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Mad Professors: The adjuncts are at the barricades
from In These Times:
Mad Professors
The adjuncts are at the barricades.
BY Rebecca Burns
After years of earning low wages, Jack Dempsey and his co-workers decided to organize. They were sick of disrespect and intimidation on the job, and desperate for benefits and job security.
Some might be surprised to learn that this predicament describes Dempseys life as an adjunct professor of English at Bentley University in Massachusetts. But in nearly 12 years working there, hes never received a promotion or benefits. Were living on a Band-aid, he says. If somebody gets sick, theyre finished. People are so afraid of losing the little bit of bread that they have that theyre afraid to speak up. But were going to try to change that.
On May 9, adjunct faculty at Bentley filed petitions for a union election to join Adjunct Action, a new project of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Earlier this year, Adjunct Action began a push to unionize part-time faculty at private schools across the Boston area, an effort thats part of an emerging focus within the labor movement on contingent faculty in higher education.
That so many advanced degree-holders are toiling in poverty conditions flies in the face of the assumption that higher education is a path to prosperity. But low wages and precarity in fact represent the new norm. Tenure-track faculty now constitute just 24 percent of the academic workforce, an all-time low, according to an April report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). ...................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15080/mad_professors/
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Mad Professors: The adjuncts are at the barricades (Original Post)
marmar
Jun 2013
OP
Large schools with armies of graduate students use grad teaching assistant AND adjuncts.
Buzz Clik
Jun 2013
#1
Buzz Clik
(38,437 posts)1. Large schools with armies of graduate students use grad teaching assistant AND adjuncts.
Smaller schools have fewer or no grad students, so it's adjuncts. They are underpaid because the only contribution is the teaching. If adjuncts manage to force the colleges to pay them the wages they deserve, the number of them will drop dramatically. The bottom line is the bottom line, and colleges and universities are suffering major cutbacks in funding for their teaching support.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)2. Slave labor is very popular among our managerial elites. nt
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)3. .
.