Lesko Blog

  • New Voices Debut On AdjunctNation.com Blogs—More to Come

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    16 Jan 2010 /  AdjunctNation.com, on blogging

    I’ve had this idea for a while now. I concluded some time ago that there needed to be more adjunct voices blogging. At InsideHigherEd.com, there is “The Education of Oronte Churm” blog. Oronte blogs somewhat sporadically and indirectly about adjunct faculty. Over at The Chronicle of Higher Education, there are no adjunct bloggers, per se, though the newspaper is publishing essays from about about adjunct faculty with more frequency. It galls me to no end that the Chronicle’s high profile Brainstorm blog employs Marc Bousquet, a tenure-line faculty member, to blog about adjunct issues. So it has been for much too long that full-time tenure-line faculty have taken it upon themselves to serve as the spokespeople of their  non-tenured colleagues.

    With the launch of the new blogs on AdjunctNation, each of which is written by a non-tenured faculty member, the site has give voice to several individuals who will write weekly on a variety of topics that will, I believe, appeal to a wide swath of the Adjunct Nation who visit our site. 

    So take a few moments, and check out the new blogs:

    The New Adjunct, written by Paul Porter, chronicles the launch of the web site “The New Adjunct” for non-tenured faculty throughout Indiana. I thought it might be interesting to see the progress of the group working on this project. Web pages just for non-tenured faculty are few and far between and I welcome the creation of The New Adjunct. 

    Kat Kiefer-Newman pitched Juggling 101 when I sent out a call for bloggers to several thousand individuals registered as AdjunctNation.com Family Members. I thought Kat’s idea was spot on. Adjuncts juggle teaching with many other responsibilities, and Kat is going to write about her busy days, afternoons and evenings. Adjuncting for two different departments, teaching five courses, is just the beginning of her day.

    Check out all of the new blogs here. 

    You can now follow whichever blogger(s) you like via Twitter. When there is a new blog posting on AdjunctNation.com, it will be tweeted to the followers of the blog(s). The AdjunctNation.com Family email alert will let Family members when new blog postings go up, as well. That email alert contains other information, so if you simply want to be alerted when your favorite blog is updated, follow the blogger on Twitter.

    In the meantime, we are going to design and launch the Adjunct Diary Page. Unlike our regular bloggers, on the Diary Page, anyone will be able to sign up and post their own blog content. Diary readers will be able to comment on posted Diary content, and the Diary content with the most views and most comments will be be highlighted on the Adjunct Diary front page. I am very excited about this opportunity for more and more non-tenured faculty to have opportunities to tell their stories.

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  • The New Faculty Majority

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    09 Nov 2009 /  politics, unions

    In September, there were pieces in The Chronicle (http://chronicle.com/article/An-Activist-Adjunct-Shoulde/48348/) and on InsideHigherEd.com (http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/09/10/maisto) about the New Faculty Majority. September, it seems, is the time of year when people’s thoughts turn to adjunct faculty and what should, could, would be done to address the “adjunct problem.” This past September, we read about the New Faculty Majority, a group founded by SUNY-New Paltz tenured faculty member Dr. Peter D.G. Brown, whom I know and respect very much for his work on behalf of SUNY’s adjuncts.

    The group’s official launch was clunky. It went public without a name. Let me digress and explain that in the mid-90s, I launched a group called the National Adjunct Faculty Guild, a membership organization that provided, among other benefits, access to health care. The dues were modest, and the membership grew. We held three conferences. Attendance at the conferences was modest, between 50-100 people. I disbanded the NAFG after six years. It became obvious that though the members wanted and needed access to health and life insurance, they were unprepared to pay even modest premiums. They also clamored for a national union—a task I was unprepared to tackle.

    So I was pleasantly surprised when I spoke to an adjunct activist who told me of the formation of the New Faculty Majority. Since then, I’ve been watching and waiting to see the next steps the group would take. The other day I visited the group’s web site and came away puzzled, disappointed and dispirited. The group has a laudable list of goals now: job security equity, benefits equity and compensation equity. Equity? Why not parity, I wondered? Equity is the concept the academic labor unions have been trying to cram down the throats of their members over the past several years. If you need a quick lesson on the difference between the two, check out this piece (http://www.adjunctnation.com/blogs/part-time-thoughts/?p=86).

    Then, I looked at how the group intends to be funded. This is from the New Faculty Majority web page: “In January 2010 we plan to begin membership dues in order to establish a national office, with an executive director and a small staff. (Unlike most of our employers, we shall certainly provide our own employees with a living wage and benefits.)” A national office with an executive director and a small staff? Ok. So what do the members get in return for helping launch a bureaucracy? The benefits page answered that question: “All of us will benefit from a thorough reform of employment practices in higher education. The benefits of NFM are not services per se but the power of our numbers. We are working to restore the profession of teaching and to ameliorate the substandard conditions and terms of employment now allotted to the majority of higher education faculty.”

    In short. No services, per se.

    So let me understand this New Faculty Majority structure and system. Adjuncts pay money to a group so the group can pay for a national headquarters, hire an executive director and a staff. This sounds terrifyingly familiar. The members keep the bureaucracy in the manner to which the bureaucracy will quickly become accustomed.

    How nice for the executive director and the small, but well-compensated staff.

    What, I wondered, could have driven the group so far off course short of the organization having been co-opted by members of the education unions. Then, I went and studied the list of NFM leaders. Ah, the answers were all there: UUP, AFT, NEA, AAUP, UC-AFT. Then I studied the list of the kind folks who had agreed to serve on the group’s “Advisory Board.” Three out of the eight members of the board were from the AAUP.

    What was next, I wondered? An invitation to AFT-Washington’s Sandra Schroeder to come and “advise” the group?

    Well, yes, it turns out that the New Faculty Majority has, indeed, put feelers out to the President of the AFT-Washington. I can only imagine Schroeder’s terms. The New Faculty Majority would, of course, have to endorse the AFT’s FACE farce. The New Faculty Majority would endorse a legislative boondoggle that seeks to, at base, reduce te numbers of the New Faculty Majority. 

    The New Faculty Majority has morphed into the same old thing: a group that takes money from adjunct faculty in order to, first, feed and clothe a bureaucracy. The group’s goals are perfectly acceptable. Those involved, however, can see no other way to get there than by plodding down the failed course charted by America’s higher education unions over the past 35 years.  

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  • Thanks For Killing Time at AdjunctNation.com

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    03 Apr 2009 /  AdjunctNation.com, on blogging, on publishing

    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.

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  • Copy Cats

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    25 Feb 2009 /  AdjunctNation.com, on publishing

    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.

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