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It was another bad week for program closures and adjuncting in public flagships--Colorado and Vermont in particular. @ColleenFlahert1 gets the CO dean proclaiming the high-adjunct future as an inevitable & perfectly ok thing. Many TT faculty think same https://bit.ly/3qrcRwC
The piece cites two opposite yet true statements on the adjuncting crisis that define the debate. Jonathan W. Wilson says, "once the pool of excellent underemployed academics became big enough, and once public pressure and financial pressure built up enough ... @dennismhogan
colleges could start dispensing with even the pretense of tenure... It's an expensive anachronism." In other words, colleges tenured teachers when there weren't enough of them. Now they're are too many, so they don't. Markets.
But @LDBurnett says that @CUBoulder's intention to replace TT with NTT faculty "sends students the message that their education doesn't really matter.” This is also the @AAUP's correct position that great NTT profs need secure working conditions so their students can learn.
Secure means employment terminable only for cause, academic freedom, and teaching hours that allow for engagement in research, which defines the postsecondary difference. @HankReichman @AaronRHanlon Professional standards, not markets.
The problem is that university officials like the CU dean James White have spent the last thirty years telling politicians and the public that quality means market responsiveness. Which can buy some star professors--there's your quality. They've abandoned quality as daily work...
done by hundreds of thousands of college instructors under now mostly bad conditions. Does the public know what @LDBurnett means when she says less tenure means less learning for students? Do deans know?? Do TT professors?
If TT professors know, do they push the conversion of NTT to TT with hardcore arguments about the needed benefits for learning and research? No. The university tells students that tenure is an anachronism whose lack does NOT hurt their education. We TT have stayed silent.
This fact, TT silence, fills me with shame. We can make it up to both students and our NTT colleagues by fighting just-as-good Sweatshop College. Set targets for for NTT to TT conversion. @MichaelBerube1
