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Ivory Tower
DePaul Adjunct Calls Out College President on Efforts to “Intimidate” Faculty
by Brendan McQuade On Jan. 14, DePaul University faculty received a letter addressing a campaign by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to unionize DePaul’s contingent faculty. While the tone of the email was softened by…
A Letter to My Students as I Leave Adjunct Teaching
by Dana Biscotti Myskowski I’ll miss you. If you don’t believe me, ask any of my former students. Or ask my husband who has had to put up with my moping and my bouts of tears these past few weeks as the semester winds down to an end. It’s…
PC Culture on College Campuses—Who’s to Blame?
by Ramesh Ponnuru Is political correctness on campus a real problem? Tellingly, it is less often defended than it is minimized. In the 1990s, it was sometimes dismissed as a conservative “myth.” In recent months — with…
Profs Making Friends with Students? Why Not?
A few months ago I needed somewhere to crash after a university social event and decided to stay at a student’s house. I planned this in advance, because I knew that I’d miss the last train home, and my partner was fine with the…
Can Student Activists Push Administrators to Raise Pay for PT Faculty?
by Brian Min In April 2015, hundreds of students and professors from Columbia supported CU Fight for 15 by demonstrating in front of Low Steps to promote a $15 minimum wage for low-income workers and raising the wages of adjunct professors.…
Adjuncts Have Fewer Options Than Grad Students at University of Missouri
by Carl Kenney Adjunct professors are often treated like Walmart employees. At Walmart, those pulling the strings are most concerned with making money. Consumers flood the retail giant because of those amazing low prices. “Always…
Academic Publishing is Destined to Fail without Better Publisher-Author Partnership
by Ken Wachsberger IN THE MAY 26, 2014 issue of The Nation, Scott Sherman wrote about the precarious state of academic publishing due largely to pressures it faces, including from declining library budgets, the rise of commercial publishing…
Gentleman Scholars & The Rise of the Higher Ed Aristocracy
by Rick Perlstein Here’s a personal observation with a political thrust: if I were single, I don’t think I could handle dating a graduate student in the humanities or the social sciences. Or someone with a PhD but not a tenure-track job. Or…
New Survey Suggests Adjuncts May Be Unrealistic About Their Career Prospects
by P.D. Lesko Fasten your seat belts. There’s a new study out, the “College Graduate Employment Survey,” by Accenture. Who’s Accenture? From the company’s website: “Accenture is a global management…
Oakton CC Tells Dept. Chairs: “Limit Adjuncts’ Hours to Avoid Affordable Healthcare Act…
by Tom Robb When Henry Ford first put his Model T’s and Model A’s on the assembly line, he introduced a revolutionary concept: workers should be able to afford the cars they are making. That concept seems lost on today’s…