The session presentation was titled “Optimizing the Use of Part-Time Faculty.” Titles like that make me queasy, because “optimizing” people generally goes well for those doing the optimizing, and badly for those being optimized. I spent Memorial Day weekend at a conference of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, in Austin, Texas. It’s the first time I’ve attended (well, exhibited at, actually) that conference, and I can tell you that few disciplinary meetings offer the quality of the sessions at NISOD.

Jim Hammons, a professor and program coordinator in the Higher Education Leadership Program at the University of Arkansas, led the session on optimizing part-time faculty members. Unlike the sparsely attended sessions on part timers that are held at other big conferences, Hammons’s room was jammed with program directors, department chairs, deans, provosts,...

An unlikely beneficiary of the global economic slowdown is India’s faculty-needy higher-education sector.

The country’s university regulator said it had been inundated with applications from Indian and other professors who currently teach at universities abroad, The Times of India reported. The “surprised” regulator, as the Indian Express reported, is convening a committee of university heads to work out a way to get the best of the applicants into India’s universities.

“There is an opportunity in economic recession,” S.K. Thorat, chairman of the University Grants Commission, India’s university regulator, told The Times. “We have received hundreds of applications expressing interest in taking up teaching assignments in India,” he added. Most seek appointments at the 15 new central universities that will open this year, at the six new Indian Institutes of Technology that started last...

To follow up on my last post about adjunct-labor issues, I would like to propose a simple taxonomy of the ways in which institutions use adjunct faculty members. Each of those ways has its own particular ethical and educational implications:

Many years ago, when I taught high school, I had an assistant principal who used to squat outside of classroom doors and press an ear to them, eavesdropping on what the teachers were saying in class. When caught, he would stand up quickly and act like he was looking for termites or something. It was hilarious.

Since then, I’ve seen deans who wander the halls checking on office-hour compliance, chairs who scour phone records looking for personal calls, and presidents who have accessed faculty e-mail accounts to look for discord.

Certainly there are times when legitimate investigations need to occur, but trolling for violations always has struck me as petty and an incredible waste of time. I suppose, as well, that supervisors aren’t the only ones who succumb to such temptations; colleagues can as well.

Do any of you have cautionary tales to share with us?

I try not to be pessimistic, but the realist in me says that if this year has been difficult budgetwise for most institutions, just wait until next year. Tax revenues for states will continue to decline, donations will continue to wane, and endowment returns will get even worse since many institutions use a three-year rolling average for their disbursements.

I see more budget cuts on the horizon. Anyone who has had to deal with deep cuts knows how frustrating it is when the process works in one direction only: top down. Most folks in the trenches feel that a more team-oriented approach might be more effective.

What advice would you offer to administrators who must make more cuts next year?

Here’s how some colleges are dealing with their budget deficits:

It’s exam time, and I need something to distract me: Most of my friends have no idea what it’s like to be a professor, so they project their favorite television shows onto the profession. For some, I’m like one of the faculty members on Saved by the Bell: The College Years. Or like the professor on Gilligan’s Island. For others, I’m like Gary on thirtysomething. Personally, I don’t see the similarities between me and any of them (Dick Solomon on 3rd Rock From the Sun, maybe?). Then again, television and movies shape our perceptions of all sorts of professions.

Have you been influenced by a fictional professor, even one from a novel? Which one most closely matches the reality of your own life or career?