cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1: Overview & Key Facts Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations Part 3: Complaints and concerns Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter

There are some problems with MLA’s representation of the needs and circumstances of the nontenurable faculty. If you want to know how they really live and think, watch Linda Janakos’s documentary, Teachers on Wheels. Really, watch it: she’s a much better filmmaker than I’ll ever be.

All reports of this kind are a compromise, and not all compromises are successful. The authors of this report are frank about being divided on the issue of nontenurable faculty between the meliorative, pragmatic, and sometimes apologist position long represented by committee chair David Bartholomae and the view, long represented by committee member Paul Lauter, that a permanently nontenurable faculty is “an illegitimate...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1: Overview & Key Facts Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations Part 3: Complaints and concerns Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter

Along with graduate student activists, and members of the Radical Caucus like Paul Lauter, Cary Nelson has for two decades urged the MLA to commit more resources to the needs and issues of faculty serving contingently. If you’re going to be at the convention, stop by the SUNY booth to meet him and get him to inscribe a copy of the splendid festschrift devoted to his exemplary, selfless career, Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University. Monday, December 29, 2008, 11am – 12pm

In part 1 of this series, I said that the MLA report on the workforce in English is a mixed bag — important new commitments to higher standards of data gathering and analysis and some good recommendations, but also some...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1: Overview & Key Facts Part 2: Kudos for Recommendations Part 3: Complaints and concerns Part 4: Interview with Paul Lauter

Most of my blogging between now and early January will relate to the worst-timed gathering in the profession, the Modern Language Association annual convention Dec 27-30, with a strong bias toward faculty in English studies.

Feel free to tune out if you don’t care about what happens to one of the largest teaching faculties in the country, encountering nearly every student — including disproportionate encounters with those who don’t earn degrees or never make it out of the first year.

I wouldn’t blame you for not caring much about these teachers — the Modern Language Association has only recently taken real notice of them, having abandoned meaningful consideration of lower-division disciplinary issues to...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com you gotta watch this Batgirl video!

Look, there’s no way to confront how the gated-community crowd has stunk up the economy without core legislation addressing higher education, health care, gender equality, and workplace association as human rights. While the five million top consumers were out getting boob jobs, BMW’s, and blood diamonds, the rest of us were grading their kids’ papers, scrubbing their toilets, and doing their nails. (The chance to “choose” paper-grading instead of other things has a lot to do with the racial division of wealth.)

Here are five key pieces of legislation for The One to jump on — like, yesterday — if he wants future historians to give him the “FDR meets Lincoln” treatment he craves. As I’ve previously written, Obama doesn’t have the luxury of hedging his bets, robbing Peter to pay Paul the way...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Whether you dropped half a million in your TIAA-CREF or are standing in line for free cheese this holiday season, you may be looking for ways to cut back on your dispensation of holiday cheer, while still letting your friends and colleagues know that you’re thinking about them.

Enter Shite Gifts for Academics, my new favorite Facebook app. Devised by someone named “Michael,” you can choose from a wide array of thoroughly appropriate virtual gifts, from an “overbearing, maladjusted colleague” to a “crappy office chair,” a “vengeful student evaluation,” an “idiot chairperson,” “condescending IT guy,” “colleague who knows Robert’s Rules of Order by heart,” a “4-4 load,” or a “windowless office.”

You do have to be on Facebook to use the app. Your students can use the app to send you gifts as well. You can create your own gift app, or ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

With everyone else getting bailed out, higher education is at an absolutely critical juncture, with profound implications for academic actors at all institution types, and their ambitions to serve racial and economic justice.

On the one hand, yesterday’s major AFT report on the permatemping of the faculty urges the necessity of reversing course on academic staffing. That would imply a greater investment in higher education, almost certainly including substantial federal leadership and funding. Most of the public don’t have any idea how many of the faculty are untenured, and are shocked—not in the Casablanca sense—to learn how much they’re paid. When they are given the true picture, every ordinary taxpayer gets it: something’s wrong when faculty earn less than bartenders; nobody would trust an accountant earning less than a living wage,...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Turkey at the top is always intensely competitive. This year’s contenders included first runner-up Robert Felner, the U of Louisville dean indicted for conspiracy to commit fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion in what the feds allege are repeated acts of embezzlement of grant monies amounting to over $2 million. Not content with these escapades, Felner racked up 31 grievances and complaints in his 5 years at the “U of L” but was consistently backed against the faculty by upper administration, especially Provost Shirley Willihnganz and President James Ramsey, who spent extravagantly on lawyers and consultants to prop up his administration despite what numerous accounts (including this one and others that I’ve privately confirmed) termed an “onslaught” of complaints from faculty, staff and students alleging “unsavory behavior,...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Hint: drag cursor to 4:40. Any problems, try here

I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking for help with dislodging the market fetish, whether I’m talking to undergraduates or economists. Some regular Brainstorm contributors have all been expending a ton of energy on recent posts like this one and this one trying to get finance prof “James” to loosen a white-knuckled grip on his Ronald Reagan prayer shawl. Without much success.

So this one’s for valiant Brainstorm regular commenters Lucky Jim, drj50, Unemployed Academic, Joe Erwin, George Karnezis, Maria, “me,” “k,” angry, Annie, Henry C. Frick, Amanda Huggenkiss, David Yamada, and the rest. You know who you are.

Tonight we’ll let Colbert take a shot at explaining the relationship between voodoo and the business curriculum.

The relevant portion begins at 4:40; the re...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com In connection with The Chronicle’s Executive Compensation supplement, Sandy Ungar of Goucher College and I just appeared on NPR — and we agreed on most things. Sandy, for instance, described faculty compensation as “appalling,” and concurred regarding our over-reliance on contingent appointments. I argued that we needed to rebuild our crumbling faculty infrastructure, and that presidents should be held responsible for staffing arrangements that lead to scandalously low graduation rates.

I’ll write more about this later, but for now you can listen to the interview and read our commentary.

Excerpted from my piece, Asking Whether Presidents are Overpaid is the Wrong Question: Using one form or another of peer comparison, many administrators can easily show that they should earn 20 or 30 percent more than their current salary. But that...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com The Yes Men media pranksters have claimed responsibility for a million-copy spoof edition of The New York Times handed out yesterday on Manhattan streets.

It captures the gap between what is needed — what we hope and long for — and what we’re likely to get with a pragmatic Chicago pol at the helm, and the NYT filling his sails.

The lead story narrates our exit from Iraq and inquiries into war crimes. Other stories note the passage of universal health coverage, not Obama’s fake plan, and Adolph Reed’s proposals for free higher education, which I’ve discussed in this space before, including a great video interview with Reed, recorded about a year ago.

Of additional interest to Chronicle readers, since its annual “Executive Compensation” issue is in press, is a spoof story announcing passage of a new maximum wage law that caps all...