Category: Job Searching

but I love the work and would do it for free. (Don’t tell my boss.)

It also means I was very interested in Richard Vedder’s comments on some of the discussion at a meeting he attended.

Dan Julius, the Provost at Benedictine University, called for more serious academic research on labor issues, suggesting good ideas for studies. For example, has the spread in the use of part-time non-tenured (“contingent”) faculty led to reductions in academic or instructional quality? What is the relationship between academic quality and unionization? Good questions, deserving serious scrutiny. And Ernst Benjamin, who runs the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), saw a potential dilemma. In pushing hard for higher salaries and fringe benefits for mostly tenure track full time faculty, unions increase the incentives for institutions to hire more adjunct faculty with low pay and fringe benefits. He came close to suggesting that unions are promoting the demise of their own membership by driving universities to lower cost substitutes for their services.

CNN has a post on adjuncts. Most of it is same-old for those of us who are adjuncts. But I thought the salary thing was weird.

And a 2004 report for the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute found that adjunct faculty members were paid about 64 percent less per hour than full-time assistant professors on a tenure track.

While I have a PhD, and know another adjunct who also has one- but he’s “retired,” most adjuncts have the minimum education required by their state to be an adjunct. Most full-time assistant profs are PhDs. You would expect that someone who is a PhD would be paid better than someone who is not.

Of course, the 64% doesn’t include the fact that the full-time person has benefits and the adjuncts don’t. Nor does it deal with the fact that the adjuncts get the classes no one else wants to teach. (Works for me. Those are the ones I like.)

Anyway, it’s an article on the topic. I found it through The Cranky Professor.

and University employment can easily be seen in Inside Higher Ed. Three teachers have been convicted of sexual felonies- two having to do with children and one stalking. But they’re all still employed. They’ve been convicted. And they’re still employed.

Is this what “academic freedom” has come to mean?

If so, then we need to chunk it and start over.

An interesting article at Political Calculations says that a professional degree is worth more than a doctorate. (I can tell you that’s true!) It also says that having some college is almost, but not quite as good, as having an associates’ degree.

Of course, these won’t be true over everyone. R looks more like a professional now (at 40), but his income won’t go up unless he does something new or goes with a new company. However, he’s got an incredible leap over normal bachelor folks.

None the less, it is an interesting presentation. And my teacher aide students would have enjoyed seeing that the yellow line is visibly higher than the blue one.

According to Cronaca there’s a Brit study that says that professors are 2x as likely to have beards as lecturers. I wonder if this is part of the gatekeeping in academia? What does it do for women academics? I’d think a beard would be a setback there.

Having taught at several places where beards were not allowed, I doubt if the beard-heaviness is true in the US.