next »

[need2know]

I have read a lot of comments about the need for adjunct faculty to fly under the radar, not make any waves, etc. I have tried to follow that advice, but I seem to be a magnet for criticism from older full-time faculty members. They watch me. What is up with that?

[fiona]

I have read a lot of comments about the need for adjunct faculty to fly under the radar, not make any waves, etc. I have tried to follow that advice, but I seem to be a magnet for criticism from older full-time faculty members. They watch me. What is up with that?

Paranoid? Warts?

The Fiona

[kamiakin]

The one advantage of adjuncting is that you have the right not to give a s***. Let them fire you--pick up a job at Target and go on with your life.

[mdwlark]

Sometimes trying too hard to fly under the radar brings on the criticism.  Self protection is a fine art and requires delicate balance between being inoffensive and looking too tough to attack.  Yours must be a small department.  Our full time faculty don't remember my name between faculty meetings.  We also have a good chair, which keeps conflict to a minimum.  You might be in a toxic department where they are too chicken s*** to attack each other, so they go after an adjunct.  In that case, you have to answer them boldly, quickly, and in a way that puts an end to it, in which case you need a lot more advice than how to fly under the radar.  You also might be doing some things that genuinely irritate people, so some careful personal reflection might be in order. 

On edit, your moniker suggests you are emotionally vulnerable right now and perhaps the department barracudas are sensing that.

[adjunctprincipessa]

Could you give us some specifics about which criticisms the department makes?  How do they treat other adjunct faculty members? 

Flying under the radar means that you give grades that are in line with the rest of the department (since the chair usually doesn't want to deal with grade complaints, particularly from an adjunct's students), don't do anything too controversial in class, refrain from complaining about the school (don't ever compare the school negatively to your undergrad or grad institution), and don't take sides in departmental debates (you might not know the whole history of an issue and don't want to make enemies of powerful full time faculty members).




 

[yellowtractor]

Stay in view, please.

[dano64]

Some departments are hostile and not worth working for; I have experienced this twice, but it is personally damaging when they shift policies and requirements capriciously, not inform you of the shift. There is a hidden agenda underway inm some colleges wherein they seem to be discouraging the development of critical thinking with students but instead an indoctrination of sociopolitical ideals. One college, a few years ago, changed their remedial English courses from sentence and paragraph structure and critical thinking to issues related to "gender, race, and the environment." Students were allowed to summarize everything, provided it reflected a desireable viewpoint. Correlatively, they initiated a mentoring program, pairing full-timers to the "unprofessional" part-timers to ensure absolute conformity among the adjuncts. I did not do well under this hammer.  Flying under the radar is nearly impossible in some colleges.