Faculty of the Future

You get the government you pay for, you get the education you pay for. Experience shows that as in California, if you don't pay for goverment, you don't get an education either. Like shoes, sometimes you get them on discount, sometimes you pay a premium. Sometimes you pay for the brand name, sometimes you shop Costco (Eli, would never shop Walmart). Via Bitch PhD a paper read at the Modern Language Association meeting by Brian Croxall. And yes, in the humanities and often in the social sciences they write out and then read their presentations. It is strange for someone used to the point and shoot slide (Eli is old) powerpoint presentations of science and engineering. The MLA meeting is the AGU Fall meeting of the language mavens, huge, busy and a combination of meet and meat markets

I’m sorry that I can’t be delivering these comments in person, and I thank Prof. Cavanagh for her willingness to read them on my behalf. Hearing talks delivered by the person who did not write them is only slightly better than having to be the person who is reading a talk she didn’t write, so I’ll be brief. At the same time, however, I can think of no more appropriate way for me to give a talk in a panel titled “Today’s Students, Today’s Teachers: Economics” than in this manner. After all, I’m not a tenure-track faculty member, and the truth of the matter is that I simply cannot afford to come to this year’s MLA. I know that we as a profession are increasingly aware of the less than ideal conditions under which contingent faculty members (and graduate students) labor while providing more than half of the instruction that undergraduates receive across the nation. . .

But having a faculty majority comprised of contingent faculty means a lot more than just conferences being less and less attended. In my case, it means that my students cannot easily meet with me for office hours since contingent faculty don’t really have offices. It means that they do not get effective, personal mentoring because I have too many students. It means that I cannot give the small and frequent assignments that I believe teach them more than a “3-paper class” because I do not have time to grade 90 students’ small and frequent assignments. It means that the courses they can take from me will not be updated as frequently as I think is ideal because I will be spending all of my spare time looking for more secure employment—or working a part-time job. In other words, when we short-change (pun-intended) today’s teachers (the majority of us who are, finally and for the last time, contingent and not present at this year’s MLA), we simultaneously short-change today’s students.

It got picked up at the Chronicle of Higher Education. Oh yeah, Michael Bérubé got elected President to Be of the MLA, one in the eye for David Horowitz and the hockey stick is broken.

Read the comments, actually mice, it's your job to WRITE the comments. Slackers.