Women Profs, Adjuncts, Coporiversity

AAUP summarizes the structures of contingent faculty, including its feminization. This is not news. It is, however, still a matter of some urgency.

Brief response: private liberal arts college pays me $4000 to teach two classes in frosh-comp. Do some math: how many of those would I have to teach to keep a roof, food, and my own health insurance, own and insure a car, ...?

(And I kinda like this little job and this nice school with these fairly smart kids that lets me look for a job that would let me use my full range of scholarly and pedagogical talents -- which is the thing I want : to use all of it, that's all this life is for.)

Second brief response: the devaluation of women's labor in academe will ONLY change when women insist on the value of our labor, and the value of labor period.

Third brief response: you teach frosh-comp, involving reading comprehension, interrelational thinking, clarity of organization and coherence, basic grammar, discourse analysis, style and academic voice, critical thinking, rhetoric and argumentation, and research methods, on a nearly one-on-one basis, to students who have rarely if ever been exposed to that level and complexity of thought and work ---- and then you tell me that meeting that set of objectives is A) possible and B) spiritually fulfilling and C) NOT intellectually demanding.

Fourth brief response: "team players" and "family members" in business or academic departments are marks in a con. Free labor is good employers and bad for employees. If we are to live in a Corporiversity, let us not be Wal-Mart. The friendlier the rhetoric, the more dangerous the "request."

But, let us not live in a Corporiversity. This kind of institution is not that kind. The confusion is now, as it has been for the last 15 years, very very dangerous.

Fifth brief response: the worry in this summary that contingent faculty are structurally bad for undergraduate education is just plain and simple: those who are undervalued in monies, support, office space, access to benefits, and intellectual acumen in a profession of intellectuals cannot keep it up for long.

But, from the Admin's point of view, they don't have to. The husks they become are replacable with new graduates whose profs failed to hip them to the con, who are fresh and green and ready for harvest.

I don't adjunct for a living. I am adjuncting between livings. Imagine what will happen when I have an office and some security.

Imagine the benefit to those students.

No, wait, it's NOT about benefit to Students. Learning. Knowledge.

It's about efficiency and productivity. Both of which are qualities that do not pertain to Learning (inherently inefficient as involves error and correction, practice and experimentation) nor to Scholarship (ditto as involves creativity and rumination, critique and experimentation).

Careful, we are very near the university becoming as empty and fake as most financial institutions and securitized mortgage packaging with the students being the marks of the universities, taking out loans on an education the value of which will turn out to DEcline.

The appearance, rather than the actuality.

The REAL, people, does in fact affect reality.