In reality, instructors off the tenure track account for more than four-fifths of the faculties of two-year public colleges, more than two-thirds of the faculties at private four-year colleges, and more than half of the faculties at public four-year colleges.

“Accreditation Is Eyed as a Means to Aid Adjuncts,” Peter Schmidt

This ought to be a shocking statistic for anyone who works for a living. Academia used to be the cutting edge of employment standards in many ways; it didn’t always pay well to be a teacher but you did have some job security and benefits.  One problem is that the language is so obtuse; “off the tenure track,” means, by and large, part-time workers who can be fired at will. Imagine we…

I’ve lost jobs immediately after receiving excellent assessments from both colleagues and students. In one case, one or two teachers were able to manipulate the system for their own obscure purposes. That sort of petty, narcissistic power is probably always obscure if not inexplicable. In the second case, it was administrative power run amok. That too was obscure, but my guess is that they went for whoever talked the most.

I didn’t have the power– I should say “we” didn’t have the organizational power, that is, the faculty involved didn’t have the power–to fight either case but in each case my treatment was rewarded with severance pay.  There’s no real justice, this seemed to be saying, but at least you can leave with a little money. Academia…

I see something once and then see it again and…  You don’t see anyone in a cast for months and then you see them everywhere you go for the next week… Maybe that’s why I am finding so many small-minded thinkers this week. This piece, “Parsing Santorum’s Statistic on God and College: Looks as if It’s Wrong,” by Jonathan P. Hill in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems almost militant in its pursuit of a meaningless question.

I’m almost– not quite–shocked by Hill’s seeming lack of  perspective. He seems to have not noticed that the Republican candidates aren’t in the least worried about veracity. If all you do is try to test the truth of the hypothesis that U.S. universities are “atheist factories”…

I continue my pursuit of back-reading with s a piece called, “A Letter to Barrack Obama,” in the September 2001 issue of Harper’s, by George McGovern. Even at the distance of less than a year, it’s a remarkable piece, well-worth reading. McGovern, who says he’s never seen a president thwarted by “the kind of narrow partisanship that has beset Obama,” offers a kind of laundry list of proposals that might help the president, “on the road to greatness.”

What’s so refreshing about McGovern’s ideas is their ambitiousness, particularly after a long season of the Republican primaries, a debate poisoned by the worst sort of reactionary small-mindedness imaginable. One moment they are debating the morality of birth control and insisting…

Today’s freshmen are more focused on the financial benefits of a college education than were their counterparts four decades ago. Freshmen now are also more racially and ethnically diverse, harbor higher expectations for the college experience, and are increasingly interested in pursuing graduate degrees.

“45 Years of Survey Data Show First-Year Students’ Financial Concerns Are on the Rise,” Libby Sander

Today brings another helpful  juxtaposition or a set of juxtapositions all set against research into student attitudes done by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angles.  Students, this implies,  understand that education is both increasingly important and increasingly too expensive.  Interestingly, this interest in graduate programs is being met by shrinking Ph.D. programs (“Top Ph.D. Programs, Shrinking“).

It’s not…

Juxtaposition is a wonderful thing and, sometimes, hints at something interesting. Here’s a set of fruitful contrasts. First is the story about the beleaguered U.I. president, Michael J. Hogan, confessing to what he calls a “communication shortfall” (“U. of Illinois President Acknowledges Communication Shortfall“). Among other things, these “shortfalls” may include asking his personal assistant, Lisa Troyer, to send faked anonymous emails “designed to sway a faculty governing body’s decisions on enrollment management.”

That’s seems a little beyond “communication problems.” Once the emails were discovered Troyer resigned and Hogan rewarded her for falling on her sword with a tenured faculty appointment. Meanwhile, over in the “Administration” section there’s a piece about proprietary school’s ongoing effort to buff up their image…