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[eternal_adjunct]

We would, but right now we are working on achieving world peace, air-conditioning Hell, attacking those pesky windmills, and making sure every child in the world has a basket full of puppies.

Poor fishbrains!  And I'm sure you've really been trying so very hard to get more ft positions, so that you won't have to keep using those lousy adjuncts whose warm bodies are apparently enough to communicate the important concepts for what (probably) are your introductory (and hence, supposedly, foundational) courses.

I'm sure you've made known to them that they can be just as tough as ft faculty, and you'll get their back!  The relaxed attitude that you so loathe is probably not at all the result of feelings of institutional insecurity, exacerbated by anecdotal evidence that adjuncts who act tough like ft faculty get un-rehired (or whatever they're calling "fired" these days).

As I continue on with my own case, though, into which I've already invested more than 15 hours of unpaid time, and which case might be lost on a technicality, so all that time will have been wasted, I wonder:

How many ft faculty, protected by tenure, etc, actually prosecute all their plagiarism cases?  After all, 15 hours is 15 hours, whether you are getting paid or not.  How many ft folks, then, just try the fail/drop maneuver, so that the cheater goes away (but, lacking a record, is free to try to cheat again)?  I mean, there's all that committee work, articles to publish, basket durability testing to do (we wouldn't want the puppies to break the basket, you know), and so forth.  With all the documentation, conversations, even meetings these cases can take, well, isn't that time better spent on things more important to your career?

I bet the number of ft people who don't pusrue plagiarism cases is actually not a significantly different number from the adjuncts who don't pursue the cases for fear of retribution and because it's uncompensated time.

[notaprof]

I've already invested more than 15 hours of unpaid time,

I think the solution to this is to stop thinking of this as unpaid time.  You are being paid to teach a course and everything that goes with getting that done, including prep time, grading time, answering student email and dealing with academic honesty issues.  Yes, I know adjuncts are working at slave wages but so are many outside of academe and I don't think it is productive to think this way.  In fact, many professionals probably have a clause in their job descriptions that says "and other duties as assigned."  They are not paid by the hour but are paid to get a job done, however long that takes and I think faculty and adjuncts are paid in a similar manner. 

So don't think of it as unpaid time, it is not time you are losing, it is your own integrity you are saving.

[fishbrains]

We would, but right now we are working on achieving world peace, air-conditioning Hell, attacking those pesky windmills, and making sure every child in the world has a basket full of puppies.

I'm sure you've made known to them that they can be just as tough as ft faculty, and you'll get their back!  The relaxed attitude that you so loathe is probably not at all the result of feelings of institutional insecurity, exacerbated by anecdotal evidence that adjuncts who act tough like ft faculty get un-rehired (or whatever they're calling "fired" these days).

Actually, we do have their backs! Like I've said in previous postings, we enjoy having a great division chair who supports us when we have the documentation.
I understand the frustration with the process, and I agree that many full-timers just fail/drop the students or let it pass for the same reasons adjuncts do.

Trust me: if we could hire more full-timers, we would; no one enjoys calling people the day before classes start trying to get instructors in the classrooms. But we have to work with the money we have. The system has created a mess in that since colleges have been able to lower costs by abusing adjuncts, it's now getting difficult to obtain the funding for full-time positions. Legislatures think it's good that colleges have "tightened their belts" and reward the colleges that most abuse their adjuncts.

We are a rural CC, so we don't have much choice in who we hire. Not many adjuncts flock to our rural setting so they can work for minimum wage (or less).

[eternal_adjunct]

I've already invested more than 15 hours of unpaid time,

I think the solution to this is to stop thinking of this as unpaid time.  You are being paid to teach a course and everything that goes with getting that done, including prep time, grading time, answering student email and dealing with academic honesty issues.  Yes, I know adjuncts are working at slave wages but so are many outside of academe and I don't think it is productive to think this way.  In fact, many professionals probably have a clause in their job descriptions that says "and other duties as assigned."  They are not paid by the hour but are paid to get a job done, however long that takes and I think faculty and adjuncts are paid in a similar manner. 

So don't think of it as unpaid time, it is not time you are losing, it is your own integrity you are saving.

Thanks notaprof, but it is fairly naive to think of these extra duties as implicit in an adjunct contract or in any way equivalent to the sorts of things other professionals do.  It is made very clear to us that we are being paid for our classroom time alone.  We are not paid even for office hours.  I've seen tangible proof of this many times, as has every other adjunct.

You are right, though, insofar as it is a matter of integrity.  If you will look at my first post on this thread, you will see that this is precisely why I have decided to start pursuing these cases.

But the hour notation also serves to point out that, in my view, because these things take a lot of time and energy for anyone, then very few of them are ever pursued by anyone, whether adjunct of full-time.  Sure, the adjunctification exacerbates this.  But the extra duties that ft faculty have to incur because there aren't enough of them also exacerbates this.  What assistant prof, trying to get tenure, wants to spend 15 hours of time that could be spent on research or other things that will help the tenure portfolio, on a cheater - particularly when one can usually just give them a 0 on the assignment and make them go away without paperwork?

In fact, to continue with an anecdote, as a TA I caught a plagiarist who actually stapled the paper he copied from to the paper he handed in (now that's genius!).  The tenured full professor did not report the case.  He didn't even fail him!  He just gave him a D.

I know that this is just one case.  The point is, I bet it's not that uncommon.  I've yet to meet the faculty member of any classification who said "yes, give me more paperwork and procedures!"  A 0 and suggestion to drop are easier.  But they're also letting the cheater off the hook, too, which is why, I thought, adjuncts doing things like this was such a problem.

[diana_prince]

One way to solve the problem of academic dishonesty from students is to take a pro-active stance in the source material they are allowed to use, at least in the intro courses. My comp students all used the same sources from our anthology and wrote on the same topic. It's very difficult for them to copy and paste after reading and discussing the material in class. When they were at the stage of using "outside" sources, material from outside of the anthology, I was very specific in the type of sources they were allowed to use. They learned the difference between an electronic database and the Internet. Every electronic database link or web site link had to be fully functional and accessible and provided in the works cited to count as a source. They submitted their papers electronically, which they understood made it easier for me to scan or check for plagiarism or copying and pasting. In the years that I taught using this approach, I didn't have any problems.

However, I still had occasional problems as an adjunct at a CC with administrators and FT TT faculty who didn't back me up over minor issues, such as use of voicemail v. email, changing my course schedule at the last minute (after students enrolled in courses they thought were being taught by me), allowing me to develop an online course and then assigning the course to a fulltime instructor, etc. Yep, you guessed it, I quit, and the students lost out.  I probably wasn't ever going to be hired FT TT because I was continually raising the bar and exceeding most of what the full time faculty was doing. Today, most of the full time faculty wouldn't be qualified enough for their current positions. They sit on hiring committees and make these decisions, yet they aren't as qualified as the candidates they're judging. The FT faculty came across as being only concerned about managing adjuncts and maintaining resources for their travel budget. As long as they had an administrator who achieved those goals, the FT faculty was quite content to maintain the status quo.

In many instances, students prefer adjuncts who have a full time job in the subject area: a technical writing instructor who actually is a technical writer v. a technical writing instructor who specializes in Victorian poetry. The college, on the other hand, will assign the technical writer to teach the lowest intro courses or ESL courses, so the FT faculty member with a Ph.D. in Victorian poetry is teaching a course at the 200 level. A lot of students aren't knocking down the doors of the Brit Lit dept.