#adjunct stories

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#AdjunctStories:  Violinist, CCM graduate and former #adjunct #faculty member must leave U.S

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#Adjuncts' Stories of Job Insecurity | @PSC_CUNY. Updated January 24, 2014 

PSC’s work to improve working conditions and job security for CUNY adjuncts received prominent coverage this week in the New York Times and NBCNews.com. In the NY Times, see “Crowded Out of Ivory Tower, Adjuncts See a Life Less Lofty” by Rachel Swarns, author of a column called The Working Life. On NBCNews.com, see“Class divide on campus: adjunct professors fight for better pay, benefits” by Nona Willis Aronowitz. 

Job security for adjuncts is a priority demand for the PSC in the current round of collective bargaining for a new contract. The stories (submit yours at psc-cuny.org/JobSecurity) are being collected to support a campaign for adjunct job security. They may be shared anonymously with media, reported in testimony or offered to inform the contract negotiations.

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#Adjunct Across America, Interview 3…

"If Only John Dewey Could See Us Now": A Snapshot of Everest College in Crisis"

[Jonathan is a full-time non-tenure track Lecturer in Seattle who has also worked at Everest College for seven years. He agreed to meet with me at some point during my travels, and on his way to conduct research in San Francisco, we met in Corvallis and shared a hotel room. Immediately, we took out our laptops and respectively compared our online for-profit universities. 

The following is a documentation of how a federal investigation into the parent company of Everest College precipitated a fundamental and seemingly arbitrary shift in the faculty expectations for Everest’s adjunct instructors. In this sense, Jonathan’s account provides a window into the policies of a for-profit university reeling from economic and political crisis

Jonathan comes from a tradition of humanities instructors who are critical of for-profit education yet find themselves placed into the business due to their meager compensation. Throughout his seven years serving at Everest, Jonathan used his compensation from the for-profit university to supplement his grad school stipend, fund his doctoral research, recover from the instability of 9-month adjunct contracts, pay his student loans, foot the bill for attending American Historical Association job interviews in New York City, and attend conferences that are not funded by his department due to his full-time non-TT status.

While Jonathan is grateful to Everest for insulating him from financial hardship, he has become critical of the arbitrary faculty expectations that arose when Everest’s parent company (Corinthian Colleges) weathered numerous financial setbacks, campus shutdowns, and federal investigations over the past few years. Originally, Everest instructors were only expected to email students whose grades fell below 70% on every Wednesday. Reeling from financial and economic crisis, Everest’s faculty expectations suddenly “shifted from week to week” in a move that Jonathan described as transforming “people from classroom instructors into free-lance call centers and customer service representatives.”

Now every Monday, Everest instructors email students who did not participate in discussion forums the previous week. On Wednesday, instructors email students whose grades fell below 70%. On Friday, instructors call students who have not responded to either communication. According to Jonathan’s own estimates, this ultimately means that an instructor teaching three classes would have to conduct up to 50 phone calls between Thursday and Saturday, and send up to 50-100 emails total between Monday and Wednesday. 

For a struggling student with a full-time load, this means that they would receive 10 emails from five different instructors as well as five phone calls Monday through Friday. Jonathan notes that this process often alienates his strongest students, who work full-time jobs and reserve their work for the weekend (a key selling point that Everest emphasizes). Furthermore, Everest requires instructors to conduct these phone calls via Skype so program directors can “monitor and confirm that instructors are actually calling.” 

Jonathan notes how this sort of administrative panopticon became common for Everest, as his work was evaluated by program directors who were evaluated by associate deans who were evaluated by “higher-ups that he couldn’t perceive”—all with a focus on achieving ideal metrics of “retention” and “outreach” that made the University “look good” amid financial and political crisis. Yet, when Everest opened up message boards for faculty to discuss these faculty expectations, Jonathan noted how the forums devolved into “lengthy diatribes” about how these new expectations came at the expense of valuable time previously reserved for classroom instruction.

After sending out around 50-100 emails and around 50 phone calls, instructors are also expected to relay their efforts to Everest by logging their “student interactions” into Talisma, a software system that Jonathan describes as an “archaic system straight out of a 1980s computer system.” Using this system that requires a “laborious process to log-in,” Everest instructors are expected to log every “interaction” with students, and indicate whether their student interactions are “resolved or unresolved.” Instructors are also evaluated on “how they organize their student interactions,” and micro-managed to the point where they can be assessed on the subject line they used in student emails, or critiqued for having documentations of interactions that are not “detailed enough.”

In addition, Jonathan noted how Everest instructors also had to log their hourly work into Talisma, in a process that Jonathan believes was designed to “prove to shareholders how time is allotted.” To many instructors, this process seemed odd, as their compensation ($1800 per course) was not billed in an “hourly way.” Furthermore, Everest intentionally limited the maximum amount of hours that adjuncts could report that they worked, a move clearly designed to prevent instructors from reporting hours that neared full-time status. However, Jonathan noted that if adjuncts teaching 2-3 courses performed all the obligations expected of them, they would clearly qualify for “full-time work.”

In assessing these transformations, Jonathan notes how Everest has placed an emphasis on retention because “otherwise they could have to admit that they prey on at-risk, low-income students.” Many of Jonathan’s students are “very poor,” come from struggling neighborhoods, work multiple jobs, and help sick and struggling family members. Other students lack computers or Internet access and complete their work at the library. And while Jonathan notes that he does have not have the qualification to diagnose his students, he did note how many students “with obvious learning disabilities did not receive accommodations.”

Furthermore, Jonathan noted how these changes are part of a broader cost-cutting strategy. While previously working at University of Phoenix as an academic counselor, Jonathan engaged in “outreach” designed to pull failing students back into the college in order to improve retention rates. Now, Jonathan finds that Everest has shrewdly rerouted the tasks formally reserved for academic counselors and placed them onto adjuncts themselves, resulting in a “150% increase in workload.” According to Jonathan this has ultimately facilitated a “call-center culture” where there is “no day off for adjunct instructors,” and “no training” for the new faculty expectations instructors are required to achieve

By this point, I proposed that we needed a drink and Jonathan and I gravitated towards a Corvallis bar where I asked him if he ever encountered any experience at Everest that eclipsed the absurdity he had just described. In one instance, Jonathan noted how when Everest faced dire financial straits, the college sent out an email to all professors indicating that some “appreciative” faculty members had decided to forgo their pay for a couple weeks in order to insure the preservation and posterity of Everest. This development led the University to ask if any other instructors were similarly willing to sacrifice for their employer and go without pay. Jonathan doubts that these “appreciative” educators even existed.

In another instance, Jonathan noted how Everest’s purchase from an outside buyer (Zenith) precipitated an “administrative shuffling” with sometimes illogical consequences. One expectation required faculty to set-up a Facebook account with their conventional first name and a last name of Everest, resulting in Jonathan turning into the appropriately manly, “Jonathan Everest.” Incorrectly, Zenith informed faculty that they had to set-up their Everest Facebook account on a different browser or else their current Facebook account would become jeopardized. This resulted in a job requirement where Everest policy violated Facebook rules while also compromising the integrity of their instructor’s primary social media accounts. According to Jonathan, this plan quickly “went away.’

Ultimately, Jonathan has no qualms about participating in the perpetuation of this arguably detrimental for-profit enterprise. He cleverly omits Everest from his CV and keeps quiet when his “New Leftist” colleagues deride “anyone who would work at a for-profit.” He’s aware that Everest intentionally targeted students with “low self-esteem” by airing advertisements during Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. And he indicated that when he finally receives a tenure-track position (he has a book contract, dissertation award, and his CV is lined with conference presentations) he will immediately quit working at Everest. Yet for now, he has no compunction in working at an amoral for-profit university while he applies to a job market that he finds similarly cruel and unusual.

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IYCMI David J. McCowin addresses his students at Assumption College, May 12, 2015…plus comments

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Dr #Adjunct or How I Learned to Stop Suffering & ❤ #CollectiveBargaining

Lunch was provided by the university administration, represented at the collective bargaining meeting by the director of human resources, the assistant provost, the university legal counsel, and an outside labor attorney who sat in a row of desks facing us -- 12 adjuncts (representing hundreds), an Adjunct Action organizer, and a labor attorney from the SEIU.

I hadn't planned to be an adjunct

.... The university administration's attitude was adversarial and pejorative. They weren't interested in being "friends" or "bff" or even colleagues--their gestures were empty. To them, contract negotiations were risk management, while to the rest of us it was about cultivating a real relationship.  If university administrators continue to cling to Wall Street principles of financial greed, then faculty unions are essential for the survival of teaching and citizenship. We must work together, in solidarity, to get back to the substantive heart of...

Tracy Strauss is writing a novel about the lives of adjunct professors ~ more at www.tracystrauss.com & @TracyLStrauss

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SoLong&Thx for All the…Dry Erase Markers—A Teacher on Retiring at 27 « @RCPress

Raging Chicken Press Editor's Note: This is the first in what we hope to be many articles by Marlana Eck, founder and editor of the brand-spanking-new publication, Lehigh Valley Vanguard. 

Here she writes,

Many people are finally realizing that the nation’s institutions of higher learning are being taught by piecemeal, temporary workers. It’s nice to see so many people adding to the conversation. I thought I would tell a little part of my own story in solidarity.

I was an adjunct “professor” for almost three years from ages 24-27. I worked at three different schools after I received my Masters in Education.

When you are a contingent worker, you have what feels like a constant state of fight-or-flight adrenal issues. Your job is not real. By that I mean, you are a perpetual temporary worker. If a student asks you if they can take your class next semester, you’re not sure what to tell them, so you lie a little: “Sure.”

You are always in fear that you will lose your “job” for a reason that may not be valid, logical, or even legal. You certainly won’t get due process.

Read the rest at http://www.ragingchickenpress.org/2014/04/11/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-dry-erase-markers-a-teacher-on-retiring-at-age-27/

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#AdjunctStories ❝Hanging Up on a Calling❞ @pankisseskafka #QuitLit @Chronicle

A January 2014 #QuitLit classic from the Rebecca Schuman collection

An adjunct finds she doesn't enjoy teaching as much as she thought she did when she had a more stable gig.