Does anyone happen to know the percentage of adjuncts employed at USM today as opposed to, say, 10 or 20 years ago? USM would be bucking a huge national trend if the percentage were not significantly higher today than it once was.
I doubt that SFT or many of his supporters would care very much if the university was mainly populated by marginally qualified faculty, as long as the faculty were under their thumb. You are assuming that they want the best people; I am not sure I can share that assumption. Besides, you may also be overlooking the trend toward online instruction. Once a few more technical hurdles are overcome, I think it will be VERY easy for highly qualified adjuncts from (let's say) New York to be offering fairly sophisticated courses to students in (let's say) Hattiesburg. We have alrady seen how "out-sourcing" has affected the high-tech industries (I will never forget talking to a computer techie with a very strong Indian accent who tried to convince me that his first name was "Shawn"!). It will soon be quite possible to have a national (indeed, international) academic labor market, and in fact I can think of all sorts of reasons why, in some ways, this might not be an entirely bad thing. However, it will probably result in the erosion of tenure, which I definitely think will be a bad thing for academic freedom in this country.
Just an opiniion, I couldn't have said it better. Including your comment about "Shawn" (I think I spoke to Shawn once and I still don't know what he said!).
Grrr- - - I hate this formatting mess we have now.
Let me add that I do not advocate increased use of adjuncts, as my previous post may have indicated. It's better if the regular faculty routinely teach lower division courses. At the school where I got my master's degree, all English faculty taught at least one section of freshman comp every year, and this was with a good sized group of TAs and full-time instructors.
Just an opiniion, I couldn't have said it better. Including your comment about "Shawn" (I think I spoke to Shawn once and I still don't know what he said!).
If other countries outsourced their call centers to Mississippi, could they understand our lovely accent? And I can imagine the consternation of their faces if they reached a call center outsourced to South Louisiana (I guess I'll hear from Boudreau or Thibodeaux on this one)
Just an opinion wrote: First is Last wrote: Just an opinion wrote: What was the percentage of adjunct usage forty years ago? I think you are ignoring some very worrisome and very recent trends. Just an opinion, hiring a sufficiently large number of qualified adjuncts is not a viable option in a place like Hattiesburg or in other non- metropolitan areas. I have to quibble a bit, having been an adjunct here and elsewhere. What do you call "qualified" and what do you expect for the money? I was able to teach this fall due to personal circumstances, but certainly can't afford to do it as a career. Most adjuncts I have known had other jobs, were retired, or were temporarily available for various reasons. It's true that you can't count on that population always being available. As to "qualified"-- while that depends on the discipline, there is no good reason a person with an MA can't teach many freshman and sophomore classes. After all, you let grad students teach them.
LVN,
Because of activeboard's strange new formatting system (another example of an "improvement" that is actually a step backward), I am not sure to whom you are replying. Let me, then, just make a general comment about adjuncts.
In my experience, adjuncts are often the most dedicated and committed teachers of all. In some cases, they are even more highly qualified on paper than some people who have held tenured positions for long, long periods. Nothing in this thread (at least nothing written by me) is intended to disparage adjuncts. In fact, my own hope would be that even the best adjuncts could be tenured in some way -- or, better yet, that many people currently in adjunct positions could find permanent, tenured positions. However, for all sorts of economic reasons, the trend seems to be moving entirely in the opposite direction, so we are seeing more and more people being employed as adjuncts (no need to pay benefits; no long-term commitment; no worries about adjuncts criticizing incompetent administrators) -- a trend which does a dissservice to adjuncts and which also helps to erode the system of tenure.
Nothing in this thread (at least nothing written by me) is intended to disparage adjuncts.
What was said is that a sparsely populated areas such as Hattiesburg does not have enough persons to serve as adjuncts. Nobody said the adjuncts who are available are not qualified. Large cities do.
And I can imagine the consternation of their faces if they reached a call center outsourced to South Louisiana (I guess I'll hear from Boudreau or Thibodeaux on this one)
No offense taken Middle America. Me n Thibodeaux was just talkin de ouder day bout dis idea. We already got a call center down her where dey teach hog callin, nutrea callin, duck callin etc. (Dat just a little bayou humor for ya.)
As soon as dey get dem phone lines down dis bayou we ready ta start one of dem real call centers.
Me and Thibodreaux been studin and got some good idears, ya. We told NASA we wanna be de first to land on de sun, ya. Thibodeaux just solved dat heat problem fer us. We decide ta go at night.
Just an opinion wrote: You may be correct, but I doubt that SFT or many of his supporters would care very much if the university was mainly populated by marginally qualified faculty, as long as the faculty were under their thumb. You are assuming that they want the best people; I am not sure I can share that assumption. Besides, you may also be overlooking the trend toward online instruction. Once a few more technical hurdles are overcome, I think it will be VERY easy for highly qualified adjuncts from (let's say) New York to be offering fairly sophisticated courses to students in (let's say) Hattiesburg. We have alrady seen how "out-sourcing" has affected the high-tech industries (I will never forget talking to a computer techie with a very strong Indian accent who tried to convince me that his first name was "Shawn"!). It will soon be quite possible to have a national (indeed, international) academic labor market, and in fact I can think of all sorts of reasons why, in some ways, this might not be an entirely bad thing. However, it will probably result in the erosion of tenure, which I definitely think will be a bad thing for academic freedom in this country.
JAO,
You quoted First Is Last and then replied to me.... but with the recent step backward in usability on Activeboard it's pretty easy to do that.
I checked out several of the articles you linked. They are a real grab bag. For instance: nearly every state has a legislator who hates professors or feels slighted by them, and tries to get even by introducing a bill to abolish tenure. These bills generally go nowhere. In the late 1990s, a different legislator (not mentioned in the 1995 article you linked) took up the cause in South Carolina and quickly became seen as a nutball and a pest. It's hard to predict what state legislatures will do, as higher education keeps sliding down their scale of priorities, but I think privatization of some state universities is actually more likely than keeping them all under state control and abolishing tenure. (Keep in mind that only future grants of tenure can be abolished, because tenure is a contract--so tenured faculy will remain in the system for a generation after any such law is passed.)
There are some long-term trends that are genuinely undermining tenure. Increasing reliance on adjuncts is one. Another is the sluggish to nonexistent adjustments that some doctoral programs are making to the lack of jobs for their degree holders. But I doubt that hiring "research professors" who are strictly on soft money will make much of a difference; some institutions that do a lot of grant-funded research have had this job category for a long time. Tenure has always been in a department, so if the university shuts down the department, the tenured faculty get pink slips along with the rest. (Even the AAUP principles provide for this kind of outcome, under the heading of "financial exigency.")
I think you are right about SFT and his crew not giving a hoot how qualified USM's faculty are, so long as they all obey SFT. But if Thames got what they wanted, USM's competitiveness for grants and contracts would plummet, its academic reputation would touch the bottom of the scale, and most likely enrollment would tank as well.
Tenure will have to be replaced with long-term contracts at several widely respected institutions, before other universities see fit to emulate that model. If USM were to do away with tenure, it would merely be seen (quite accurately!) as the seizure of power by a rogue administration, guaranteeing pariah status for the university.
There are lots of complexities in all of this. For instance, I sometimes wonder whether tenure leads faculty members not to demand better performance from administrators, because after all the administrators' power to harm the faculty members is limited. (I'm talking about normal operating conditions, of course, not the crisis conditions that Thames has plunged USM into.)
Maybe this discussion would be better continued on its own thread, though, instead of one started by an administrative troll with more aliases than I know how to keep track of?
3. The political climate today is such that the erosion is likely to continue at an increasing pace.
4. Technological developments are likely to put tenure in increasing jeopardy.
5. (The main point): Therefore it is not foolish to discuss the erosion of tenure on a board devoted to USM, since this board is a place for larger discussions. (It was the insinuation that such discussion was foolish that led to my participation in the first place.)
5. (The main point): Therefore it is not foolish to discuss the erosion of tenure on a board devoted to USM, since this board is a place for larger discussions. (It was the insinuation that such discussion was foolish that led to my participation in the first place.)
I believe you were responding to my joke, Just an Opinion. I was trying to point out, not that tenure was not under attack, but rather the people on this board didn't seem to know what tenure, academic freedom or shared governance was. Yet that didn't stop (or even slow them down) from attacking these principles of academia.
Mama Troll impressed me by reading the links supplied and changing her stance concerning tenure, although she still saw it as a problem.
I guess this just proves your point. The negative attracts on tenure has reached the general public and influenced them, but the information they get doesn't tell them what it is.
I believe you were responding to my joke, Just an Opinion. I was trying to point out, not that tenure was not under attack, but rather the people on this board didn't seem to know what tenure, academic freedom or shared governance was. Yet that didn't stop (or even slow them down) from attacking these principles of academia. Mama Troll impressed me by reading the links supplied and changing her stance concerning tenure, although she still saw it as a problem. I guess this just proves your point. The negative attracts on tenure has reached the general public and influenced them, but the information they get doesn't tell them what it is.
Sorry if I misunderstood you, Joker! It's easy to miss tone of voice (or I guess "tone of type") on these discussion boards!
I just spent the last half-hour typing a long response to your last long posting. I even checked to make sure I hadn't made any typos. However, when I hit the "submit post" button, a message came on telling me that "sparklit cannot establish a connection right now; we are working on this problem; try again in two minutes." My entire post had disappeared.
Needless to say, I now feel like shooting myself for not saving the reply after I had written it. I will try to respond again later tonight or tomorrow, but right now I am only in a mood to take a sledge hammer to my computer.
I swear on my mother's honor that this is a true story and not an attempt to evade answering your post.
Okay, Mama Troll, I hastily reconstructed some of my arguments from "The Lost Post," although my thoughts below are not nearly as eloquently expressed as they were originally. In any case, here they are. Thanks very much for considering them. (I've put your comments in bold and then placed mine in regular type after yours.)
Here goes. I would never advocate taking tenure away from those to whom it has been granted. That would cause such a huge disruption of our system, that we would really have a problem. I don't see how that could even be considered without an increase in pay, and most schools don't have the money to do that even if it were a vialble alternative. That said, all of us are stuck with tenure for at least the time being like it or not, and frankly I don't like it. I'll get into my reasons in a bit.
I agree with most of this, although obviously I do not consider tenure something to be "stuck with."
Academic freedom is right up there with freedom of speech and all the other rights we enjoy. There is no question that academic freedom as it has been described so far in this conversation is near sacred, and should be protected at all costs. When an administration either on campus or in Jackson or in Washington starts to dictate what can be taught is the classroom, we are in trouble. Of course there are reasonable bounds of classroom subject matter, but we could probably come close to agreement on what is not appropriate.
No disagreement here.
I can't buy into the argument that this right is protected by tenure. It seems that this right is and has been protected when necessary almost exclusively by the courts. I can't see reasonable freedom to teach ideas being stiffled in this day and age unless it is something far out as in what happened with that guy at the U. of Colorado. I think that tenure as a defense for academic freedom is an AAUP selling point at best. In reality I can't see it. You' will argue this point, but I doubt I will be swayed.
Here's where I will have to respectfully disagree. I really don't think that academic freedom can be successfully protected by relying on lawsuits. Here are some reasons: (1) In any legal proceeding, the deck is stacked in favor of the party with lots of lawyers and lots of money. Universities have lots of lawyers, and they always seem to find the money to fight lawsuits. (2) Let's say a professor was fired for researching or writing or speaking about a controversial topic. Even if a professor were successful in eventually winning a lawsuit that could take years and might bankrupt him in the process, he would not be likely to make the same mistake twice. In other words, even if he were ordered reappointed by a court, he would probably have "learned his lesson" and be much more timid in the future in tackling another controversial topic. Thus the professor's academic freedom would be diminished even if the professor won his suit.
It is from the economic standpoint that I see a controversy, and if I were an adversary of the faculty, I would love the economics of tenure. I am frankly surprised that the more productive of you hold it so dear.
Most of us, honestly, are not in it for the money. If we were, we would have chosen different career paths long ago. Instead, we are academics because we love to teach, love to think, love to write, and love to debate. The fact that we make less money than many business persons is less important to us than the fact that we can pursue an idea wherever it leads us, without fear of losing our jobs. We can debate with our colleagues; we can challenge the orthodoxies of our fields; we can disagree with "leading lights" in our professions if we think they are wrong -- and we can do all this because we have tenure. Tenure creates the peace of mind necessary to real academic work. I can wake up in the morning knowing that if I say something that challenges a colleague's core beliefs, I will still have a job in the evening. Without tenure, many professors would simply be trying to toe the line -- which is not what any professor should be doing.
It seems to me that institutions use tenure in the place of money. A university professor will generally take less dollars in pay if he/she can get tenure. That's a deal for the institution in my way of thinking. What am I missing here. Without tenure universities would have to compete with the private sector for talent. You would earn a higher wage, and if you are as good as you say you are, and I believe most of you are, you would have job security based on your talents and productivity.
Please see my preceding paragraph.
My original post went on a bit longer, but I am still so frustrated about losing it that I think I will stop here for now. Thanks again.
Excellent post, Sympathizer. It was so well written, I'm sure the original must have been a work of art. The paragraph explaining the value of money vs. the freedom to explore was my favorite and should be considered for the "post of the week" award.
Excellent post, Sympathizer. It was so well written, I'm sure the original must have been a work of art. The paragraph explaining the value of money vs. the freedom to explore was my favorite and should be considered for the "post of the week" award. Thanks.
Thanks, Left; I appreciate the kind words, especially coming from you. I really tried to put a lot of thought and effort into my original post, because I wanted to show some real respect to MT for having waded through all the material I gave her and for being willing to alter her opinions. It kills me that the original post was lost. Everytime something like this happens (inevitably due to not using the "save" function), I vow that I will never be so stupid in the future. And then I go ahead and am stupid again in the future. (Hmmmm . . . maybe I should apply to be a university president . . . .)
... And then I go ahead and am stupid again in the future. (Hmmmm . . . maybe I should apply to be a university president . . . .) Anyway, thanks again for your kind words.
At first I was going to joke and say you were over qualified, but then I realized that may be an insult.
(Hmmmm . . . maybe I should apply to be a university president . . . .)
Hey USMS, based on your entire body of thoughtful posts, you'd certainly have my support for a university presidency, USM perhaps? It might come down to a close race with our old friend W.J. Johnson, but I think you've definitely got the edge.
Hey USMS, based on your entire body of thoughtful posts, you'd certainly have my support for a university presidency, USM perhaps? It might come down to a close race with our old friend W.J. Johnson, but I think you've definitely got the edge. AE
If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve. I cast my vote for old W.J..J., whom I miss greatly. Where IS he?