By: KK

KK — Sat, 19 Sep 2015 02:10:08 +0000

Based on the title, I was hoping there would be a review of what percentage of faculty at Fordham were adjunct now versus 10 years from now. The “numbers” cited are vaguer than that. It is the fact that when TT folks retire, they are not replaced by other TT people, and the increasing numbers of adjunct jobs – with no job security, benefits, or a living wage – as a percentage of total academic teaching jobs that is most troubling. Throwing us a bone in the form of a couple hundred dollars’ raise is not what is in order.

By: Alan Trevithick (@eValerick)

Alan Trevithick (@eValerick) — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 01:06:41 +0000

It is certainly not true that most adjuncts are “professionals who teach on the side.” This is a standard boilerplate reaction of university administrators everywhere, when confronted with the dreadful and really indefensible working conditions of adjuncts, so I hope Dean Rodgers will not feel singled out when I note 1) some professions more than others–typically law, medicine and business–indeed provide part-time adjunct faculty (often at higher rates than received by most adjuncts), and have for many years, 2) the great number of purely “academic” courses, NOT the “professional” courses, now and for the past two decades, are taught by poorly paid part-time adjunct faculty and that is a dramatic departure from the once-normal “professional” adjunct model of the past to which Dean Rodgers refers, and 3) that which is “on the side” to you, may not be, to me and, anyway, it is ethically dubious, to say the least, to rationalize gross pay and benefit inequities on such considerations. In any other labor situation, does a prospective employer ask an applicant how much she or he is making from other sources?

Comments on: A Look at the Numbers on Fordham Adjuncts

By: KK

By: Alan Trevithick (@eValerick)