Category Archives: Professional

Under the new law, which takes effect in January 2014, employees who work at least a 30-hour work week must receive health benefits from their employers. Some colleges are concerned about how to tally up the hours adjuncts spend on the job to determine if they have reached that full-time status. Most adjuncts don’t receive health benefits, and the legislation appeared to pave the way for them to finally get access.

“IRS Says Colleges Must Be ‘Reasonable’ When Calculating Adjuncts’ Work Hours,” Audrey Williams June

One of the most insidious loopholes in labor law is the idea of the part-time and or contract worker. Through that tiny little crack administrators have driven the entire field of higher education teaching right into the ground. As long as you are below 30 hours in a technical sense (never mind the actual hours you work), you can be treated as the proverbial cog in the machine: no benefits or job security or health care or whatever.

This is why, at bottom, we’ve gone from 70% full-time faculty to 70% part-time in the last thirty years or so. Administrators didn’t want to pay benefits; since part-time and contract workers are temporary– “seasonal”?– they don’t need to be paid as much as full-time permanent employees. What’s the best way to save money, then? Make everyone temporary. It’d be great if the ACA was the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Average folks and higher education researchers have conflicting views of academia. Average folks believe that most college teachers are tenured professors and that most students are residential students who play ultimate Frisbee on the quad. Higher education researchers have a different view. We know that most teachers are actually part time adjuncts and graduate students. Residential college is for the top of the pool. Most students are part time commuters or community college students. The mistake that people make is that the most visible forms of higher education (e.g., elite research universities and liberal arts schools) are the most common.

orgtheory by fabiorojas, as quoted by Vanessa Vaile

Here’s the thing. If you take unions, and to a lesser extent, faculty governance, completely out of the picture you end up with a version of higher education that fabiorojas, in this post, calls “the best and the rest.” In other words, you get a system which has fully abandoned the goal of an educated society, and that no longer believes that scientific literacy is crucial to the future of human society. It’s a vision of utter powerlessness.

Instead, you get a system in which, as fabiorojas, says, a small minority of students “want genuine engagement and learning.” It’s expensive, though, and only available to the socioeconomic elite. That’s the best; taught by tenured faculty. The rest get “a credential and some basic vocational instruction.” That can be done on the internet, or at junior colleges, or community colleges, taught largely by adjuncts and graduate students.

I think fabiorojas is wrong on at least two counts. Humans, including teenagers, are seekers, programmed to be curious and interested in knowledge and understanding. If the system made some sort of sense, I think lots of people would choose, at various points in their lives, to immerse themselves in knowledge for a time. I also think the writer is wrong insofar as he or she implies that our current system is a tenable– or even stable– state of affairs.

Democratic culture won’t survive unless we continue to expand intellectual literacy. We can’t make good decisions otherwise; technological culture isn’t going away. In the U.S. fewer than 1/3 of us have undergraduate college degrees; that needs to double and then triple and it needs to happen sooner rather than later. It won’t happen, on or off-line, unless teachers put their own power back into the equations in the form of aggressive, unionized faculties.