May 17, 2012, 1:42 pm
By Isaac Sweeney
I received a strange e-mail a few weeks ago. It was a Change.org petition, made by a group of students, to allow one of our adjuncts to teach English 102, “Introduction to Literary Genres.” The e-mailed petition was sent to all of the college’s students, faculty members, and staffers, and reads:
“Give [Name Removed] the opportunity to teach English 102.”
“We, the students of Richard Bland College, respectfully request that [Name Removed] be allowed to teach English 102 (Intro to literary genres) during the upcoming semester. Every signature on this list is either from a student who has taken [the faculty member's] class and feels that his encouragement of expression and opinion speaks to us as students, or from a faculty member who can validate the aforementioned claims. [Name Removed] is a gifted teacher and it is widely known that he has wanted to teach English 102 for some time….
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May 7, 2012, 1:38 pm
By Isaac Sweeney
I implemented a policy a couple of years ago that has caused colleagues to raise eyebrows at a number of institutions and in a number of departments. I believe this policy is a good one in a perfect world, but I would like to get some opinions from readers here.
The policy concerns deadlines. In all of my classes, students write essays of one type or another, but I’ll focus on ENG 101, of freshman composition. In here, students write three medium-length essays that make up most of their grade for the semester. These essays have due dates. The kicker is that I don’t enforce these deadlines; they are loose deadlines. Let me explain.
I have the deadlines because some people seem to work better with a deadline in mind. The deadlines also mark the end of one paper and the beginning of another for the purposes of in-class activities. I don’t enforce the deadlines, though, because I view …
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April 23, 2012, 11:02 am
By Isaac Sweeney
In a recent post, I talked about some apathetic students. Some comments suggested I’m not an engaging enough instructor. I expect a certain amount of resistance to almost any post I write, but one comment did disturb me. Evan DeliFi, who claims to be a student, said, “As a student who pays for my own education I view myself as my teachers’ employer. I am paying for a service and I should be able to consume as much or as little of that service within the pre-determined bounds that I am paying for. It is your job as a teacher to make class-time engaging and necessary for success in the classroom. I have been through far too many classes where everything covered in the lecture was in the book and attendance offered no tangible benefit to me in terms of achievement on the exams. In these cases as long as the teacher doesn’t score points for attendance, which by the way is absurd, I would…
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April 9, 2012, 10:10 am
By Isaac Sweeney
I’ve been working with some art students lately to help them with their professional writing. These art students are going to Seattle to participate in the Fremont Summer Solstice Parade and they’ve been writing grants, Web-site materials, letters, artist biographies, and other items. These students are passionate, energetic, determined, intelligent, and talented. They call themselves the “Seattle 5.”
I love working with them. They’re good at writing, but that’s not the reason I love it. Writing isn’t their top priority, but they understand its importance. They really grasp the notions of purpose and audience. More generally, they understand that their writing is a reflection of them as individuals and professionals and, unlike some of my other writing students, they care about getting it done well.
Recently, I was browsing through The Chronicle’s blogs, forums, and other areas,…
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March 26, 2012, 1:12 pm
By Isaac Sweeney
I think I’m an OK instructor. I’ve always considered one of my strengths as being able to build a rapport with students and motivate them to write honestly and insightfully. Maybe I’ve been kidding myself.
The other day, nobody showed up for class. This is a 9:30 a.m. freshman composition class. It’s technically titled “Writing and Research.” I arrived five minutes early and knew I was going to have lackluster attendance because the usual early-arrivals weren’t there. At 9:30, with the room still empty, I wrote a note on the whiteboard that said, “I was here at 9:30 and nobody else was. You figure it out. Apathy will get you nowhere.” I underlined the last part.
As I was writing this note, one student came in. I told her we weren’t having class because nobody was there. I saw a few of the students a little later in the hallway, and we talked about being on time and some assignments…
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March 12, 2012, 12:34 pm
By Isaac Sweeney
In my post, “Can We Overproduce a Degree?,” I said that people “don’t get Ph.D.’s to become professors; they become professors because they get Ph.D.’s.” Based on more than 80 comments, it appears I may have been wrong. I admit that I made some unfair assumptions. So, I’ll generalize less.
As someone with a master’s degree in English, I would not pursue a terminal degree as a means to career advancement. Maybe that’s easy for me to say because I have a tenure-track job. But when I didn’t, when I was working in the adjunct trenches, I never considered pursuing a terminal degree as a way to advance my career. OK, that’s not entirely true. I did consider it, but I quickly concluded that that was a bad (and expensive) reason to pursue a terminal degree. Even when my department head at James Madison University told me to get a Ph.D. if I wanted a full-time job in higher education, I…
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February 29, 2012, 11:30 am
By Isaac Sweeney
At the New Faculty Majority’s national summit in January, an administrator from the University of Cincinnati told the first panel of speakers that she would like to see the summit address “the 850-pound gorilla in the room,” which is the overproduction of Ph.D.’s. If there weren’t so many English Ph.D.’s, she said, then English adjuncts could make more money, find more secure jobs, etc. Basically, she was saying that we are flooding the market with Ph.D.’s when there aren’t enough jobs in academe for people with that credential.
As some in the room applauded, I felt very uneasy. I kept thinking to myself, “So there are a lot of Ph.D.’s. Is it possible to overproduce a degree?” If I trace my sense of unease, I come up with a fundamental difference of opinion I have with this person from the University of Cincinnati, one that brings up an age-old debate: What is the purpose of a Ph.D.?…
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February 19, 2012, 7:00 am
By Isaac Sweeney
In a review of my self-published essay ebook on adjunct life, called Students Losing Out, Claudia Dreifus, co-author of Higher Education?, said, “Here’s the dirty big secret of American higher education: It is being financed by thousands of underemployed adjunct faculty who work only for pennies and the love of teaching.” She’s right, but this is only one of many “dirty big” secrets. In my first year as a tenure-track professor, I have discovered another one: the tenure-track job sure can be a cushy one.
After being a full-time adjunct for a while, this tenure-track stuff is kind of a cinch. Of course, everything has to do with perspective. I used to travel between two colleges to cobble together minimum wage; now, I go to work in the morning and stay in the same place until I go home. I also teach at a two-year institution and the majority of my job is supposed to be devoted to teach…
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February 10, 2012, 2:58 pm
By Isaac Sweeney
Though many speakers at the New Faculty Majority’s national summit, in Washington, D.C., on January 28, urged spreading the word about the overreliance on contingent faculty and how this harms student learning, few were as colorful as Deborah Leigh Scott.
Scott, an adjunct instructor, artist, writer, and filmmaker, uses various forms of art as her mode of expression. She’s currently working on a documentary called ‘Junct: The Trashing of Higher Ed. in America. She urges those with artistic means and motivation to use them to spread the word about contingent faculty issues. She talked about some of her fellow adjuncts who live in vans or in their parents’ basements. She said these stories are heart-wrenching, but the images could be even more striking if they were captured on film, in fiction, or in some other artistic form. The idea was to let the general public know, somehow, what is…
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February 3, 2012, 2:17 pm
By Isaac Sweeney
Like Eliana Osborn, I was at the New Faculty Majority’s national summit in Washington, D.C. A number of things caught my attention as I listened to the speakers. I’ll spend this and the next few posts describing some of these ideas and offering my own thoughts and questions.
One of the most important ideas was that of fear, which was implied by many, but brought up specifically by Rich Moser, a senior staff representative at the Rutgers Council of the AAUP Chapters, and by Joe Berry, author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower. Whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, higher-education systems often work to keep contingent faculty members quiet. That way, they can claim that their contingent faculty members are happy because they don’t complain.
A scarier byproduct of this is the self-censorship of many contingent faculty. Many are unhappy but they fear speaking up. Like all working…
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