President Ebenezer Cuts Adjuncts From Holiday Party List

According to this piece from the Palm Beach Post web site, the for profit South University president John Peterson, disinvited all of the school’s adjunct faculty from the annual holiday bash at the Breakers. Ok, those of us chilling in northern climes may have a tough time feeling sorry for our Palm Beach colleagues, but a social diss is a social diss. 

Actually, Ebenezer Peterson explained that while it pained him to invite only the full-time faculty to the school’s holiday party (because they’re all a bunch of bronzed and boring sods?), he’d been instructed to reduce the school’s travel and entertainment budget (no more junkets to Key West?). The school’s Director of Communications, Heather Askew, put it this way: “While adjunct faculty are an important part of our university, they are not part of our full time faculty.”

Well, Merry Christmas to you, too, Jacob Marley.

So, who’s showing up at the South University party at the Breakers? A quick trip to the South University web page showed that the college has, well, just about as many full-time faculty teaching on the Palm Beach campus as you’d expect, around 60. Let’s just say no one should make more than 3 trays of hors d’oeuvres now that the part-timers aren’t attending the bash. 

South University is owned and operated by Education Management Corporation (www.edmc.com). The company operates 83 campuses in 26 states and enrolls some 96,000 students. Education Management Corporation is among the largest providers of private post-secondary education in North America. Last year the company raked in $1.09 billion in revenue. As of 2007, EMC employed 13,000 full-time, part-time and adjunct faculty. Shall we take bets on the breakdown of full-time to part-time faculty?