The amount of tripe out there is amazing. Quoting some guy named Tony Jones —
Last semester, I taught a class at a local seminary. The class met on Thursday nights. After the first week of class, I received a one-line email from the dean, asking me how everything was going. And a month after the class, I received another email asking how everything went. Other than that, I didn’t hear from anyone on the faculty. I didn’t meet anyone on the faculty; I wasn’t even greeted by anyone. I did receive emails from the support staff with attendance sheets and asking for grades, but that was it.
Last summer, I sent a query to another seminary for which I’d taught online courses for three years. Would they be needing me this year? Nope. Budgets are tight.

And this semester, I’m teaching at a state university. So far it’s great fun. But last week when I was walking toward the classroom, the professor who teaches in the room before me turned off the lights and locked the door — he had no idea I was there as a professor. A grad student let me in the room so that I could teach.

I’ve chosen the life of the adjunct professor, so I’m not crying in my beer here. I have deliberately avoided the life of a regular faculty member because I hate hate hate the politics of the academy, I hate committee work, and I don’t really want a job with that much commitment required. I’d rather be a freelance theologian, with all of the freedom and pressure that entails.

Nevertheless, I am not unaffected by the loneliness of the adjunct role. I do wish that there was camaraderie with other faculty. My qualifications are just as good as theirs, even if I don’t get health insurance and a parking pass from the institution.

More and more, colleges, universities, and grad schools are using adjunct faculty — they’re doing it to save money. And I think that more and more academics will choose the path I’ve chosen, to be independent from the publish-or-perish environment of institutional life. It’d be great if the schools that use us adjuncts could think seriously about how to weave us into the fabric of their faculty.

Meanwhile, some adjunct professors are telling their students not to call them “Professor” as a protest against their working conditions.
I know that a lot of seminary and college professors and administrators read this blog. What are your thoughts about us adjuncts?

End of tepid thinking QUOTE!!!

He gets 35 comments, and then, well, his is a Feb. 7 post, a day after I clocked in at 56 years. I had to weigh in today, now:

My quote —

Well-well-well. To cut and paste one of several telling paragraphs from your light-winded blog post:

“I’ve chosen the life of the adjunct professor, so I’m not crying in my beer here. I have deliberately avoided the life of a regular faculty member because I hate hate hate the politics of the academy, I hate committee work, and I don’t really want a job with that much commitment required. I’d rather be a freelance theologian, with all of the freedom and pressure that entails.”

Hmm, some of us have been teaching at multiple campuses to make a living and to make a difference in the lives of students, and in our own lives. That, I am sorry to say, Tony, is accomplished through inspiring and pissing off students, but also connecting with students’ families, employers, and our own bosses, whether pseudo-deans or administrators or even regents and politicos. That involves being involved in communities. Education is a little bit special, don’t you think? Have you missed that 5,000-year-running message?

Some of us saw the contingent faculty cadre exploding, growing exponentially back in the early 1980s when some of us started teaching, again, at multiple campuses, in prisons, on military compounds, across international borders, for community education programs, and writing and doing things in the community because we did not want to become part of this endless Diaspora of good folk graduating from colleges where they’d like to teach with dignity and livable wages and benefits who HAVE to leave those communities to find work elsewhere.

So, that means some of us have spent countless hours reaching out, bugging ADMIN class types, getting political, becoming unionists. We’ve been in crappy local newspapers, banded together and got on radio shows, and we have collectively worked to uplift our students’ lives and our own lives through community participation.

Some of the 35 comments above in this post are so telling of a diseased group of thinkers who blame the victim, who see some uber-Utopia with technology as savior, who believe that education is about delivering, about connecting and uploading and sim card insertion, about the on-line virtual world of endless communities and virtual social and now education groups. They of course are wrong, and they are part of the problem not solution to education issues and challenges and this current downward slide to oblivion.

It’s a tired old canard now, really. “We are in the midst of revolutionary and profoundly positive changes thanks to IT, Creative Class and our unending addiction for technology to put us into a 3-D replicator world where sex, food, and shelter can be at our virtual fingertips in a giant intergalactic game of Simulated Humanity is so f-ing far out, let’s do it.”

It’s bogus, really. Massively Open Online Courses-Work-Life maybe a foregone conclusion in some of your minds, but for some of us, who have been adjuncting and fighting for wages and fairness and an academy that is a cut or two above Walmart and Amazon.dot cum, well, we have heard, seen and experienced it all. And some of us are fighting this MOOC lie.

I’m not surprised that you did not reach out at this state school and make inroads to challenging your coworkers to know you, to be human and humane, to normalize human relations. Theology, uh? How’s that working out? I’ve been with Sandinista clerics, liberation theologists, with Buddhists, with countless numbers of Muslims, with a plethora of theologically-informed folk in many countries, and your bizarre fear of face-to-face interactions makes sense only on one or two highly dysfunctional levels. Certainly it’s American, North American, USA phenomena. Get a life — push yourself onto your colleagues, your co-workers.

As far as the tongue-in-cheek comments and those admonitions for adjuncts-precarious-contingents to get real, get real jobs and admit our lowly status, yet, our god-like status, too, they are beyond the time and ire necessary in your comment frame. Interesting you have that many folk following your blog.

end of my non-tepid quote!!!!!!!!

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