Professors Talk About Adjuncts Shrugging

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Boston — Michael Bérubé’s address at this year’s Modern Language Association convention was one of a handful of times that I felt some real solidarity in the profession against the exploitation of the majority of our students and colleagues…

So hearing Bérubé as the president of the MLA call out higher education for more than 40 years of exploitation was a watershed moment for me, and, I am sure, many others in that packed ballroom: the first time I remember seeing an MLA president receive a standing ovation. I kept thinking of Jesse Jackson crying during Barack Obama’s presidential acceptance speech in 2008.

“What if the Adjuncts Shrugged?” William Pannapacker

I have to acknowledge this as a real watershed moment. Michael Bérubé’s MLA presidency and now this speech shows that the graduate student labor movement has gone from fighting the MLA to taking it over. I was around for some of that (here’s a piece I wrote about our efforts in 1998) although I was also never as fully enthusiastic about it as some of my friends and colleagues. Professional organizations have very limited powers.

In many ways, it seemed then– and now– that the MLA is largely a venue for the minority of guilty-minded tenured professors to bemoan the labor exploitation of the majority of their colleagues and then go home to their SUV’s and giant houses and job security and cats named Trotsky. I don’t want to appear as cynical as that might sound, but while I admire Bérubé and Neslon and the like, they swam in a vast sea of academic indifference.

That indifference, as the article says, has ment that most of us who were in graduate school in the 1990’s ended up outside of the tenure system without job security or much pay or health insurance. Bérubé’s speech suggests how far we have come, but as the article also points out the victory will have little practical effect. The MLA is finally on the right side of history, but it cannot provide the organizations we need to re-make higher education.

Posted in: Writing

Show Me the (Research) Money

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Alarmed by growing scientific research on the health risks created by the widespread prevalence of guns, the NRA and its Congressional allies stripped all funding for the Center for Disease Control’s gun research budget. They also inserted a provision into the CDC appropriation bills that said “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” deterring the CDC from providing significant funds to gun research ever since. As a result, the New York Times reports, “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result.” This has meant in practice that “there is no scientific consensus on the best approach to limiting gun violence, and the N.R.A. is blocking work that might well lead to such a consensus.”

“Biden: The White House Will Fight NRA’s War On Science” Zack Beauchamp

We know from other areas– evolution and climate change would have to top the list– that the American right is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-science. They don’t want public funding of science (unless it supports corporate profit) and when science tells them something they don’t want to hear, they start disinformation campaigns. They force religious dogma– creationism– into the school textbooks and they pretend to debunk climate science.

The damage this has done to our intellectual life is probably best measured by the damage to our coastlines, amplified by the public’s unwillingness to support measures that might slow down the global rise in temperature. We are more ignorant, as a culture, than we ought to be and we will be paying the price for decades. I suppose that I knew this but it turns out the right has long used the same tactics in the science of gun violence.

Here, the enforced ignorance, sponsored by the right, has cost us in the sorts of scientific knowledge we might have used to prevent the recent gun massacres. It also makes effective gun control measures now much less effective, which I suppose is the point. I think that restoring this research has to be high on the agenda if we have any hope of real change. It ought to be obvious that We can’t prevent gun violence unless we understand it.

Posted in: Economics, Miscellaneous, Writing

Reasonable Teaching

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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.

Posted in: Economics, Professional