Joe Ramsey is a talented young scholar of the radical writing that often characterized the American cultural landscape in the first half of the last century (and which the cultural criticism of the second half largely ignored). He writes politically-relevant poetry under the name J. Gallant Ramsey. This piece on Haiti is presented here with his permission. Over one and a half million Haitians are still homeless, many of them the children of the quarter-million dead.

Fault Lines--Six Months After, July 12 (A poem reflecting on the six month anniversary of the Haitian Earthquake, and the ongoing catastrophe)

The Earth has traveled half way round the Sun

Since the day it shook and sucked them down.

Down

Down and

down

everything fell:

Shacks and hovels smashed through sewers;

Palace collapsed like an empty egg shell.

Three hundred thousand, maybe fewer

Thousands buried, never found.

A nation of...

Only way to please me
turn around and leave
and walk away
—"Alabama Getaway," lyrics by Robert Hunter

Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt's report for The Chronicle blamed "Dixie" culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who "bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same."

As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All the Kings Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at...

Just last year, Stanley Fish was playing Clint Eastwood with his manifesto: Do Your Job, Punk! (or, My Tinfoil Hat Keeps Politics Out of My Teaching--Get Yours Today!) In that widely panned book, he argued that the role of the faculty was to produce and distribute knowledge magically apart from the mundane and political.

Earlier this week he more convincingly took on the student evaluation of teaching and, specifically, a Texas proposal to hold tenured faculty "more accountable" by giving faculty bonuses of up to $10,000 for earning high customer assessments of specified learning outcomes.

Fish makes two arguments against the proposal. He squanders pixels bolstering his weaker point, that students aren't necessarily in a position to judge whether Fish-as-teacher-phallus has, ugh, "planted seeds that later grew into mighty trees of understanding."

Far better is his second point:...

Let's say you teach at an M.A.-granting state school with 2,000 new first-year undergraduates entering annually. Let's further say they take half their load with faculty on part-time appointments. Controlling for other variables, one new multi-campus study suggests that this degree of contingency in faculty appointment could play a significant part in 600 students dropping out before their sophomore year.

The latest chapter (pdf) in the cautious series by Audrey Jaeger and Kevin Eagan focuses on the critical first year in four-year institutions, following up previous efforts on community colleges and the lower division more broadly.  Their conclusion: a merely "average" degree of contingency in faculty appointments and working conditions at four-year institutions affects year-to-year student retention by as much as 30 percent:

Students with average levels of exposure to full-time,...

Across the planet for the past two years, university management has been opportunistically putting the screws to faculty, staff and students with bogus claims that "the economy made us do it." Professor of accounting and AAUP Secretary-Treasurer Howard Bunsis has made a second career of flying around North America debunking these hilariously dishonest claims, a reason Bunsis is one of my top picks for next AAUP prez.

One of the more sinister categories of administrator opportunism is program closure, and winner of 2010 Most Egregious Sleaze in that category has to be the UK's Middlesex University, which in a burst of vocationalist enthusiasm closed an active, successful philosophy program. The department was by far the top research producer in the school, according to the national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and ranked 13th nationally among philosophy programs measured by the...

So when I heard Anya Kamenetz, once the passionate shoot-from-the-hip spokesperson against student debt, was reinventing herself as the passionate shoot-from-the-hip analyst of new media in education, I was prepared to give her a listen. I thought, well, at least she has enough dignity and intelligence not to turn herself into a pimpette for learn-while-you-sleep audiocassettes.

Whoa, was I wrong. She turned out a book that stays relentlessly on its Twitter-sized message: OMG! OMG! The internetz a library! (Speaking of Twitter, you can relieve your boredom with the book by following Kamenetz's real-time feed about her visits to the dentist.)

Kamenetz turns out to be an adherent of the most shopworn education fantasy in history: education without educators! Like untold generations of blatherers before her, she opines that information technology will deliver education without an...

Over at The Atlantic, business editor Megan McArdle lit up the Beltway blab-o-sphere by posing an interesting question: If "almost every" tenured professor she knows has a "left-wing vision" of workplace issues, why do they accept the "shockingly brutal" treatment of faculty with contingent appointments?

Her perception of leftism among the faculty leads her to think that our values "should result in something much more egalitarian." So, she asks, how is it that higher ed sustains "one of the most abusive labor markets in the world"?

Good question. One answer, of course, is that the faculty aren't "leftists" at all, but American liberals, whose commitments to equality are relatively clear in matters of ethnicity and gender, but hopelessly confused when it comes to class and workplace issues generally.

Arguably most of the policy failures by contemporary liberals in matters of ethnicity...

As usual, your friends at The New York Times let higher education employers off the hook. After finally picking up on the nationwide scandal of unemployment claims denial, a story that Joe Berry broke years ago specifically in connection with higher-ed employers, the Times mentions the complicity of just about every kind of employer except higher ed.

Here's how it works. Because employers fund unemployment insurance (UI) in this country, generally in some relation to how many of their employees receive UI, they are highly motivated to contest claims. The system was designed, of course, to penalize employers who try to dump the costs of their workforce on the public by making those who aggressively churned their staff pay more.

As Jason De Parle's piece makes clear, this incentive to fight the claims of the unemployed has created a boom industry for niche sleazebags like the Talx...

Think you enjoy academic freedom? Think again. In July 2007, the American Sociological Association reported that 1/3 of its members felt that their academic freedoms were threatened, a significantly higher figure than the 1/5 recorded during the McCarthy years. What this suggests is that witch hunts haven't gone away; they just don't attract as many headlines. (Just last month, Bill Ayers was disinvited from another lecture: ho-hum.) Today, even tenured faculty at top research schools can legally be disciplined and harassed for questioning the administration in a department meeting.

How are we to understand this moment? How did we get here? Academic Repression, a blistering volume by Nocella, Best, and McLaren, offers some desperately needed history and analysis.

The history alone is worth the price of admission. If you've let your AAUP membership lapse—and have been getting your...

Reposted with permission from the essential adj-l discussion list, guest artist Maria Shine Stewart offers a taxonomy of the (too often silent) majority faculty.

Adjunct acrobat: One who stays supremely flexible
Badjunct: Unfortunate stereotype
Cladjunct: Colleague with scheduling luck
Dadjunct: One balancing parenting and teaching
Egadjunct: Typical reaction upon hearing course load
Fadjunct: One who follows the trends
Gladjunct: Opposite of "sadjunct"
Gradjunct: One completing an/other degree while teaching
Hadjunct: Remember position you had before reassignment, budget cuts, etc.
Idjunct: One given to too much self-indulgence
Jazzjunct: One who recharges while commuting with innovative music
Kitkatdjunct: One who stops at vending machines rather than taking meal breaks
Ladjunct: The newbie
Myriadjunct: One who works in multiple departments of the same school
Nadjunct: Someone who gives it up