"Adjunct Lives Matter" Comment on Another Article About The Tenure Track

[mahagonny]

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/04/09/covid-19-demands-reconsideration-tenure-requirements-going-forward-opinion

Here's a comment I find interesting.

Laura Gibbon      four months ago

"What about "the conservative influence" in the American Council of Learned Societies? It's no secret. Tenure-track faculty are receiving way too much focus right now. They always do. This hurts many academics, and it distracts from larger problems. Assistant professors at research universities? What about faculty off the tenure track trying to maintain a research agenda under much more difficult circumstances? They have more at stake. Does their research matter? Do they matter? How can ACLS support them? Forget about this is time of crisis, how about just in general? Those questions are more pressing. Tenure line faculty, who already have a great deal in their favor, don't need groups like the ACLS rushing to their aid. Look down the hall from them, please.

Covid 19 is going to be a breeze for assistant professors at research universities, compared to adjuncts and NTT faculty. People like Joy Connolly must ask themselves if their attention is in the right place."

[Wahoo Redux]

Academe is a fractious entity.

It does none of us any good to be at loggerheads.   

[mahagonny]

Academe is a fractious entity.

It does none of us any good to be at loggerheads.   

I am taking note of your stern warning. The author's last paragraph:

"Let our early-career scholars explore, contribute to and thrive in every avenue of opportunity to share knowledge for the greater good. And let them be fairly evaluated and rewarded for this work. Then, not only will we make the most of nearly limitless means of communication and connection, opening up our institutions to diverse people and needs, but we can also make the old warning "publish or perish" fade into history."

and note that it's a great example of how most teaching faculty are invisible to so many, such as this author, as these recommendations would seem to an outsider to conspicuously omit the concerns and prospects of the adjunct professor. In fact speak as though the things that a researcher should be rewarded for and supported in  are values that should be reinforced even in our strange new era, and it should warm our hearts to do so, even while it's only for the people who matter. Yet, unwittingly, by challenging the 'publish or perish' requirement one could be opening the door for all sorts of reforms.

[hazelshade]

https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2020/04/09/covid-19-demands-reconsideration-tenure-requirements-going-forward-opinion

Here's a comment I find interesting.

Laura Gibbon      four months ago

"What about "the conservative influence" in the American Council of Learned Societies? It's no secret. Tenure-track faculty are receiving way too much focus right now. They always do. This hurts many academics, and it distracts from larger problems. Assistant professors at research universities? What about faculty off the tenure track trying to maintain a research agenda under much more difficult circumstances? They have more at stake. Does their research matter? Do they matter? How can ACLS support them? Forget about this is time of crisis, how about just in general? Those questions are more pressing. Tenure line faculty, who already have a great deal in their favor, don't need groups like the ACLS rushing to their aid. Look down the hall from them, please.

Covid 19 is going to be a breeze for assistant professors at research universities, compared to adjuncts and NTT faculty. People like Joy Connolly must ask themselves if their attention is in the right place."

I've always been mystified by people who want to take the ACLS, of all organizations, to task for their lack of support for faculty in more precarious positions. In my experience, of all the funders who make grants in the humanities and social sciences, they are the most supportive of early-career and contingent faculty, and they are by FAR the organization that has done the most to really listen to what the community needs. It's hard to imagine any other funding entity saying that they are going to close their flagship grant program to senior/tenured faculty for a couple of years, as the ACLS has recently done--this is a huge change under Connolly's leadership.

[mahagonny]

Maybe because for instance, schools, often with the help of tenure track faculty, have done such a great job of keeping employer health insurance availability away from so many who work very hard to keep them going by teaching, and for pitifully small amounts of pay, and an organization that has paid at least some attention to adjunct faculty in the past might be someone who would try and listen, or have a few among them that would.

[writingprof]

I'm disappointed that no one seems to have actually used the phrase "Adjunct Lives Matter."  It would have been fun to see the resulting public disembowelment. 

[mahagonny]

I'm disappointed that no one seems to have actually used the phrase "Adjunct Lives Matter."  It would have been fun to see the resulting public disembowelment.

I'm having fun watching you being disappointed.

[writingprof]

I'm disappointed that no one seems to have actually used the phrase "Adjunct Lives Matter."  It would have been fun to see the resulting public disembowelment.

I'm having fun watching you being disappointed.

Oops, I didn't notice that my camera was on. 

[mahagonny]

I'm disappointed that no one seems to have actually used the phrase "Adjunct Lives Matter."  It would have been fun to see the resulting public disembowelment.

I'm having fun watching you being disappointed.

Oops, I didn't notice that my camera was on.

Actually it would be more like a public 'what are they talking about? [yawn].' Or, no, I get it, you probably meant people disembowelling themselves.

[Wahoo Redux]

I'm disappointed that no one seems to have actually used the phrase "Adjunct Lives Matter."  It would have been fun to see the resulting public disembowelment.

I'm having fun watching you being disappointed.

Oops, I didn't notice that my camera was on.

Indeed!  And please do not post from the bathroom anymore!  We live in a civilized society, you know!

[nonntt]

My life matters, but 1) being an adjunct isn't my life; and 2) my research program doesn't matter all that much, and certainly not to the university that hired me. I've been hired to fill a particular role and to be easily discarded in a crisis. Now the crisis is here, and my university is going to face some ugly budget cuts. Sucks to be them. Fortunately, my primary teaching activity has enough enrollment to count as a profit center, so that income stream is safe for now.

[writingprof]

My life matters.

Unless you're "B"lack, that's a horribly racist thing to say.