[Marxism] 'Tenured radical' tries to revive professors group

[Mark Lause]

Where I did my longest indenture as an adjunct, it was an a
multi-disciplinary department.  Since an adjunct works exclusively at
the discretion of the department head, no other historian ever had any
say about whether an adjunct in their field was employed or not.

For the longest time, our head was a social worker who didn't have a
doctorate and scorned the PhDs she employed as adjuncts in other
disciplines.

At one point, as a search was opening for a full-time tenure-track job
in history was opening up, she realized that I was the unanimous
choice for the job among the historians and decided to deluge me with
student complaints.  Almost all of them were from her advisees and
they included complaints that I had not graded their papers promptly,
etc. from students who never took a class with me.  They also do this
through online rating of professors, etc.

What I said to her at the time was that I got the message that she
didn't want me to fail any of her advisees.  She smiled and said that
this was my choice, that it came under the rubric of my academic
freedom to do what I wanted in my classes.

I said, "Fine, but I won't give your students any privileges that I
don't extend to all my students."  She said that this was my choice.

So I did what she wanted, but I made no secret of it, telling all the
full-time tenured faculty that would listen that so as half their
classes were taught by adjuncts subject to having such non-standards
imposed on them, they were going to have problems themselves.

I should add that I don't think this is worse than what happens in
most other state institutions.

And, in any event, I have twenty years of such stories, and a complete
confidence that nobody who counts really gives a shit about them.
Administrators only care about the enrollment and the funding it
represents, while faculty generally manage to draw a firewall between
their jobs and what adjuncts do.

As the former president of the AAUP here insistently told me once,
"don't compare what I do and what you do."

And so it goes....

ML