How The University Works

By now, you’ve seen the video of UC-Davis police lieutenant John Pike pepper-spraying a peaceful sit-in. You’ve seen his strutting little-man-in-a-big-body sadism, giving his beefy little canister a nonchalant waggle before strolling down the line of nonviolent protesters, aiming the toxic stream into their faces from a few feet away. You might even […]

When we added humorous chapter books (eg Roscoe Riley) to my three-year-old’s story time, we were appalled to find that one of them featured one of the cruder and, we thought, outmoded Asian stereotypes–the New Kid from the Black Lagoon, it turns out, is not the scary blue-skinned alien from Mars that the other kids […]

At the annual convention of the Modern Language Association last month, David Horowitz once more shared a panel with AAUP President Cary Nelson, who has previously replied to Horowitz’s exaggerated claims of bias in the classroom. As Chronicle Review editor Liz McMillen’s coverage pointed out, there wasn’t much actual debate in this over-hyped […]

Part 1: Overview & Key Facts
Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations
Part 3: Complaints and concerns
Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter

There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. […]

Part 1 of an interview with Melanie Hubbard, a Columbia Ph.D. with articles, an NEH fellowship, and a book contract who has never been interviewed for a tenure-track job while serving on full-time contingent appointments for 10 years.
MB. How would you describe your situation?
MH. Downwardly mobile! I was a teaching assistant at an Ivy League […]

In today’s mailbag, Miriam at The Little Professor has a nice reading of HTUW, and raises a couple of good questions in relation to the book. She wants to learn more about the way affect or “teaching for love” helps drive exploitation and wants to know what could happen to contingent faculty if contingent work […]

As is the case with many contingent faculty, blogger Adjunct Whore was a long-term graduate student, pursuing her dissertation while working. She is also part of a faculty couple, and just scored a tenure-track job when her institution adopted a moderately enlightened partner hiring policy:
mr. whore just went through tenure. in August, the institution published […]

Oh. My. God.
I thought I’d heard all the stories already. Wrong. In the discussion of the Faculty on Food Stamps video over in the non-tenure track forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education, plenty of others chimed in that they’d been forced to take their families on public assistance. One guy even slept in […]

At the New Hampshire presidential debates Saturday, Charlie Gibson imagined that a faculty couple at the host institution were in the $200,000 income bracket.
They laughed so hard he practically blushed through his makeup.
The reality: in the absence of spousal hiring policies, faculty couples tend to be one tenure-stream, one not: combined incomes for most such […]