Wednesday, February 25, 2015

So What (If Anything) Happened At Your School?

image making the rounds; I got it here: http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/02/25/ranks-swell-paychecks-dwindle-adjuncts-hold-national-day-action

Today was (Inter) National Adjunct Walkout Day (or, in some places, Adjunct Action/Awareness Day, or Adjunct Dignity Day).  What, if anything, happened on your campus?  Did you see/hear any press coverage?  Do you think this is the beginning of a movement?  A flash in the pan? Something in between? 

5 comments:

  1. Fucking nothing happened. Or I didn't hear it.

    My last encounter with the reactionaries at my joint was an exercise in navel-gazing. Even they couldn't be motivated to discuss, much less organize, participation in such an event.

    Which means the beatings continue until morale improves.

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  2. Nothing at my school. I did not do anything special today, but I am always very upfront with my students being an adjunct. I have been doing this almost since day 1. I probably talk too much.

    In fact it appears from the graphic above that nothing happened anywhere near here!

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  3. There was an AAUP-sponsored adjunct forum at my place (which does appear on the map), but it was advertised without any reference to Walk-Out Day. I did not attend because I am full time. My SO adjuncts elsewhere and cancelled class--included it on the syllabus and explained it to the students on the first day. I don't think any other adjuncts there did anything, though.

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  4. We had a forum-type thingie, too (where the image above was part of a powerpoint). It was a bit hidden away, and the attendance was probably in the low dozens, but it was a start. I learned a few things, and met a few people.

    The thing I found most interesting about the whole thing is that administrators (on my campus, and nationwide) seemed more nervous about the whole thing than seemed entirely justified by the somewhat seat-of-the-pants organizing style. I'm sure that's partly because administrators are always nervous about anything that might turn into a PR problem and/or end up costing them money (and besides, labor unions got involved, and a labor union has actually managed, for the first time in a long time, to disrupt a significant sector of the economy this month). But I'm going to take it to suggest that we might actually have some leverage, and should keep pushing (I suspect the administrators may be noticing one turn in the national rhetoric: while it's still out there, there seems to be much less discussion of lazy, overpaid professors these days, and much more discussion of bloated, overpaid administration. Of course, as we've discussed here, the whole thing is much more complicated than that, but I'm still counting it as progress).

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