Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

I’m not generally a big fan of “charter schools,” which more often than not are sleazy operations that combine experimenting on other people’s children with transparent attempts to break schoolteacher unions.

But one NYC charter school really breaks the mold by offering the same argument for developing teacher talent that administrators make for themselves: You pay for it. A starting salary for teachers of $125,000 a year, to be exact.

Yeah, baby.

But here’s the great part: He’s paying his principal less than the teachers. A lot less — just $90,000 to start. Oh, double yeah, baby.

I love this guy.

Reaction from the administration? Predictable. Robert Logan, president of the city principals’ union, called the scheme “the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” continuing, according to the New York Times, “If you cheapen the role of the ...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In this final season of David Simon’s The Wire, we see the dystopic contemporary Baltimore created by the class war from above. It’s a city ravaged by “quality management,” the same philosophy that administrations across the country have adopted in shunting the overwhelming majority of college faculty into contingent positions.

As Time magazine television critic James Poniewozik puts it, “All The Wire’s characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation, or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they’re all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for.”

What the show grasps is that private corporate and public institutional managers both employ “quality” in an Orwellian...

(This is not the promised issues-only post on contingency, which I’ll deliver early next week.) Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Some of the issues I’ve been raising have been batted about in The Chronicle’s discussion forums. One member of the business faculty initiated an exchange by complaining that some of my writing is an example of the way, he believes, humanities faculty too easily assume the utility of their work and project a corresponding harmfulness to the work of business. He raises a fair question, and my answer may well be too soft on capitalism, or too tough on administrators, or both.

I might even be too hard on Stephen Trachtenberg. I don’t know. But I’m flummoxed at the ruling silence on the question of contingency and a situation where five faculty members teaching full-time earn less than a decent nurse or state trooper. That’s messed up.

So...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

In our abortive exchange, Stephen Trachtenberg a) repeatedly ignored my very polite request to talk about the circumstances of the overwhelming majority of faculty, those who serve contingently; b) said I could leave the academy if I didn’t like it; c) affected that I was a tricky fellow using rhetoric and d) ran even farther away from the conversation after his own crude ad hominem attack opened the door to my asking him to discuss the well-documented facts of his own record with the majority contingent faculty during his administration.

This begs further analysis, insofar as Stephen accuses me of ending a conversation that—in reality—he refused to start.

Tomorrow I’ll publish a companion post that deals with the issues and not personalities, as I prefer and as I invited Stephen to proceed. If you find Stephen’s reduction of issues to ...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

I was a bit surprised that Stephen chose to ignore my second invitation to talk about the plight of the majority faculty — those who serve contingently — and, instead, indulged in a speculative ad hominem flight of fancy that ends with inviting me to leave the academy!

(“I’m sorry Mr. Bousquet is so unhappy in the academy… Surely so articulate a man could do many things. I disliked being a lawyer so I found an alternative career.”)

For the record, I’m very happy in the academy. Like the hundreds of thousands of academic unionists and many others, I’m willing to stay and fight to make this a place where administrations don’t reside in mansions on half-million dollar salaries when an impoverished faculty are standing in line for free cheese.

I don’t think going ad hominem was wise for Stephen, who will recognize in that last sentence ...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

One of my co-contributors, Stephen Trachtenberg, recently posted on the importance of “safety nets” for administrators, then followed it with a post in which he questioned the usefulness of tenure for faculty, at least for those profs he described as “burnt out”:

He went on to complain that tenured faculty average $80,000 a year.

I couldn’t resist asking him to relate the two posts, and specifically requested that he talk about the movement toward massive insecurity for faculty:

Stephen, I haven’t followed all of your commentary here, but the ...

Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

My son Emile Amitai arrived on Valentine’s Day at 5 a.m. To the best of my knowledge based on our brief acquaintance, he is healthy, intelligent, big-boned and good looking. If all goes as planned, 18 years from now he’ll be a big man on campus somewhere.

But what will that campus look like?

If current trends continue, that campus will closely resemble another American institution — an upscale suburban shopping mall, with highly standardized “products,” a student work force, degraded floor managers wearing pocket protectors, an expensive yet disposable physical plant, and corporate executives designing everyone else’s work process at a great distance from the shop floor.

The “faculty” will be 87 percent contingent and upper-division undergraduates will do much of the teaching of lower-division students.

Tenure and curriculum will ...

(Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com)

In a couple of recent posts, I raised questions about the Democratic candidates’ health plans — Obama’s really won’t cover many people and Clinton’s enthusiastically endorses tiering of care.

As we move closer to the likelihood of an Obama presidency, isn’t it time to start moving the candidate toward repairing the shortcomings of his health-care plan?

His plan is simply unlikely to do much for faculty members serving contingently, such as Nancy Welch’s colleague at the University of Vermont, who has taught in the English department since 2000. Most often, he’s been given three courses each semester. But UVM calls him ‘part-time,’ which means that he isn’t eligible for UVM’s health-insurance plan.

As a result, he pays $356 each month for an individual insurance plan, with a deductible of up to $18,750 a year. He also has cancer and...

crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com

“It’s broadly recognized, certainly by contingent faculty themselves, that they really don’t possess academic freedom,” Cary Nelson says, at least not “in the way that the American academy has assumed for basically half a century that everyone who teaches does.”

In the first segment of our interview, the 49th president of the AAUP suggests that the shift to a majority contingent faculty is not only an economic phenomenon.

It’s an intellectual sea change as well — for the faculty and for their students.

Instead of intellectual freedom, many of the majority contingent faculty can be fired for contradicting the administration, can’t choose course texts or create syllabi, and are afraid to challenge students to think and learn, or raise controversial issues.

“It’s a question of teaching in a climate of fear, versus teaching in a...

In the very unscientific polls I placed at DailyKos and The Chronicle’s non-tenure-track forum, a 3/4 majority responded to the question “Which Dem candidate’s health plan?” with “Neither — we need a single-payer system.” This appears to reflect at least one of the candidate’s own judgments: Clinton appeared to acknowledge in the last debate that single-payer was preferable — just not, in her view, politically feasible.

The best overall conversation on the subject was held on adj-l, the very important discussion list on which major contingent organizers such as Jon Curtiss, Joe Berry, Craig Smith, Keith Hoeller, Elizabeth Hoffman — and AAUP past president Jane Buck — all weigh in regularly.

One adj-l correspondent, Steve Street, himself a faculty member serving contingently and a cancer survivor, who understandably calls this “his issue,” pointed to the timely Paul Krugman column...