mortiz055

Image for U of O by Jennifer Ruth, English Department, Portland State University This is the second of a two-part post.   “Why are Faculty Complicit in Creating a Disposable Workforce? ” appeared last week. We need rapidly to increase pressure on university administrators for change. I believe that administrators are slowly digesting the (academic and public relations) downsides of relying on instructors to whom the institution makes no real commitment, but at the same time they are under unprecedented budget pressures. Chris’s post on public austerity spelled out many of these pressures. We desperately need to build a coalition that unites university constituencies in efforts to increase state funding. But the adjunct crisis is tricky in this context. It is hard for university leadership to translate the ethical and political disaster we’ve all created with contingent labor into any form of public appeal. Most obviously, administrators attempting to explain the deleterious conse...

This post focuses on the University of California's budget situation, but it is broadly applicable to public colleges and universities across the country.   More evidence of the national pattern came in this week, with reports of Moody's negative outlook on higher education's finances.  The Chronicle of Higher Education's Don Troop provided highlights of Moody's view of the overall sector .  UC reflects the convergence of all but the fourth of these trends. Growth in tuition revenue remains stifled by affordability concerns, legislative ceilings on tuition levels, and steep competition for students. State financing of higher education will increase, on average, just 3 to 4 percent—not enough to meet the growth in expenses. Already stiff competition for sponsored-research dollars is getting stiffer, with success rates for proposals dropping from 19 percent in 2008 to below 15 percent last year. One in 10 public and private colleges is suffering “acute financial ...

by Jennifer Ruth , English Department, Portland State University The Modern Language Association (MLA) is under fire for not fighting hard enough against the adjunctification of the professoriate. An excellent piece in Inside Higher Ed criticizes the recent MLA report on doctoral programs for accommodating when it should challenge the trends that destroy PhDs’ prospects. In blog posts and in The Chronicle for Higher Education,  another group calls for the MLA to consider a 4:1 salary ratio: the highest-paid person (the Association’s executive director) should be compensated no more than four times the lowest-paid person in the profession (the adjunct). The intent here, Marc Bousquet writes, is to “goose” the MLA leadership into action by forcing it to glimpse its ample-salaried self standing in disturbing proximity to the anorexic adjunct. Taking the MLA to task makes sense. One of our biggest professional organizations, why is it helpless to stem—much less reverse—deprofessiona...