Dept chair being unreasonable with adjunct?

[hester]

I don't they are correct.

[Ruralguy]

Then dont help them. If any one asks, just send them a link that describes the process or say that at ths point, talk to Chair or Dean.

[jerseyjay]

One obligation that a former employee does NOT have is to regularly check their previous email. When I have stopped teaching at a school, for whatever reason, I set the auto reply to something like: "Thanks for emailing me. I am not currently teaching at College University. For all questions relating to College University please contact Professor Dr. Chair at email@collegeunivesity.edu. If your email is not about College University, please contact me at jerseyjay@personalemail.com." The last part is optional and I only include it because people sometimes email me about my research or something like that. Then I never check my email again.

Presumably, the chair has your personal contact information and may contact you. If you have no relationship with the school (i.e., you never want to teach there again), you are under no obligation to do anything, as has been established. If the chair was unhappy with you, for whatever reason, they may not even contact you. Or they may contact you as a professional courtesy.

If they were to contact me in that position, I would probably respond:

"Based on my professional judgement and using the criteria on my syllabus, I assigned John Smith the grade of C. He earned a 75 percent on the homework, a 73 per cent on the midterm, a 76 per cent on the final."

After that, I wouldn't care. The chair could change the grades of all the students in my class, and that'd be fine with me, because I have no attachment (emotional or material) to the school anymore.

Personally, while I find this thread interesting, I think that the OP has already spent more time on this than it is worth.

Of course, there are some schools I have taught for years, have had a good experience, like my colleagues, may want to teach again, and may want to use as a reference. In those cases, I would be more more inclined to interact. But even there, up to a limit.

[Ruralguy]

What Jerseyjay said!

[hester]

Yes, I agree with your points and how much time I've spent on this thread.

I would like to point out this is a flaw with adjuncting.

When Dept chairs want to play games " hire for one course then dump" , there are ramifications.

Adjuncts like to be invested where they teach and admin need to be aware of problems (like I am facing)arising from churning adjuncts.

Thanks

[downer]

I would like to point out this is a flaw with adjuncting.

When Dept chairs want to play games " hire for one course then dump" , there are ramifications.

Adjuncts like to be invested where they teach and admin need to be aware of problems (like I am facing)arising from churning adjuncts.

That's old news.

It is odd that you are still worrying this issue. Time to move on. Probably time to stop working as an adjunct.

[Langue_doc]

I would like to point out this is a flaw with adjuncting.

When Dept chairs want to play games " hire for one course then dump" , there are ramifications.

Adjuncts like to be invested where they teach and admin need to be aware of problems (like I am facing)arising from churning adjuncts.

That's old news.

It is odd that you are still worrying this issue. Time to move on. Probably time to stop working as an adjunct.

+1. Let it go. Admins are well aware of the problem. It's the adjuncts who seem to think that putting in hours after the end of their contract will somehow earn them brownie points. Let it go; you are no longer on the payroll.

[Ruralguy]

The 4 factors important for retaining a contingent faculty member:

1. need (enrollments, role of course for requirements)
2. funding
3. instructor performance (evals, complaints, etc.)
4. what are the alternatives? (overloads for TT staff, dumping course for a semester, etc.)

[kaysixteen]

Any chance that if the OP does not respond to a request from the chair to do actual work  on this grade appeal problem, that the chair would be able to blackball the OP going forward?

[jerseyjay]

What the OP describes as "a flaw" in the adjunct system is, in fact, the main feature of the adjunct system: that a school is able to hire a professor to teach a course for a set wage and have no more obligations to the professor. I started my adjunct career in the late 1990s and this was the situation then, and it remains the situation now.

Of course, if the school has no more obligation to the (former) adjunct professor, the professor has no more obligation to the school, either. That said, schools may try to pressure or cajole (vague possibility of full-time employment, implied continued part-time employment, guilt about service to students, etc.) employees to do more than they have to.

In my experience, most schools do not try to cycle through adjunct professors as quickly as possible. All things being equal, it is better for the school to have a stable cadre of dependable instructors. That said, some schools do not hesitate to not schedule a part-timer a second semester if they don't like the part-timer (for whatever reasons, legitimate and not).

As to kaysixteen's question--no doubt the chair will "blackball" the OP from being hired in the department again; in fact, this sounds like it has already happened. Beyond that, who knows? If there are various schools in the area, chances are this is not a big deal for the OP. Twenty years ago I was an adjunct in Boston, and it was quite easy to move from one school to another; I had two schools that were my "regular" schools and would teach a semester here or there somewhere else. Of course, if the field or the area is really small, then this could be a bigger deal.

(I remember that at my current school, where I teach full-time, the administration tried to centralize a list of part-time professors since evidently some people had been fired in one department and then walked across campus and got a job in another department, without anybody realizing this for a while. My school is in a large metropolitan area with lots of schools that pay the same or better, so it cannot really be too choosy. I don't think they ever did create a central list.)

My bottom line is: if the OP taught one semester at a school and then stopped, so long as they have done all the duties required, they have no more legal obligations to the school. Assuming that the school has fulfilled its obligations (mainly in pay), then they have no more  legal obligations to the OP.

[kaysixteen]

Why would it be a problem if dept B hired an adjunct that dept A across the hall had chosen to sack?   Doesn't dept B have that right?

[Ruralguy]

I suppose they have the right (though only if they have hiring power, as at a large university). At a smaller school, many other chairs would know about problems with the adjunct and the hiring Dean surely would. Theyd only let an adjunct bounce around if there was legitimate need in the other dept. and there were no performance issues.

[marshwiggle]

Why would it be a problem if dept B hired an adjunct that dept A across the hall had chosen to sack?   Doesn't dept B have that right?

Since hiring of part-time faculty is, by definition, on short term contracts, then a person is almost never "sacked", i.e. fired before the end of a contract. They are simply not re-hired. There's absolutely no reason one department's decision not to re-hire someone should have any authority over any other department. (Although, presumably if the "new" department knew about the person's having been employed by the "old" department they might want to know how that went. Still, there's no reason that kind of discussion would be required.)

[Ruralguy]

But how many of us are interchangeable cogs?  Maybe an English prof. can teach intro comp? Maybe some physical scientists can do *some* level of math or comp sci.  Some language people can do multiple languages. So, theoretically, this can happen, but we only see a couple of adjuncts every so often falling into that sort of situation, and ONLY if they have a good reputation (though, oddly, one of those got by us in the last couple of years, and it was because the person was excellent in his "home" field, but not so great in the others he distributed into).

[marshwiggle]

But how many of us are interchangeable cogs?  Maybe an English prof. can teach intro comp? Maybe some physical scientists can do *some* level of math or comp sci.  Some language people can do multiple languages. So, theoretically, this can happen, but we only see a couple of adjuncts every so often falling into that sort of situation, and ONLY if they have a good reputation (though, oddly, one of those got by us in the last couple of years, and it was because the person was excellent in his "home" field, but not so great in the others he distributed into).

This strikes me as about as common as the idea of a student submitting the same paper in two different courses and/or disciplines; it's theoretically possible, but it's going to be pretty rare that the requirements will be similar enough for it to work.