I devoted most of the energy available for blogging today to a response to Invisible Adjunct, who takes me to task for what I said and implied in an earlier post. I must agree that I oughtn’t have said that IA claimed to be a “good (or “very good” or ‘excellent’) teacher[s] and scholar[s].” I was thinking of comments I’d read there, but the scope of my generalization included IA’s own writing, and I don’t ever recall seeing IA make such a claim.
The heart of my point, which I evidently didn’t communicate well, was that the proportion of people who protested that they’re good teachers and scholars seems higher than the proportion of job applicants whose qualifications I’ve been in a position to evaluate. So far as I know, every adjunct-blogger’s claim that she or he constitutes an exception to that generaliztion is true; I’m not arguing particulars. I just can’t entirely explain why the situation looks different when I’m leafing through application files. (One difference may well be the constitution of different academic fields.)
Other commenters in the thread correct my misprision of IA’s response, to the effect that the problem isn’t that valiant adjuncts are wronged by duffle-headed full-timers, but that there’s no specifiable distinction to be drawn. You can’t tell an adjunct from a full-timer without drawing on tautological evidence, and there’s no coherent account of why one applicant should count as full-time timber and another not.
This point too is well-taken, especially when one tries to account for differences in fortune between specific individuals or between adjuncts and full-timers in the aggregate. On the other hand, I’m uncertain about what would count as an acceptably rigorous criterion for differentiating applications satisfactorily. Academic positions involve a peculiar mix of qualifications, and the emphases within that mix vary from locale to locale. I heartily agree that there’s no demonstrable property that should enable an impartial observer to separate some herbivores from others — but that premise means not only that most adjuncts may well “deserve” full-time status, but also that there might be non-obvious reasons that some do not. The thrust of my earlier musings was that the testimonial tales of woe that I had recently read don’t fit my experience of evaluating applications.
It’s not a peculiarly academic problem; in many fields, people occupy and hold onto jobs that others would do better, would presumably “deserve” more. De jure tenure, however renders academic hiring that much more problematic an area in which to rectify deadwood problems. Much as I hate to concede hard-won benefits, I’ve been persuaded that tenure is no longer a benefit to the teaching profession as a whole — only to those who can lay claim to it. My father delayed his retirement for a long time, demanding that he be replaced by one full-time position rather than a shuttle of adjuncts, and part of my reluctance to give ground on the justification of tenure involved my sense of the rightness of his struggle to make sure that the benefits for which he’d worked hard weren’t dissipated in the name of lowering costs. I’m ready to change tack, though.
To close, then, I apologize to the exploited adjuncts whom I’ve mistakenly wronged; I repeat that I appreciate IA and the IA community for keeping my conscience awake to the extent of academia’s culpable complicity in the exploitation of part-time faculty. I don’t know which ones would make better full-time faculty than which present full-timers, but I know that more institutions should employ more full-time faculty, and those that rely on adjuncts should absolutely make their working conditions less Dickensian.
Posted by AKMA at March 3, 2004 10:58 PM | TrackBackLove the spelling. :)
Another point is that the sample at IA's is self-selected. I don't necessarily think it's a fair sample of the sort of thing you get CVs for when you put out a job listing.
Exactly what the differences might be between the two samples is an excellent question to which I don't have a firm answer. I can't say for certain that it's a better class of people than the general run, though I tend (perhaps self-servingly) to believe so.
Even so, I'm not sure it's fair to dismiss their self-appraisals out of hand.
For the record: I was a competent but by no means outstanding Spanish teacher, with strengths in applied linguistics and general class presentation and weaknesses in exercise design and class prep. I knew who the outstanding teachers were. They weren't me.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at March 4, 2004 12:14 PM