I take notes at the conference sessions I attend. These are not those! Instead, these are the tangential thoughts those notes evoked. There are a lot of them, so I may be doing this over several days.
As you will see from my notes, a lot of information at the conference was helpful. It was definitely worth attending.
Reader as witness
A question was asked about bills of sale for estates during the Middle Ages: By writing it down, does that make the reader/audience a witness? an involved participant in the transaction?
I think this is very interesting, especially in terms of the work I am doing with sexual assault survivors. Do they write down their trauma in order to create a form of witness?
It is an interesting concept and one which I would like to explore/expand.
Community colleges
43% of students in the US who go to college, go to CCs
39% of students in CCs are first generation college students
What that says to me is that lots more students are in CCs than I thought. It also makes me wonder if that 43% are less powerful. Certainly their is a stigma attached to community college attendance. But is it a stigma because of the backgrounds of the students or something else?
Again, it is something I will need to think about.
Feel free to chime in with thoughts on this if you have some.
Adjuncts
In 1953, full-time faculty were 52% and 48% were adjuncts.
In 2003, full-time faculty were 37% and 63% were adjuncts.
My first thought was that adjuncting has been a lot more prevalent for longer than I thought. 1953! This was eight years after WWII ended and we had a lot of GIs in school right after WWII, but I think they were mostly done by 1953. They had to go to work. So what was the motivation for this percentage of adjuncting? Eight years is sufficient to get a college degree and a PhD, if you were interested in that. My grandfather-in-law had not graduated from high school prior to WWII and he did a bachelor’s in 27 months after the war ended.