an adjunct instructor living in Philadelphia, who wrote an essay for the New Yorker about the poor working conditions in her field—not just the low pay, but adjuncts' lack of job stability, professional development, health and retirement benefits, and even an office to call their own.
The rest, Please To Enjoy (happy now motherfuckers?)
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121389
It couldn't hurt if students understood the conditions that faculty work under. I tell my students about my research in part so that they understand that teaching is only a part of my job. Some of those undergrads may consider getting a PhD so telling them about adjunct life could help th students make a more informed decision about grad school.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's a similar issue to the one R&/orG brought up. People (students, administrators, lab directors) have things to do. Going against the tide is seen (with some justification) as personally costly and unlikely to make a difference. Students and taxpayers want to pay less, not more. It's deplorable (says I from my high horse), but not surprising. After studying global trade and sweatshops, my students, when polled, indicate that they're willing to pay on average zero extra money to buy clothing and shoes manufactured under safe and humane conditions ("I'm a college student," they explain, invoking that peculiar accounting system under which textbooks are unaffordable luxuries, but top of the line text and data plans are necessary basics).
ReplyDeleteOf course all of us turn a blind eye to the consequences of our choices. Are we going to do without cell phones? (I actually went out of my way to buy a US-made Moto X, only to see this happen right afterwards.)
I figured the writing was on the wall for Motorola when it decided to get out of the semiconductor business a few years ago.
DeleteI think it depends on the students. Privileged students who have a good deal of discretionary time and already spend some of it supporting various causes -- why not? Not-so-privileged students who are scrambling to keep their own heads above water, going in debt to pay for their educations, and generally overwhelmed -- putting one more thing on their already-very-full agendas seems like a bit much (unless or until they start saying things like "I pay your salary," or "I want to become a professor").
ReplyDeleteThe more strategic group at which to target awareness campaigns is, I think, parents -- especially college-educated parents who are paying (or expect to pay, or did pay) a substantial portion of their children's college costs. They've got a sense of what constitutes value for their money, and also of what people with advanced degrees should be able to earn (though they may not have a very realistic picture of what college professors actually do all day, or how long it takes). A larger and parallel/overlapping group is taxpayers and businesspeople -- other stakeholders who have a sense of what they want out of the higher ed system (especially their state higher ed systems), and where the money they contribute to the enterprise should go (though,once again, they may not really understand the activities involved, and/or the time those activities require,and/or how little they're actually contributing through their taxes to the present-day enterprise).
I was interested to note that National Adjunct [take you pick] Day actually elicited a certain amount of response, including on my campus, from administrators. They seemed a bit nervous about possibly-increasing public awareness of adjunctification, and possibly-turning public opinion, which I found cheering. On the other hand, at least on my campus, they seemed to be focused not so much on adjunct salaries as on the adjunct office situation, and possible deleterious effects on student privacy/FERPA violations. A real issue, but perhaps not the first one I would have picked to address.
I discussed it with my students briefly last semester because they asked. Specifically, they wanted to know what classes I was teaching in the spring because they wanted to take the next course with me. When I told them I didn't know, they were confused, then curious, then (as I told them about adjuncting) furious. They were so angry *for* me that it surprised me a bit. So my students *did* give two shits, thank you very much.
ReplyDeleteI guess the question is are they able to maintain that sense of outrage when thinking about the larger issue, or is their outrage limited to you as an individual with whom they have interacted?
DeleteI too have raised the issue with the undergrads, but with considerably less success. Perhaps if I were an adjunct they would transform their affection for me into outrage, but I have found it exceedingly difficult to get them to be interested in the issue as an abstract (to them) problem.
But I just might be a shitty explainer.
There could be a bit of learned helplessness, or a bit of "help me to change what I can, leave alone what I can't, and know which is which" as Frankie suggests. The sad part is that they are suffering the effects.
DeleteI'm convinced that this is one of many factors behind the decline in humanities majors in recent years: students are somewhat like ducklings, tend to imprint on instructors they meet early on, and want to follow them into the major. They can't, for the most part, do that with adjuncts.
DeleteOf course, that may also be an argument for giant freshman/gen ed lecture courses, so I should probably shut up before I make (other) things worse.
Well, It is an issue. I do recruit majors when I teach the large core/gen ed courses. I don't think the large courses and the small writing courses are necessarily mutually exclusive. A gateway is a gateway. Whatever works.
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