Previous Judge Dismisses Wisconsin Professor's Widely Watched Lawsuit Over Firing |
Next |
May 06, 2009, 09:53 AM ET
Making an Impact on Higher Education
A recent post on a blog called Reassigned Time is an excellent example of why it’s worth it for anyone interested in the future of higher education to keep an eye on blogs that comment on higher education.
The post, ‘Changing’ Higher Education — Dr. Crazy’s View, takes up a variety of perennial issues that are particularly pressing these days, including the exploitation of adjunct labor (with its attendant damage to the academic job market), the pressures from trustees and legislatures that sometimes greatly distort institutions’ academic missions, and the turf wars that so often afflict departmental and institutional operations.
All of those are important concerns, and the post makes a number of salient points. What I want to add is that the academy is made up of people, and that concerted action can change institutions for the better, even in the face of adverse economic circumstances. It will be extremely difficult to deal with the exploitation and overuse of adjunct faculty members by simply overturning the system of institutional finance that virtually mandates their use at many institutions. However, careful, less “turfy” analyses of curricula and students’ academic needs may, in fact, make it easier to reduce our reliance on poorly compensated labor.
New faculty members are going to inherit a very difficult situation. However, one way out is going to be simply to stop automatically replicating the systems that have gotten higher education into its current predicament. Wiser heads than I will need to figure out how to accomplish that goal, which is going to require mobilizing many kinds of resources. But the project is exciting, and if I were a new faculty member, it would certainly be on my agenda.
Categories: General-interest, Faculty-hiring
Add Your Comment
Commenting is closed.