Okay, I am going to get told I am old-fashion and out of touch for posting this, but sites like AdjunctMatch and Adjunctopia scare me a little.  If there is any indication that we have moved into a corporate, perma-temping model of higher education, these employment sites are it in my mind.

Adjunctopia suggests they offer an important service because "finding qualified educators can be a life-long process in itself. Adjunct faculty members often have busy schedules and higher education institutions often have a difficult time communicating, training, and evaluating their adjunct faculty." Really, finding qualified educators is a problem?  I have a few un- or under-employed folks with PhDs you should talk to.

Inside Higher Ed is reporting on some new research by occasional FACE Talk contributor, David Dobbie of the University of Michigan Graduate Employees Organization/AFT, and his colleague Ian Robinson of the Lecturers' Employee Organization/AFT.  Their article, which appears in the June issue of the Labor Studies Journal, looks at the connections between unionization and the shrinking number of full-time, tenure track positions in higher education. 

You can read about the study at IHE, but we thought FACE Talk readers might be interested in posing some questions to one of the authors, and Dr. Dobbie agreed.  So follow us over the jump for a few opening questions and then post your own!

The manila envelope containing the scantron sheets for my class evaluations is gone now from my desk. I took a deep breath and gave them to the class yesterday since the students were handing in papers and I was not giving any back. (Hint: Never give the class evaluations the same day you give back a graded assignment.) It is a bit of a relief not to have to look at that envelope any more. I did my evaluations, then noticed Matthew Hall's recent Teachable Moments cartoon at Inside Higher Ed  which illustrates the personal impact of these evaluations. Obviously, Hall has faced this end-of-the-session ordeal. Like the cartoon, indeed it does feel at times as if the accumulating student comments do manifest themselves physically on your body and chomp away. I forwarded the cartoon to a colleague worrying over her evaluations. She has done these evaluations many times before and can accurately predict exactly what comments she will get. When you teach general education classes and students are forced to take your classes, the odds are good that you will get some comments that do gnaw at you.

What better way to end the week than by announcing another organizing victory?!  The adjunct faculty members at Morris County Community College in New Jersey had their union recognized today under New Jersey's card check certification law.  The 358 faculty members in the unit will be affiliated with the New Jersey State Federation of Teachers/AFT.  More details as soon as we get them. 

We have been slow in getting to the recent article, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" by Professor X over at The Atlantic--if you haven't read it yet, you should check it out.  In his piece, Professor X, who teaches at a private college and a community college, is primarily focused on the students who end up in his evening classes and the question of why they are there and whether or not they are ready to be there.  However, an important connection he makes is the fact that it is often X and his fellow adjunct faculty members who are teaching these students.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don't come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

Okay, so I confess that I don't know what "vlorbik" means, but this dedicated blogger has just decided there aren't enough blogs out there and started a new blog related contingent faculty issues.  Whether there are enough blogs out there is an open question, but more bloggers highlighting contingent faculty issues is definitely something that we think is a good thing. So check out Academic Lumpenproletariat.

For more news, views and discussions, check out our FACE Links page.

Margaret West has been teaching as a part-timer for Edmonds Community College twenty-one years. For several years, she has been offered annual "Assurance of Employment Contracts." Her students enjoy her classes, and her colleagues like working with her.

She has been active in her local, serving on its Executive Council for almost eleven years as the Vice President of the Committee On Political Education (COPE) and the Vice President for Communications. Margaret has also served on (or led) the faculty team during six contract negotiations.

On the state level, Margaret has served on the AFT Washington Contingent Workers Committee and on AFT Washington’s Executive Board. She has testified in Olympia on behalf of her colleagues, and has proven herself to be passionate about education.

Just in case it isn't clear enough that we have a two-tier faculty system in this country, here is the response from the Provost at the University of New Haven to charges by the American Association of University Professor's (AAUP) report on the unfair dismissal of a 14-year contingent faculty member:

The provost's response said that for tenured faculty members, the university's procedures for dismissal are consistent with AAUP guidelines. However, the university considers that there are "two distinct categories of faculty" - and that those who are not on the tenure track do not have the same procedural rights.

Thanks for that clarification.

Last week we reported on the great victory at Henry Ford Community College by the Adjunct Faculty Organization.  Fortunately, our guy Matt Jones was on the scene with his camera and caught some footage of AFO members and the ballot count.  Check it out!

There were a couple of interesting items in the Modern Language Association (MLA) Newsletter that was just published. The Association of Departments of English (ADE) found that (based on United States Department of Education's surveys for 1995 and 2005, plus a 2007 survey of English departments), the number of students enrolled in higher education has increased 23%, while the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty remain unchanged. However, the number of non-tenure track faculty grew by 67% in the full-time positions and 62% in the part-time positions. (I am not sure how individual institutions make the distinction.) And, as Gerald Graff notes in his column "Bringing Writers In From the Cold," a good three-fourths of the writing instruction in colleges is handled by graduate students and contingent employees.