Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Unions for Adjuncts. From Albert the Adjunct.

 I want to tell my story in order to raise consciousness of what is going on in higher education today with respect to adjunct professors.

I am a successful mathematician working outside of academia. In 2015, a local college hired me to teach a course in mathematical modeling for upperclassmen as an adjunct professor. The chairperson who hired me gave me about month to prepare the course, which I designed myself. (Before the chairperson had hired me, I had raised concerns that a month would be too short a period of time to prepare, given my other obligations, but that I’d try anyway.)

The course naturally didn’t go perfectly, but it was successful. The students all passed with a majority of A’s. I didn’t give them their grades as gifts, and I didn’t curve the tests - they had earned their grades. At the end of the course, the chairperson thanked me and said I would be considered for teaching other courses at the college. I was pleased.

A few days later came student evaluations. And my students ripped me apart. I was shocked; during the semester, no students had raised any concerns about my class to me. I emailed my chairperson a few times to see what had happened. But there was no response.

Recently as of the fall of 2016, I found out that my email account at that college had been deleted and my name was taken off the department webpage, so I have been effectively fired from my teaching position at that college. When I started out teaching there, I was very excited – they had promised me that my children would get free tuition if I would stay on as an adjunct. Now, I’m quite upset about how I was treated. If I truly did my students wrong, then I was never given any chance to defend myself.

From this experience, I understand why teachers need unions. And I believe that adjunct professors need unions too to protect themselves against treatment like this.

14 comments:

  1. Albert, that asshole did you a favor: he/she let you know that over the long term, working for hir department would be a nightmare, for the inmates are running the asylum. But you were spared hir dissembling and prevaricating.

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    1. I agree. I will never work for a school where I have to worry about pleasing my students. I am a professional. I never tried to please them when I taught them. I only tried to teach them. I had told them they could write anything they wanted on their student evaluations and that they wouldn't hurt my feelings. This was so I would be able to know what type of students I really had. (They were all so nice and pleasant before I read the evaluations.) And I found out that the type of students that went to that college were of very low character, based on my small sample. But more importantly, I found out the true nature of the administration there.

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    2. I should say that I actually liked and still like the chairperson on a personal level. I blame the system, not the people in the system. The people running the system have all types of pressures. That's why I think unions are a good idea for adjuncts.

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    3. I applaud your willingness to blame the system, not the people in it, but the system IS the people.

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    4. I actually blame the students more than the chairperson. Nobody complained to me the whole semester; hardly anyone asked questions pertaining to the material. I had no reason to suspect that I was doing anything wrong. I treated them like adults.

      Yet they backstabbed me. I believe the real reason is because I made them work hard for their grades and they just wanted to get me back for it.

      If the chairperson would have let me stay on with bad evaluations, then he/she would have had to take heat from his/her superiors, so I had to be the sacrificial lamb. He/she didn't return my emails because he/she just didn't have the guts to face me.

      My students had bad character. The chairperson simply had weak character. This is why I blame my students more than the chairperson.

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  2. A similar thing happened to me about 10 years back. I taught a class at a satellite campus of a University that thought it's satellites should be run like for-profits, so much so that they've got about 30 satellites in three states.

    I taught and assessed with actual standards. Most of the students (mostly underprepared) didn't do the work, and therefore didn't do well. Seven out of eleven students passed (and I still feel a little sick about three of them).

    This satellite campus offered the class that they solicited me for (yes, they asked CC of the State of Denial for me specifically) once per year. I didn't hear back the next year. My emails went unanswered. I tried again prior to the next term, in case they changed the offering cycle. Again, emails unanswered. I gave up, because it was an extra assignment. While the extra money was nice, it wasn't necessary.

    Shortcut to three years later. For whatever reason, I realized that I still had the satellite campus keys on my work keychain. Don't ask why it struck me then, it just did. Anyway, I drove to satellite campus, walked in to the office, and handed the befuddled receptionist my keys, greeting her with, "You know, I haven't taught here for four years and no one asked for these. Here you go."

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  3. Can anyone recommend an updated dictionary? Every one I check has no entry for disposable under the entry for adjunct. The closest I find is temporary--but that doesn't seem to denote what I see happen too often.

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    1. Indeed. The only thing that surprises me here is that Albert is a mathematician. Because mathematicians tend to have a variety of nicely-paid jobs outside of academia available to them, I'd think that the supply of potential adjuncts would be limited, and thus the incentives to retain someone like Albert higher.

      Albert, if you enjoyed the experience enough to want to repeat it, I wouldn't let this one episode discourage you from applying for similar work elsewhere. Although many schools are far too dependent on student evaluations as a means of evaluating adjuncts, not all of them are.

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    2. I enjoyed the experience up until my student evaluations.

      Reminds me of a story of a wife who is married to the most wonderful husband in the world for forty years. Then at the end of forty years, the husband told her he really never loved her at all; he was just acting. Would the wife say she was happy she was married to him for forty years? No. She would say it was an awful forty years, even though before forty years she would have said it was great.

      I guess I'm very sensitive. I don't want to go through another experience like this again.

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  4. The top article on IHE this morning seems very relevant:
    ``Zero Correlation Between Evaluations and Learning'' by Colleen Flaherty

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    1. Of course there is no correlation. One doesn't need a study for this. It's common sense. If a professor goes easy on his/her students, has a good appearance, is entertaining, he/she will get good evaluations, no matter how much the students learn. If he/she is tough on his/her students, is ugly in appearance, is boring, he/she will get bad evaluations, no matter how much the students learn.

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    2. My physics department had vivid examples on both ends of the spectrum. One tends to talk in a monotone and gives the pre-meds a run for their money, so of course they savage him in every evaluation, but everyone respects him because his students know their stuff. The other showed lots of films, assigned brain-dead or no homework, and was a "happy, fun" jagoff. These two examples FINALLY got my department to stop taking anonymous end-of-term evaluations by students at face value: that, and two Consciousness-III, ed-school-influenced non-scientists retired.

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  5. Amen. Selah.
    If your students were able to earn As in a course with high expectations, that means you must have been clear about your expectations and how to meet them--which is certainly one mark of a skilled teacher.

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  6. Now you know why, from the beginning, it's been difficult for me to suppress the urge to grab a department Chair or other university administrator, shake them, and scream, "WHAT THE HELL IS wrong WITH YOU? DIDN'T YOU EVER HAVE KIDS?!?" The smug, sanctimonious, self-assured shit they spout is short of salubrious.

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