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[fiona]

Here's why the most-resented advice is STFU.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/onhiring/why-i-should-keep-my-mouth-shut-the-2-year-track/28198?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

The Fiona

[rear_view_mirror]

Sweeney is a Will Kane type (High Noon). He is full of self doubt but he presses on resolutely. I like him.

[mozman]

I'm sorry.  I sympathize with the guy but I don't see anything to suggest that his blogging led to his non-renewal, other than his say-so.  He had great teaching evals etc..., but on these very fora there are scads of similar stories.

[larryc]

He admits there is no evidence that blogging got him fired. Could be anything.

[anthroid]

In a previous Chronicle article, he talks quite openly about being frequently underprepared for class and often distracted, among other things:  Oct 2009 Chronicle Review article.  Seems to me that he wrote his own non-renewal.

I also am less than impressed with the quality of his prose.

[gsawpenny]

I took another look at the 2009 article and it as one nice point. The simple reality is that there are too many qualified people out there (at with respect to the humanities) making it a buyers market.  Quite frankly I am amazed any university is looking for full time TT folks.  A good office manager with some scheduling software could run any Political Science, Philosophy, and/or History Department.

Think about it, tenured professors actually think they are important to the machine of higher education.  How silly.  If a space ship came down and took every full time history faculty member in Boston I could have a PhD in every class before 9am the next morning and it is likely the students would never know the difference!

Scary stuff.

[fiona]

I took another look at the 2009 article and it as one nice point. The simple reality is that there are too many qualified people out there (at with respect to the humanities) making it a buyers market.  Quite frankly I am amazed any university is looking for full time TT folks.  A good office manager with some scheduling software could run any Political Science, Philosophy, and/or History Department.

Think about it, tenured professors actually think they are important to the machine of higher education.  How silly.  If a space ship came down and took every full time history faculty member in Boston I could have a PhD in every class before 9am the next morning and it is likely the students would never know the difference!

Scary stuff.

If you just want a body in front of the class, sure. If you want someone who knows how to teach, the students would definitely know the difference. A Ph.D. is no guarantee of teaching ability or talent, nor is it a sign of good sense.

The Fiona

[anthroid]

I took another look at the 2009 article and it as one nice point. The simple reality is that there are too many qualified people out there (at with respect to the humanities) making it a buyers market.  Quite frankly I am amazed any university is looking for full time TT folks.  A good office manager with some scheduling software could run any Political Science, Philosophy, and/or History Department.

Think about it, tenured professors actually think they are important to the machine of higher education.  How silly.  If a space ship came down and took every full time history faculty member in Boston I could have a PhD in every class before 9am the next morning and it is likely the students would never know the difference!

Scary stuff.

Your point may be sort of true for large urban areas if, as The Fiona points out, you don't actually care about depth of learning.  An MA is not going to have the theory and depth of a field* that a Ph.D. will--so while, perhaps, some introductory courses could be covered by MA level adjuncts in the absence of Ph.D.s, I would disagree that a senior level course in, say, European labor history would be adequately taught by a MA history adjunct whose Master's thesis was on American colonial family life, not to mention the difficulty of someone with a MA in Statistics attempting to teach Abstract Algebra.  And, those of us in the Great Flyover Region (rural sector) have a hard time staffing all of our classes (I don't have enough TT faculty, of course, as it is, but I have a horrible time getting adjuncts--and my place relies on less than 15% adjunct teaching.  We are an anomaly, I know).  Plus this doesn't even address the needs of graduate students.  So this is a far more complicated issue than simply evil administration --> victimized adjuncts.


*I speak as someone with two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in one of the two fields.

[plunkett]

He was fired from his full-time temporary gig.  The number of "contingent" faculty (full-time temporary instructors on one semester or one year contracts) is going up while the number of TT faculty is going down.  It's the wave of the future.  

This gives the institution the ability to quickly and easily dump anyone that it no longer likes or finds useful.  Also, at my institution I believe that some chairs and deans sometimes get queasy if they feel the full-time temporary folk start feeling entitled to permanent ongoing work.  And so people are sometimes laid off (or not renewed) just as a safety measure --  to prevent that instructor from feeling too "entitled" and to circumvent the stress this causes chairs when they have to let these people go after, say, five years of contingent status.

None of that is very pretty or admirable, but it happens.

Maybe he was just making James Madison colleagues nervous; I'm sure everyone there knew of his articles in CHE.  We all know how easily threatened academics can be.  Maybe they felt it was time to give someone else a turn at the full-time temporary gig.  Maybe they thought he was doing a bad job because of his extra courses at the nearby community college and his freelance writing.  Who knows?

(It was also not smart of him to write about his frequent lack of preparation and his ability to wing it.)

[history_grrrl]

In a previous Chronicle article, he talks quite openly about being frequently underprepared for class and often distracted, among other things:  Oct 2009 Chronicle Review article.  Seems to me that he wrote his own non-renewal.

I also am less than impressed with the quality of his prose.

Why on earth did he write this article (the one to which Anthroid has linked) under his real name? Being chronically unprepared? Spacing out in class? Oy.

[totoro]

I took another look at the 2009 article and it as one nice point. The simple reality is that there are too many qualified people out there (at with respect to the humanities) making it a buyers market.  Quite frankly I am amazed any university is looking for full time TT folks.  A good office manager with some scheduling software could run any Political Science, Philosophy, and/or History Department.

Think about it, tenured professors actually think they are important to the machine of higher education.  How silly.  If a space ship came down and took every full time history faculty member in Boston I could have a PhD in every class before 9am the next morning and it is likely the students would never know the difference!

Scary stuff.

If all they care about is teaching basic undergrad classes, probably. Somebody has to train those people and do the research too.

[rear_view_mirror]

So, Isaac Sweeney may not be a stellar educator. Therefore, the point he makes about the consequences of relying on poorly compensated teachers for important work having consequences for students can be ignored. That was easy.

What happens when William Pannapacker or James Lang says the same thing? Don't we need to cut them down to size so the problem can be swept under the rug? Or is it that the validity of the message varies according to who states it?

[corvus_caurinus]

Think about it, tenured professors actually think they are important to the machine of higher education.  How silly.  If a space ship came down and took every full time history faculty member in Boston I could have a PhD in every class before 9am the next morning and it is likely the students would never know the difference!

Yes, but would these replacements pull a mil a year in federal funding? In the sciences at least, tenured professors know damn well this is why they are valued by the "machine of higher education."

[rear_view_mirror]

I apologize for the poorly constructed sentence in last post.

Here is what Sweeney wrote:

My not being prepared for class is only one way in which the students suffer. More and more, I find myself completely drained by the end of the day. In the middle of a great discussion, a student directs a comment to me. To the detriment of the discussion, I stopped listening a few comments ago, thinking instead about my decreasing checkbook balance or the dishes that have been piling up as I have been grading papers. Or I stopped listening just because I have had similar discussions four times already today, and I am, frankly, bored and/or exhausted. At least once, I stopped listening because of the loud construction across the street, where the university is building a new performance center. And I couldn't help but remember the news a week earlier that budget cuts had put my job in jeopardy.

That's the whole point! This guy is honest and humble enough to talk about what his fatigue and burnout do to his teaching. The low pay means that these outcomes cannot be avoided.
Everybody knows that academia is a pressure cooker, but that excuse only goes so far. You can blame Sweeney for losing his job, but he tells a story for many, and about many.
For my money, this person is a truth teller and fills a void.

[larryc]

RVM, the article says he was fired for blogging. The title of this thread echoes that. So that is what we are talking about. No one is justifying the abusive treatment of adjuncts.