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ARCHIVE: June 2008

June 13th 2008

Someone Sends a Message in a Bottle...

People send me letters, emails, newsletters, book proposals, pleas for money, applications for employment, and all manner of information. Yesterday, I got a faxed copy of the May/June Spotlight, the newsletter of the AFT-Washington. In it, there are two interesting tidbits. Let's start by saying that my last posting addressed a recent TT hiring at a community college in Washington State. In that posting, I wrote that the union and Washington State Board for Community and Technical College (SBCTC) had conferred on which community colleges would receive a piece of the $500,000 FACE money. The cash was doled out to 20 community colleges. At one of those colleges, the FACE-funded TT position was simply awarded to the president of the union, because officials felt they couldn't conduct a thorough search before September 2008, the deadline imposed by the legislature and the unions.

In AFT-Washington President Sandra Schroeder's Spotlight column she writes about the "Washington State Board for Community and Technical College's poor decision about how to distribute the $500,000...for new full-time positions."

Hmm....don't you want to know what she's referring to? I flipped through the rest of the issue. I found the following headline: "State Board refuses to include local faculty unions in conversions." The unsigned article says that after extremely limited "consultation" with the state level unions (meaning representatives of the AFT Washington and the Washington Education Association), the SBCTC refused to work with local unions. The SBCTC decided to distribute money to certain disciplines: math, science, English, ABE/ESL, or early childhood education.

Does this have an impact on what I wrote the other day? Not really. The union president at the college where the FACE money went was still awarded a TT job without having applied in an open process for that FACE-funded post, or having ever interviewed for it amongst a group of other candidates. Despite what the SBCTC did, GRCC officials, and the AFT Washington allowed the a TT job funded by FACE to be awarded without all qualified union members having ever been invited to apply.

Posted By Patricia L. at 8:00 AM

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June 10th 2008

No Rush, Really

Listen to my blog entry here.

Everyone hurries through certain tasks. I hurry through brushing my hair sometimes in the morning if I am up late. I pay for it, mind you, with a singularly "Beethoven" look. I hurry through getting dressed, as well, and often find myself hopelessly under- or over-dressed for the weather. As all of our parents told us at one time or another, hurrying through tasks often leads to poor results. In my case, on any given hot summer day, my children come face-to-face with a long-dead German composer wearing a hooded sweatshirt and long pants. Regardless of my personal shortcomings, I encourage both of my sons to slow down and take their time when doing important tasks. Deliberation is one of the most important habits anyone can develop, I think. I'd just like to hurry up and get some.

In higher education, it can months to hire a single faculty member for a tenure-line slot. Colleges that accept public money are required by law to conduct searches with due diligence and deliberation. This does not mean higher education is a bastion of diversity. On the contrary: 30 years ago, the majority of tenured faculty were white men, and today the majority of tenured faculty are white men. However, there are significantly more women and minorities. Aside from diversity issues, there is the issue of money. A single tenure-line faculty member, on average, will cost an institution $2 million dollars over the course of an academic career.

What other reasons are there to explain why faculty searches move more slowly than molasses? The competition is stiff for one thing. In English, for instance, it is not uncommon for a department to field 150 applications for a single tenure-track opening. Sorting through all those applications by committee is a slow process. In the end, all of this explains why colleges value their tenure-line and tenured faculty so highly, and why part-time faculty are treated like so many paper plates at a picnic. The hiring process is designed to increase the odds that the department hires the best possible candidate, and so that junior faculty actually have a chance to move up the ladder into tenured and senior positions. There is turnover on the tenure-track, about one in every five tenure-line faculty does not earn tenure. However, the rigorous hiring process is designed to (ideally) guarantee faculty excellence.

I was recently sent some somewhat disturbing information. As you may know, in Washington State legislators awarded $500,000 to fund the AFT Washington's Faculty and College Excellence program (FACE). The language of the bill did not, unfortunately, include priority hiring for part-time faculty. The money was specifically to be used for the creation of full-time faculty positions. FACE proponents were disappointed by this, but hoped to address the issue through collective bargaining. What it meant was that colleges did not have to give priority hiring preference to current part-time faculty when filling tenure-line posts created with FACE money.

We all know there are thousands of truly excellent temporary faculty out there who can, when allowed to compete on a level playing field, go head-to-head with applicants for tenure-line teaching positions. We also know that employers frequently hold long-term service as a part-time faculty member against adjuncts who apply for tenure-line positions at their current places of employment. In Washington, there are 10,000 part-time faculty. The $500,000 allocated by the legislature was distributed to 20 community colleges to create 20 new full-time positions.

The hope, of course, is that 20 part-time faculty currently teaching at community colleges in Washington State will apply for the tenure-line openings, and win the positions. According to information I was given, at one community college, a single full-time position was created with FACE funds. However, because the legislators and union officials required the 20 positions to be filled by Fall 2008, at one college it has been alleged that FACE, Faculty and College Excellence, resulted in the hiring of a tenure-line faculty member to fill a FACE-funded slot without advertising the opening, and without a formal hiring process. If this turns out to be true, not a single part-time faculty member represented by the union at the community college in question was invited to apply. It also means that the college, perhaps, broke its own equal opportunity policies, as well as state and federal equal opportunity hiring laws. If the allegations are true, college officials at this school hired for a faculty position funded by taxpayer money without advertising the post, or adhering to its own formal hiring procedures.

College officials might argue that time was of the essence; they were working on a deadline imposed by legislators and the union. If this was the explanation, we would have to believe that three months wasn't enough time to post the opening to the college's web site, advertise in the local paper (and The Chronicle of Higher Education—a weekly), receive applications, interview, and hire the most qualified candidate for the position. Maybe it's not, and if that were the case, college officials should have asked legislators for an extension. The union president ought to have demanded all qualified members had an opportunity to apply. Well, that would have been awkward; the union president was the candidate hired.

If these allegations prove to be true, this tenure-line position created by the FACE legislation was filled using suspect and possibly illegal hiring practices. Worse yet, the part-time faculty served by the union were betrayed by their own leadership.

Stay tuned. We'll have more on this as the story develops.

Posted By Patricia L. at 9:00 AM

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June 7th 2008

The Lesko Blog Popularity Contest (Is It Cheating If I Win?)

This month marks the eighth month I have been writing Lesko Blog entries. I thought it would be fun to list the most frequently read entries for each month. Frankly, I have no idea why some entries are so popular, while others are not. Perhaps I am not destined to know. In any case, here's the list going back to November 2007. Thanks very much for reading my blog. Please keep in mind that, unlike other blogs, the comment tool is turned on and ready for you to use. So feel free to let me know what you think.

1. November 2007: The Untouchables of Academe.

2. December 2007: Auld Lang Syne. This one is the most popular blog entry overall, with 15,382 reads.

3. January 2008: The Denial Twist.

4. February 2008: New Podcast Interview Series.

5. March 2008: Identity Theft & the AAUP Elections.

6. April 2008: CCCCs in San Francisco (2009).

7. May 2008: Who Says Crow Isn't Tasty?

7. June 2008: Some Confusion Over What Journalists Do.

Posted By Patricia L. at 9:34 PM

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June 4th 2008

Food for Thought

We recently put our subscription to the New York Times on hiatus for the summer. In the summer, we just don't get around to reading the Friday-Sunday papers. What this means, in practical terms, is that I am reading the other newspapers we do get much, much too carefully. Our local paper, the Ann Arbor News, has an absolutely horrible reputation among readers for inaccuracy and lack of in-depth reporting. We also get The Forward. When we subscribed to the Times, I glanced at The Forward. Now, I read the weekly issues cover-to-cover, much to the chagrin of the paper's editor, I am sure. As you know, I am one of those people who writes letters to the editors. I am on a first name basis with the opinion editor at the Ann Arbor News, and in a typical week (mostly for work), I write half a dozen letters to the editor about newspaper and magazine pieces I read.

(There is a connection here, I promise.) Last August, as a family we decided to eat only regional foods (food produced and/or grown in any state that touches one of the Great Lakes) until Thanksgiving. We have a large vegetable garden, and so we had carrots and potatoes, garlic and some other late crops, but for the most part we relied on our local Farmer's markets and asking way too many questions when purchasing items at the local grocery store where we shop, as well at the local food Co-op. There is a local Whole Foods market, as well, but the layout is as confusing, and aisles are as narrow as the side streets in Venice; Whole Foods makes me cranky.

Add to this quixotic regional eating quest the fact that we keep kosher. A quick definition of keeping kosher from my children: "you can't eat anything without some rabbi says you can." This includes meat. There is plenty of regional meat for sale in out town; there are nice organic, free range chickens (probably named Maurice) raised by even nicer Amish farmers. There's organic beef from the farm just outside town. Organic, however, is not kosher because, yes, some rabbi has not given the ok. So, for our family, we took a "Papal dispensation" on the meat situation, and ate from our kosher meat stash in the freezer. We did this knowing full well none of it came from anywhere near Michigan, but it was already paid for.

Then I got wind of the situation at AgriProcessors from an article in The Forward. It seems that the ills of the meatpacking industry were not influenced by rabbinical supervision. The company produces half of the kosher meat sold in the United States. The information was like a fly buzzing around my ear. It was September, and I was getting worried about the dangers of eating Lake Superior White Fish more often than my once yearly brush with danger, not to mention serving my kids Lake Michigan trout. Could eating regionally kill us all?

Our Thanksgiving dinner was the break fast from eating locally. My kids got thoroughly sick of apples. Apples are the only locally grown fruit available in November in Michigan. The summer grapes were long gone, as were the fresh local pears (we'd canned several jars full, however). We bought a kosher turkey, and surrounded it with all kinds of side dishes that were produced far from the Great Lakes region, including stuffing made with celery from California, a salad with lettuce and tomatoes from Florida and a pumpkin pie in a crust with flour grown and milled in Iowa. We kept a journal, and we all learned that we live in a really great region for such an experiment. We ate bread baked in Detroit, and cheese from a dairy in Ann Arbor, not to mention cheese from Michigan and Wisconsin. We got other dairy products each week from our milkman, who brings them from his farm about 50 miles from our town. We found pasta made in a factory one town away from ours, and tomato products from a company in Indiana (touches Lake Michigan). We ate steel-cut oats grown in Michigan, and even drank wine we'd bought on our last vacation to Pelee island, in Canada, (in Lake Erie).

All the while, The Forward kept publishing pieces about AgriProcessors, in Iowa. As a result of the stories of abuses of animals, not to mention abuses of workers, a few months ago, we decided to stop buying any kosher meat produced and sold by the company, owned by a family in New York. The closest kosher butcher is 40 miles away from where we live. He gets all of the meat from AgriProcessors. The local grocery stores carry kosher meat—many of the brands from AgriProcessors. We found kosher meat from Canada; it comes to Detroit from Montreal. Then I read The Forward two weeks ago. The INS raided AgriProcessors with arrest warrants for over half of the plant's employees. Illegal immigrants had been hired to work, given false social security numbers (or none at all), paid below minimum wage and otherwise abused. The headline of the article was "Raid on Kosher Slaughterhouse Sparks Fears of Meat Shortage." Fear of meat shortage? I was speechless. So, you guessed it, I wrote a letter to the editor. Check it out here.

So what has all of this got to do with anything related to adjunct faculty, Adjunct Advocate, or the price of tea in China ("so way not local," as my son might say)? Well, I want to encourage all of you to join me in writing letters to the editor when you read pieces that touch on issues of import to NTT faculty. Comment on the pieces you read online, and share your opinions and stories. I think the time has come for part-time faculty to speak for themselves in the education media, as well as in the national media when those publications write about higher education. Take a few minutes and tell the world what you think; it's an important first step in the march toward much-needed equity for the majority of this country's college faculty, and the millions of college students whom you teach.

Posted By Patricia L. at 10:00 AM

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June 2nd 2008

Some Confusion Over What Journalists Do

I am happy to say that I have made the acquaintance of the editors of a lot of newspapers and magazines during the time I have published the Adjunct Advocate. As a rule, editors are a friendly lot, though some are more competitive than others, and I know one editor whom I think would sell his mother for a scoop. As a rule, editors are fair people; our jobs demand objectivity. Writers delve; editors sort out the found objects, and make sure that facts and assertions are documented and supported.

This month's copy of Academe on my desk has a feature piece written by Cat Warren. The piece titled "The Chronicle, the Professoriate and the AAUP," is Cat Warren's (and more likely, one imagines, AAUP's shot back at the Good Ship Chronicle for uncomplimentary coverage of the Association of American University Professors over the past year. Some background is important here:

The AAUP's Communication Director who oversees Academe (among the association's other communication efforts) is Dr. Gwendolyn Bradley, who moved to AAUP from The Chronicle of Higher Education many years ago.

Cat Warren, a former newspaper reporter, teaches English and is the president of the AAUP's North Carolina conference.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is published by a privately held company owned by a single family. This is important to remember. In essence, it means that CHE is beholden to no one except the banker who counts the deposits, and covers the checks, and that editors are the big men on campus, not shareholders, or even the publisher.

Alright, with that out of the way, let me just say: Wow! In the almost 20 years I have been reading Academe, I have never seen the publication publish anything like this extended op-ed piece. Ms. Warren writes that if the AAUP "can't get fair coverage even out the the Chronicle, the major speciality publication of higher education, we are in deep trouble." To accuse a news publication of unfair coverage is serious, particularly a publication such as CHE. After all, it is not affiliated with any outside political or religious organization, for example. If Ms. Warren were complaining about, say, The National Review's coverage of higher education, it might be fair to suggest she rest in a darkened room with a cold compress until the delusions of objectivity pass.

I recently invited an official at the American Federation of Teachers, to participate in our Podcast Interview Series. He wrote back that a written interview would be better. I prepared a set of questions and sent them along. A short while later, he responded that AFT preferred not to participate, as officials at the union felt they would not get fair coverage. I didn't take offense; I took it to mean our coverage is more objective than union officials feel comfortable with. Good journalism can make people awfully uncomfortable.

Ms. Warren writes in her piece that the "Chronicle's job is to report the news and make at least a passing effort to do so neutrally." Again, this is a very serious allegation, and she bases her allegation on the fact that the paper gave belated and little attention to the AAUP's Freedom in the Classroom statement. And this makes CHE's reporting biased? I read the AAUP's press release about the pending release of the statement, and decided that, to our adjunct faculty readers, a full-blown statement on the subject, wasn't really news. It didn't help that when I read the statement I found not a single mention of adjunct or part-time faculty.

Maybe, like me, the editor at the Chronicle who got the press release decided that the AAUP's statement wasn't hot news, but worth mentioning to Chronicle readers, many of whom are TT and tenured faculty, administrators, etc... Ms. Warren compares the coverage of the AAUP's statement in the Chronicle with that of Inside Higher Ed.com. There, editor Scott Jaschik's "longer" piece, which Ms. Warren judged as neither too "laudatory nor especially critical," was more to her liking. She also complains because the Chronicle's piece ends with a quote from Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a (not shockingly) conservative higher education group.

Here's a newsflash to AAUP leaders, the Chronicle is a for profit company. The owner expects a return on his investment or people get fired. There are no such expectations at AAUP. AAUP workers crank out statements, research and policy papers and collect regular paychecks. No one talks about the cost of such work in terms of any actual return. The Chronicle's owner lives in the real world, pays real income taxes, and faces some very real threats to the well-being of his publication's bottom line. Both the Chronicle and AAUP are suffering from the shrinking pool of tenured faculty. The difference is that if, ten years from now AAUP has lost 10,000 more members and still has only 3,900 part-time faculty members, chances are very good no one will have been fired as a direct result. At the Chronicle, if the paper were to lose 10,000 subscribers and revenue, editor Jeff Selingo would get the sack quicker than you could say, well, Jeff Selingo.

The Chronicle owes its readership everything, and owes AAUP nothing, not even editorial coverage. If AAUP wants coverage outside of its own magazine, maybe the organization should do something out of the ordinary, something bold, go somewhere the union hasn't gone with any frequency lately. AAUP could go about the business of funding campus organizing drives—maybe even pull out all the stops and launch a drive to organize some of the 600,000 temporary faculty who are still without representation.

Unions unionize; newspaper and magazine journalists and editors editorialize (or not) about the efforts of the unions. News is a public trust, as well as a business, and sometimes those about whom we write get confused about exactly what that means.

Posted By Patricia L. at 8:00 AM