Lesko Blog

Times are tough for everyone, and I have spent the past 18 years writing about the issues that impact the nation’s 700,000 faculty off of the tenure-track. When I began in 1992, there were 300,000 part-time faculty. Today, the Department of Education estimates that there are between 400,000 and 500,000 college faculty who hold temporary appointments. The remaining faculty off of the tenure-track are those who hold full-time temporary appointments, such as lectureships, visiting appointments and fixed-term teaching jobs.

Just as the nature of the individual teaching part-time has changed since the late-70s (when 25 percent of faculty were part-time and the majority of those part-time faculty were professionals hired to teach specific courses), the Adjunct Advocate magazine has changed, as well. The publication was in print from 1992-2006. It was then that I decided to make the Adjunct Advocate an electronic publication with an accompanying PDF version. As technology evolved, and it became clear that downloading a PDF no longer appealed to most subscribers, I decided that Adjunct Advocate would exist as an e-zine, online only. Many larger publications followed Adjunct Advocate online, including the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

What I was left puzzling out was the relationship between Adjunct Advocate and the magazine’s web page, AdjunctNation.com. As you know, AdjunctNation is not simply a companion site the Adjunct Advocate. It was never meant to be. It was designed to be a place for non-tenured faculty to come to use a variety of resources, such as the message boards, syllabus vault, and of course read the editorial content. Over the past six months, we have been working on the most effective way to leverage the almost 1,000 articles from the archived issues of Adjunct Advocate that readers can find online at AdjunctNation.com, and the idea of blogging combined with an e-zine. Blogs are instantaneous. Andrew Sullivan, who blogs on popular culture for The Atlantic, updates his blog multiple times each day.

It seemed to me that there should be some way to combine the immediacy of a blog and the aspect of an online magazine. What I came up with and what we launched in November 2009 was the AdjunctNation.com E-Zine. When you visit the E-Zine page you will find a new icon that announces there is current content posted to the site. Some of the content will change over the course of a given month (like a blog) and be moved into our archive, where you can find it using the same article identifiers we have been using for 18 years. You’ll be able to search through features, news, reviews, interviews, profiles, etc…just as you always have, and we’ll be able to freshen content much more frequently!

We’ve gone from a bimonthly online publication to an E-Zine that offers current content much more frequently than ever before. We’re not modeling InsideHigherEd.com and its daily news updates, but rather still focusing completely on faculty off the tenure-track on more in-depth analysis and reporting. Another change you’ll be seeing is that we are adding more bloggers to the site. At the moment, there are four blogs, you can expect that number of double over the course of the next few weeks. Visitors should look for new content daily on AdjunctNation.com.

The other main concern I have always had was how to price the Adjunct Advocate so that a subscription was within reach of everyone who wanted one. Over the years, we have given away many subscriptions free of charge to part-time faculty who found themselves unable to pay. In 1992, a subscription was priced at $18 per year. That eventually rose to $35 per year for the print edition. Today, almost 20 years later, the new AdjunctNation.com Site Pass is priced at $20 per year, and includes access to all of the articles in the archive, as well as access to current content for one year. I am pleased most by the ability offer so much to our non-tenured faculty readers for a relatively modest sum. As always, if you find yourself unable to pay, but want to have a Site Pass, email me directly (pdl@adjunctadvocate.com).

We are also in the process of revamping the e-newsletters. Both will be renamed as email alerts, but content of each will stay the same. Finally, have a look at the JOB-LIST. It is the largest collection of jobs for non-tenured faculty anywhere online. I am delighted at the changes, and at the opportunity to serve the population of faculty off the tenure-track in ways that are absolutely unique and, at the same time, familiar to those who have seen the development of the web site and AdjunctNation.com E-Zine. Adjunct Advocate/AdjunctNation.com has, once again, reinvented what it means to serve up information and resources to the majority of our nation’s college faculty, the ones who teach off the tenure-track. Going forward, we will work together to make AdjunctNation.com and the E-Zine a first stop online for tens of thousands of part-time, adjunct, full-time temporary and visiting college faculty.

As I’ve written before, one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job is working on our web site. It pleases me no end to provide a much-used resource for the nation’s 700,000 faculty off the tenure-track. In March, we served up about 3 million pages. Better still, our page count per user was a very respectable 8. In fact, when compared to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s web site, and InsideHigherEd.com, our users stay on our site viewing content much longer, and view 4-6 times as many pages when they stop by. Thanks!

In April, we’re launching a new blog by writer Greg Beatty. Greg is going to write about, well, reading, writing, publishing and research—with an adjunct slant, of course. I asked Greg to blog about research and publishing. I did this because, as we know, adjunct faculty conduct research and publish. Furthermore, those non-tenured faculty who expect to jump onto the tenure-track must conduct research and publish if they’re going to be successful. I hope you enjoy this new blog.  

This month, cartoonist Matt Hall sent along a Super Adjunct blog entry that lampoons the “adjunct award” event at fictitious Goose Egg University, where our hero Super Adjunct teaches. Check out Matt’s new blog entry here. I recently wrote about adjunct award apartheid in my blog at Chronicle.com (“Separate and Unequal Teaching Awards”). Great minds think alike; I never mentioned my Chronicle blog piece to Matt, and he outlined his new piece to me in general terms. Ah, well, enjoy.

January was a little scary…ok…a lot scary. We watched, more than slightly terrified, as sales dropped and dropped and, well, you get the picture. February, normally a slow month for sales of books, subscriptions and job postings, was a record month in terms of sales. So, here we sit in March, typically not a big sales month, waiting to see what our marketing efforts will bring in. I’m actually confident that monthly sales with at least match those of the previous year. Though there are part-time faculty who are being let go, there are just as many schools that are choosing to plug holes in their budgets by freezing tenure-line hires and increasing the number of part-time faculty.

Last month, we published a revised edition of Teaching Strategies & Teaching for Adjunct Faculty, and published a brand new book, as well. It is the publication of this book about which I am particularly excited. It is a Canadian edition of our best-selling Handbook for Adjunct & Part-Time Faculty. We titled it Teaching Faculty & Excellence. In Canada, the percentage of faculty off the tenure-track is the same as it is in the United States. There are fewer faculty overall, but it’s an opportunity for us to branch out internationally, and still stay close to home. The Canadian border is only 50 minutes away from us, and we have customers in Canada who already buy copies of the A Handbook for Adjunct Faculty. The Canadian edition of the book is, of course, tailored to the needs (and spelling preferences) of sessional and term faculty. 

Teaching Faculty & Excellence will be printed and distributed in Canada. I’m hoping that this book will lead to a jump into the Commonwealth of Nations, to which Canada belongs. There are over 1 billion people who live in the Commonwealth, and perhaps half of them speak English. Malaysia, the UK, Australia, and a host of other countries all have higher education systems that employ large numbers of casual and/or fixed-term faculty. 

The other part of the business that’s doing well is our AdjunctNation JOB-LIST. It’s one of the most popular sections of the site, and we’ve been averaging 600-700 jobs each month. Please remember to let employers know where you saw their jobs. We’re working on a project to let users opt-in to receive job alerts. This, along with the AdjunctNation Family Newsletter, will help our web site visitors keep on top of new jobs, forum posts, blog entries and magazine updates.

Speaking of blog entries, check out Matt Hall’s new Super Adjunct post. It’s love on a budget! 

I do hope that those of you who want to work have found teaching positions this term. If not, email me. We’ll give you a free one-year subscription to the magazine.

Lastly, we’re looking for submissions for our “ivory tower,” “analysis” and “first person” essay columns. We pay $125 per 800-1,000 word essay. Read the columns before you submit. We’re also looking for an adjunct who’s teaching online to blog on our site. Finally, we’re trying to get more college libraries to subscribe. Help us out by suggesting Adjunct Advocate to the serials librarian at the college(s) where you teach.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. I suppose. Sometimes, it’s annoying. However, I try to be good-natured and remember that as a publisher I have led the way for the past 18 years on the coverage of issues of importance to the nation’s faculty off the tenure-track. Adjunct Advocate was talking about adjunct faculty when people were still unclear about what, exactly, an adjunct was. The other higher ed. pubs. still have a lot of catching up to do.

So, the other day, when I got my daily email update from InsideHigherEd.com about their redesigned web site, I was curious to have a look. In the past, the folks at InsideHigherEd.com and I have, let’s say, had some of the same ideas (well, I had them first, and then the lightbulb went on over someone’s head over at IHE). For instance, we posted cartoonist Matt Hall’s work online, then InsideHigherEd hired Matt to contribute to their web page for the “Teachable Moments” feature. We published the work of Oronte Churm, and had approached Churm to blog for us, then IHE hired him to blog at their site. 

The latest “redesign” of their site is, well, flattery at its best. If you pull up their site, and look at it side-by-side with ours, you’ll see several striking similarities. I’ll leave them to you to identify, but pay attention to the design and placement of the navigation tabs, the way the page “floats” on the gray background, as well as the curved lines. The placement of the company logos is identical. 

One important difference between our two sites has nothing to do with the look of the sites. InsideHigherEd serves up, on average, a single page to each of its individual users. I’m somewhat mystified as to why that is, because the site is awash in editorial content. Our site, over the past six months, has served up, on average 5-15 pages to each visitor. This is really what I care about most, of course. You come and you look around. You search for jobs; you read posts in the Forum; you read pieces from the magazine archive; you read the blogs; you play the games; you take the quizzes. In a sense, AdjunctNation.com is a place where our users hang out and connect with other faculty off the tenure track.

What this tells me is that we are right on target as far as delivering to our users what they actually like, want and need. That’s not to say we couldn’t do a better job, and we work all the time to tweak and modify our web page offerings. Right now, we’re working to add links to the Adjunct Family e-Newsletter. So, when the jobs are updated, Adjunct Family members who choose to receive the Family e-Newsletter, will get notice of the job postings and links to the jobs on our site. The same will happen when there are postings to the Forum, and blogs. There will be links to the materials presented in the Family e-Newsletter.

If you don’t have a clue about Listservs, you’re in good company. This Wikipedia entry should give you an idea of what a listserv is, how it works and why you might be interested in subscribing to the brand new Adjunct Listserv (Adjunctlistserv) we just launched. AdjunctNation.com hosted a listserv many years ago, but phased it out when we redesigned our site and added Message Boards. 

Unlike Message Boards which a user must visit, listservs deliver emails directly to your inbox. You need only have a device that allows you to get email alerts and/or check email. Posting is as easy as replying to a message that interests you. 

I decided to revisit the Listserv idea when I went searching for listservs for part-time faculty, and came up with a scant four choices.  A part-timer had sent me an email about one of them, and described the list as populated by “some independent” adjuncts, but mostly by “staff and leaders connected to the three faculty unions.” This mix, evidently, stifles opportunities for the adjuncts to discuss issues openly. I’m not quite sure why, but can imagine that sometimes the union folks might gang up on adjuncts who are critical of their policies and programs. 

There’s a lot for part-timers to talk about, and I believe that part-time and adjunct faculty will benefit from an independent space in which to share news, bat around ideas, opinions and (maybe even) a few revelations! Everyone with an interest in part-time issues is welcome, of course, and the AdjunctNation.com Adjunct Listserv will be open to part-time faculty from from around the world. All postings will be in English.

To join the AdjunctNation.com’s Adjunct Listserv, please click here. If you’re worried about spam, rest easy. The Listserv will be moderated so that we can keep spammers at bay. This means a (short, I hope) delay between when a message is sent to the group and when it’s posted, but it also means spam can be deleted quickly and before it ends up in your email inbox.

In other news, we’ll soon be offering a weekly “Nation Talk” news & opinion podcast. The podcast will bring together four nationally-recognized adjunct faculty activists to discuss a wide variety of topics of interest to contingent faculty. The group will discuss such issues as the recent studies done that have drawn conclusions about the “dedication” and “impact” of part-time faculty on student retention. The Nation Talk team includes long-time Michigan adjunct activist Marjorie Lynn, as well as Washington State activist Keith Hoeller. Together, Hoeller and Lynn have over two decades of experience within higher education as national activists and organizers. Marjorie Lynn has written for Adjunct Advocate since the early-90s, and helped organize thousands of adjunct faculty at two Michigan universities.

Tomorrow evening, I’ll host an AdjunctNation Family gathering in Ann Arbor, Michigan. If you live near Ann Arbor, and want to join us, but didn’t get the email invitation that went out last week, email me for more details. We’re keeping the gathering small, but there’s still a bit of room left!

As always, thanks very much for visiting AdjunctNation.com.

In the November 14th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education sitting on my desk, the following headline is splashed across the front page: “Use of Part-Time Instructors Tied to Lower Student Success.” I can’t even begin to tell you how disappointed I am. I feel like Jeff Selingo, who edits The Chronicle, is missing the boat over and again where part-time faculty are concerned. I know part-time faculty don’t comprise even 10 percent of The Chronicle’s subscribers (and it’s no small wonder with coverage like this), but printing headlines that trash the reputation of an entire group of college faculty is nothing short of, well, pandering to the subscribers.

Chronicle writer Peter Schmidt, whom I spoke with before he wrote the piece, did a fine job of balanced reporting, I think. He quotes Cary Nelson (AAUP’s current president in whose ability to grasp the issues surrounding the lack of institutional support of part-time faculty I am quickly losing confidence). Nelson is quoted in the piece as saying, “We have had our heads in the sand about this problem for many years, and the problem is getting worse.” He said most part-time faculty members are deeply committed to their work, but many are “just frazzled” as a result of the pressures placed on them, and “the students are paying a price for it.”

Students are paying the price of being taught by faculty who are offered, as a rule, the bare minimum of institutional support. This happens at colleges which boast various union chapters, including AAUP union affiliates. The Connecticut State system comes immediately to mind. In the AAUP’s contract, part-time faculty union member pay is actually capped by a clause that restricts pay maximums, and the contract gives administrators permission to withhold any part-time faculty member’s final paycheck until “obligations” have been met. In the contract, professional development and travel money are divvied up 90 percent-10 percent between the full-time and part-time faculty thanks to the AAUP union negotiators. 

In The Chronicle’s piece, Keith Hoeller is quoted as saying that the study referred to in the piece actually measures the differences in institutional support offered to full-time and part-time faculty, and not differences in the teaching abilities between full-time and part-time faculty. As such, The Chronicle’s headline writer might just have easily titled the piece “Shoddy Support of Nation’s Part-time Faculty Adversely Impacts Student Retention.”

That would be more to the point, and a more accurate representation of the truth behind the study conducted by Paul D. Umbach, an associate professor of adult and higher education at North Carolina State University. However, taking college administrators to task is a dicey proposition at The Chronicle of Higher Education, where the bulk of the paper’s shrinking revenues come from classified advertising placed by those same department chairs, deans and vice presidents. It’s also a dicey task at AAUP, where the majority of the association’s membership is comprised of older, white men—the same guys who lead departments that employ part-time faculty and pointedly don’t provide, perhaps, for any professional development or support.

Well, I suppose this episode just shows that the need for AdjunctNation.com and its reporting on behalf of part-time faculty is even more important than ever. I agree with Cary Nelson about one thing: For years, The Chronicle and AAUP had their respective heads in the sand concerning the growing use of part-time faculty. Their heads are out of the sand now, but it’s increasingly obvious that sometimes their views are clouded by the sand still in their eyes and ears.

I am happy to say that I have made the acquaintance of the editors of a lot of newspapers and magazines during the time I have published the Adjunct Advocate. As a rule, editors are a friendly lot, though some are more competitive than others, and I know one editor whom I think would sell his mother for a scoop. As a rule, editors are fair people; our jobs demand objectivity. Writers delve; editors sort out the found objects, and make sure that facts and assertions are documented and supported.

This month’s copy of Academe on my desk has a feature piece written by Cat Warren. The piece titled “The Chronicle, the Professoriate and the AAUP,” is Cat Warren’s (and more likely, one imagines, AAUP’s shot back at the Good Ship Chronicle for uncomplimentary coverage of the Association of American University Professors over the past year. Some background is important here: