Who and where is the adjunct Pied Piper?

[mahagonny]

If it doesn't count as an asset, it counts as wasted time. A friend of mine is a PhD adjunct who has published regularly for years, is twenty years younger than me, and is looking forward to getting out of teaching forever. His PhD is not new and if they put him on the tenure track they're going to get ten years less of service out lf him than they prefer. Yet he's more accomplished than the competitor who will get on the TT.

Adjunct pay is a problem *some places*, but not everywhere. I've been fortunate to work at a number of institutions where pay per teaching hour was pretty much equal between entry-level TT and adjunct appointments. The difference being that faculty on the TT earn more per semester because teaching only accounts for a portion of their duties, and their salary reflects pay for research and service time as well.

Nope. Adjunct pay is a big problem for many. It's well documented. I don't have time to go over it. Google something like 'rising health insurance premiums self employed;' I'm sure you'll get a picture.

Sure, I can define it. Normalize is to make the argument that adjunct labor, outside of exceptional circumstances, should be a regular part of higher education. I would argue that adjuncts are either to make part-time use of professionals, or to solve *temporary* staffing problems- emergency medical leaves, sabbaticals- where there is no possibility of hiring someone into a long term contract. I would also argue that to the extent possible, schools should full-time positions with benefits, even if they are not long-term contracts (i.e., semester or year contracts, but with a full-time teaching load and benefits).

Your argument is adjunct staffing is normal when the cool people with the good jobs say it is, and they don't say so. To a third party observer, adjunct is as normalized as tenured.

[marshwiggle]

Quite the opposite.  When I was finishing up my degree and beginning my job search, some fifteen years ago, I was advised that an adjunct position should only be considered for the short-term and that if I worked as an adjunct for too long, I would have no chance of landing a tenure-track position.

Correct. Too much experience and time spent in the classroom honing your skill counts against you instead of for you. That's one of the arguments for scrapping the whole system and starting over with something different.

Great. So what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

[mahagonny]

Quite the opposite.  When I was finishing up my degree and beginning my job search, some fifteen years ago, I was advised that an adjunct position should only be considered for the short-term and that if I worked as an adjunct for too long, I would have no chance of landing a tenure-track position.

Correct. Too much experience and time spent in the classroom honing your skill counts against you instead of for you. That's one of the arguments for scrapping the whole system and starting over with something different.

Great. So what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

Get rid of publishing-mania would be a good place to start. Tenure track faculty have been herded into the publishing ballpark as teaching has been devalued. Emphasis on scholarly abilities has been rearranged according to the desirability of jobs, instead of what the advancement and dissemination of knowledge needs. Another book about Frederick Delius, anyone? Do we not already know who he is?

[mouseman]

Quite the opposite.  When I was finishing up my degree and beginning my job search, some fifteen years ago, I was advised that an adjunct position should only be considered for the short-term and that if I worked as an adjunct for too long, I would have no chance of landing a tenure-track position.

Correct. Too much experience and time spent in the classroom honing your skill counts against you instead of for you. That's one of the arguments for scrapping the whole system and starting over with something different.

Great. So what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

Get rid of publishing-mania would be a good place to start. Tenure track faculty have been herded into the publishing ballpark as teaching has been devalued. Emphasis on scholarly abilities has been rearranged according to the desirability of jobs, instead of what the advancement and dissemination of knowledge needs. Another book about Frederick Delius, anyone? Do we not already know who he is?

You have NOT actually answered the question. Getting rid of faculty research, which is in itself a terrible idea, does not actually do anything at all to identify great teaching.

So please, I will iterate - what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

PS. Your only argument against faculty research is a contrived and ridiculous example, which has absolutely no similarity to 99.999% of all faculty research out there.

[Bede the Vulnerable]

Perhaps a topic for a different thread . . . But being an active researcher-writer improves my ability to teach.  I'm in history, and research and writing is a significant part of what we require undergrads to do.  I don't see how I teach it well if I don't do it regularly.  We certainly could, and should, do more to teach our PhD students how to teach before they hit the market.  But that's not the same as saying that we should not teach them how to research.

As to identifying good teaching, we use two methods--both seriously flawed.  We combine student evaluations with peer evaluations.  The former are legendarily unreliable.  The latter?  Even in our large department, I know and like everyone.  How willing am I to harm the career of a junior colleague whom I value by writing up a scathing review of his/her teaching of History of Belgian Basket Weaving?  (Answer:  Not very).  Just being honest here.

[polly_mer]

Even at a place where research is not valued like Super Dinky, people who only have teaching experience aren't as qualified for a full-time job as people who also have experience advising individual students, mentoring student groups, and performing relevant outreach to K-12 and the community.  The end-of-year performance review is 70% teaching, 20% service, and 10% professional development.  However, the typical week is about 50% teaching and 50% service in terms of hours worked.

People who have avoided all service as not being paid activities then don't have institutional service to put on the CV.  People who eschew research-related activities don't have service to the profession activities to put on the CV.

People who have not been supported in their pedagogical professional development don't have those activities to put on the CVs.

Being excellent at teaching is not nearly as good for that next job as being a good teacher with some useful service experience both with students and with a broader community as well as some new ideas to try in the classroom from recent professional development.

In addition, being excellent at teaching is not a global skill.  Instead, being excellent at teaching well prepared majors is very different from being excellent at supporting underprepared folks with complicated lives who are taking a breadth requirement with minimal motivation so that, even when the students fail through their own actions, the professor maintained a professional demeanor that affirms the student's personhood while holding reasonable academic standards for performance.

[downer]

If you don't have some kind of active research, writing or creative project, then you are not really an academic at all. It's clearly an expectation, and a reasonable one, that any applicant to a TT job has ongoing program of productivity in addition to teaching.

The flexibility that makes sense is that it can be outside of peer-reviewed journals. Contributing to the esoteric literature read by a few people is certainly one way of doing it, and makes sense for research-intensive institutions. But for a lot of colleges, that should be less of an issue, and publishing in other venues should also count.

[mahagonny]

Quite the opposite.  When I was finishing up my degree and beginning my job search, some fifteen years ago, I was advised that an adjunct position should only be considered for the short-term and that if I worked as an adjunct for too long, I would have no chance of landing a tenure-track position.

Correct. Too much experience and time spent in the classroom honing your skill counts against you instead of for you. That's one of the arguments for scrapping the whole system and starting over with something different.

Great. So what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

Get rid of publishing-mania would be a good place to start. Tenure track faculty have been herded into the publishing ballpark as teaching has been devalued. Emphasis on scholarly abilities has been rearranged according to the desirability of jobs, instead of what the advancement and dissemination of knowledge needs. Another book about Frederick Delius, anyone? Do we not already know who he is?

You have NOT actually answered the question. Getting rid of faculty research, which is in itself a terrible idea, does not actually do anything at all to identify great teaching.

So please, I will iterate - what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

PS. Your only argument against faculty research is a contrived and ridiculous example, which has absolutely no similarity to 99.999% of all faculty research out there.

snark:   Yeah, I'm against academic people setting out to learn new things. You understood perfectly.

Publishing mania, as opposed to an appropriate amount of emphasis on research and publishing that makes sense, would explain what my younger friend Eric told me. (mentioned upthread) He's the PhD twenty years younger than me who's a part time adjunct. He's looking forward to leaving academia forever, so we can skip over the 'what Eric should do now' part. He already knows.
He can't get as much teaching work as I have and doesn't have a self employment career/income stream independent
of academia, and he hasn't bought property to Iive in as i did years ago when it was cheaper. So he's behind the eight ball financially, and needs to do something.
Anyway, here's what Eric tells me about his quest for full time faculty jobs: "They don't care how well you teach. They care about your research." This isn't me, the old guy who was never competitive for TT at all. This is someone else talking. the guy who's done everything right, and can't make sense of the processes. Why should I believe in a system when I hear things like that?

If it doesn't count as an asset, it counts as wasted time. A friend of mine is a PhD adjunct who has published regularly for years, is twenty years younger than me, and is looking forward to getting out of teaching forever. His PhD is not new and if they put him on the tenure track they're going to get ten years less of service out lf him than they prefer. Yet he's more accomplished than the competitor who will get on the TT.

[polly_mer]

Where is Eric applying?  Yes, good SLACs and R1/R2s require a solid research plan with a solid record of publication (or equivalent for performing arts).  Research is important there, regardless of how low on the prestige scale the individual institution is.  In fact, a lower prestige institution is more likely to put emphasis on research as the institution seeks to move up on the prestige scale.

Remember, Eric isn't competing only against people who are at his academic age; he's also competing against people who have spent the past 10 years teaching and publishing while off the tenure track.  The competition is fierce with many fields that used to require a book for tenure now able to restrict hiring to people who have already published a book or even two.  Even Super Dinky had people applying with substantial research productivity when we clearly stated we wanted a teacher who would also oversee the writing portion of the tutoring center.

Most of the very small, religiously affiliated, undergraduate-only institutions that are circling the drain tend to focus more on breadth of teaching experience and evidence of willingness to do substantial service.  However, those places are frequently in places that are isolated, with fewer amenities, and with much lower pay reflecting the local median household income.  People who have minimal experience with a comparable student body at an underresourced place (e.g., we're looking for a lot of service experience as well as teaching to underprepared students) are not going to make the first cut, even though we care not a whit about publication.

The isolated CCs tend to focus on teaching and service, but again people who think prestige is moderately important are very unlikely to be looking at the institutions that focus exclusively on student experience for the pay offered in the more isolated place.

In summary, the world has changed and job applications need to be realistic about how their credentials stack up against the others in the pool.  For positions that will have hundreds of applicants, being only average means never getting the job.

[marshwiggle]

Correct. Too much experience and time spent in the classroom honing your skill counts against you instead of for you. That's one of the arguments for scrapping the whole system and starting over with something different.

Great. So what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

Get rid of publishing-mania would be a good place to start. Tenure track faculty have been herded into the publishing ballpark as teaching has been devalued. Emphasis on scholarly abilities has been rearranged according to the desirability of jobs, instead of what the advancement and dissemination of knowledge needs. Another book about Frederick Delius, anyone? Do we not already know who he is?

You have NOT actually answered the question. Getting rid of faculty research, which is in itself a terrible idea, does not actually do anything at all to identify great teaching.

So please, I will iterate - what's your system for effectively and consistently identifying good teaching?

PS. Your only argument against faculty research is a contrived and ridiculous example, which has absolutely no similarity to 99.999% of all faculty research out there.

snark:   Yeah, I'm against academic people setting out to learn new things. You understood perfectly.

And you STILL haven't answered the question......

[downer]

I enjoyed this book review.
https://www.educationnext.org/truth-behind-adjunct-horror-story-adjunct-underclass-herb-childress-review/

[marshwiggle]

I enjoyed this book review.
https://www.educationnext.org/truth-behind-adjunct-horror-story-adjunct-underclass-herb-childress-review/

I love the quote near the end:

This advice addresses the real issue: oversupply of willing adjunct labor. If all students were to take Childress' recommendations to heart, far fewer of them would go to graduate school in the first place, and the problem of "adjunctification" would solve itself. And I hope students do start making different choices—because universities benefit too much from the status quo to make any changes on their own.

Spot on.

[mahagonny]

In summary, the world has changed and job applications need to be realistic about how their credentials stack up against the others in the pool.  For positions that will have hundreds of applicants, being only average means never getting the job.

Never? You could have been the chair's drinking buddy in grad school days.

[Kron3007]

If it doesn't count as an asset, it counts as wasted time. A friend of mine is a PhD adjunct who has published regularly for years, is twenty years younger than me, and is looking forward to getting out of teaching forever. His PhD is not new and if they put him on the tenure track they're going to get ten years less of service out lf him than they prefer. Yet he's more accomplished than the competitor who will get on the TT.

Adjunct pay is a problem *some places*, but not everywhere. I've been fortunate to work at a number of institutions where pay per teaching hour was pretty much equal between entry-level TT and adjunct appointments. The difference being that faculty on the TT earn more per semester because teaching only accounts for a portion of their duties, and their salary reflects pay for research and service time as well.

Nope. Adjunct pay is a big problem for many. It's well documented. I don't have time to go over it. Google something like 'rising health insurance premiums self employed;' I'm sure you'll get a picture.

Sure, I can define it. Normalize is to make the argument that adjunct labor, outside of exceptional circumstances, should be a regular part of higher education. I would argue that adjuncts are either to make part-time use of professionals, or to solve *temporary* staffing problems- emergency medical leaves, sabbaticals- where there is no possibility of hiring someone into a long term contract. I would also argue that to the extent possible, schools should full-time positions with benefits, even if they are not long-term contracts (i.e., semester or year contracts, but with a full-time teaching load and benefits).

Your argument is adjunct staffing is normal when the cool people with the good jobs say it is, and they don't say so. To a third party observer, adjunct is as normalized as tenured.

Field specific here, but for us most undergraduate students do a fourth year research project.  This is only possible if our faculty have active research programs that are well staffed and resourced.  Even our undergraduate labs lean heavily on our research programs that provide modern facilities, expertise, and infrastructure.  Additionally, we have a strong focus on graduate student training, which once again requires strong research programs.

I would also note that the industry connections forged through active research collaborations are major contributor to subsequent student employment.  Most of my graduate students and some undergrads are directly hired through these connections.  Additionally, based on our research activity in general, many companies send us job ads to circulate to our students. 

So it is not that we do not value teaching experience for new hires, but we also need people who can establish, run, and fund a research program to offer the opportunities our students want and need.  Our students expect us to be actively involved in our field. Teaching excellence alone will not convince the committee that you will be a good PI, and that is what we need.

Perhaps this is different in some fields, but I suspect in most cases students in their senior years are expected to do research projects, which need to be overseen by people who do academic research.

[polly_mer]

In summary, the world has changed and job applications need to be realistic about how their credentials stack up against the others in the pool.  For positions that will have hundreds of applicants, being only average means never getting the job.

Never? You could have been the chair's drinking buddy in grad school days.

That's not enough pull for a TT position that requires approval by the committee and then the dean and then the provost/president and then the board.

Adjuncts get hired by convincing one person; TT hires require a group agreeing based on a national search with written qualifications.