<<If you (or anyone) can point to an example of a thread that got clearly and permanently hijacked I'd be interested to see it.>>
When someone tries to re-enter material more germane to the overall thread topic and the other three or four hijacking posters keep going back to their pet peeves, it gets really tiresome.
Mostly, after three off-topic posts, I just give up and stop looking at the thread. So it's hijacked from then on from my perspective. I might try a couple times to re-route it back, but if the hijacking persists, I consider the thread dead (a la Fiona of blessed CHE memory) and just read the ones that haven't been so infected yet.
I teach my music students not to be Johnny- or Jill-one notes. I want expressive range and a variety of tones from them, and I expect the same of an academic discussion.
My personal teaching experience has all been as an adjunct, as well as a private music instructor and substitute in the public schools, but I don't feel the need to drag that into every discussion, nor do I welcome it when others do. (My work as an academic executive assistant provides whatever insights I have to TT issues; I try to be very careful neither to overstep my purview, nor to misrepresent myself in that sense).
Joining the "poor adjuncts we" chorus would be degrading in my sense of things--I've had wacky experiences as an adjunct, but not universally bad ones--and it would also be like saying that only my experience is normative for TT and NTT/semi-permanent faculty...so, no better balanced.
I want to learn more broadly about what others have experienced in other settings--in fact, if it ever became possible, because of other situations, to try to make a move like that, I'd feel very poorly served by threads that only, ever, always talked about adjunct issues and not the larger ones.
Maybe a thread or two on adjunct issues would be good, but when one gets started, the rectangular firing squad ignores that and keeps cropping up everywhere else, which belies the statement that they want more emphasis on adjunct issues.
And some things--like running a lab--are also science-vs-humanities issues. I've worked in both areas, the sciences as an EA, the humanities as a researcher, teacher, and writer, and I try to mention sometimes the fact that some of the assumptions might be more appropriate to one or the other side of that continuum.
But I don't go putting down science-y folks for their science-y-ness, or expect humanities folks to understand stuff that also didn't make sense to me at first when I found myself dealing with it in a lab setting. And I don't expect to be able to shanghai the whole thread to my interests, but that's because my interests are a lot wider than that.
We also seem to forget sometimes that we're really the only--or one of the few--voice(s) doing this kind of work in the academic community overall, and it behooves us not to go flaming each other all the time.
People sometimes don't realize how narrow their interests are until others tell them. If they won't listen, then they never grow. And those who read these threads, sometimes coming here in hopes of finding help for something that's really troubling them, don't need all the angst.
We have an outward- as well as an inward-facing mission, and we need to behave/write/speak/respond to each other with that in mind.
M.
