thanking the adjuncts?

I appreciate the general point of Hanson's title: adjuncts (like me) deserve more credit. But this article seems less about thanksgiving than about his beef with tenured professors and student protesters.

He accuses us (the student protesters) of not caring about injustice, and slaims we should not be protesting tuition hikes." Long-term, tuition increases will push poor and middle-class students out of UC; the only poor students at UC will be those few who get a generous scholarship. That shift is what we mean when we say it will be like a private university. In protest, we exercise our first amendment right to speech and assembly. Thank you, Mr. Hanson, for describing it as a "riot." I guess students should pay whatever the state and university ask, and if we can't afford it, we don't deserve an education.

I am a TA at a UC, and an adjunct at SMC. Compared to low-wage workers at Wal-Mart or foodservice, I am paid very well - several times the minimum wage. Compared to full professors or Victor Davis Hanson, I am very underpaid.

Maybe that sucks, but wage inequality is a dominant feature of every capitalist society. So I should not be surprised (fun fact: the highest-paid professors are actually at private Ivy League universities, public research universities try to compete with them).

Hanson's gratitude is insincere. He is criticizing all of higher education as "liberal," so in his mind, all of us who are exploited by "the administrative elite" are propping up a corrupt system, right? Hanson would perhaps prefer we all quit, then every public college would shut down. Then he would have his revenge on the priesthood of tenured professors.

The only colleges left would be the private universities. Without interference from unfairly subsidized public systems, private organizations could let the market decide how much education costs, and how much profit to earn from us. Then, just get the government out of the student loan business, so loan sharks (i.e., Bank of America) can set interest rates. We will have a perfect system to serve every wealthy family in America. And the uneducated masses can forever work for Wal-Mart, where they should be thrilled to get $8 per hour.

While many tenured professors (even in social sciences!) do great work, I fully agree that the tenure system is messed up. I have worked with professors and admins who suck; on the other hand, there are bad lecturers, TAs, and students, too. Sure, some professors' research is irrelevant, but a lot of it is at least as valuable as anything published in the National Review.

Anyway, we were actually protesting the UC Regents' meeting. The regents are the ones who set policy for hiring, pay, research, services, and tuition. Professors and administrators don't control this. Unfortunately for the National Review, regents do not fit their profile of leftist academics. Regents are the kings of the private sector: bankers, CEOs, real estate speculators, and lawyers, as well as politicians (they get the job by giving about $300,000 to the governor). Regents and politicians built the current system. If Hanson has a grievance or wants a change, it makes sense to talk to the regents or legislature, instead of vaguely complaining about snooty professors.

Academics did not bankrupt our state. I think bankers, real estate speculators, and politicians deserve the thanks for that.

Kip Austin Hinton

-----Original Message-----

From: JIM

Sent: Fri 11/27/2009 1:38 PM

To: FACULTY_ADJUNCT

Subject: Thanks to the forgotten part-time teacher

Here's a Thanksgiving article for all of you from an unlikely source.

Jim

Soon-to-be former Adjunct Faculty member

***

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDRjMTgxMjlkZGU5YjE5YTI0NjUwZmQ5MmE0YjRiZWQ=

Thanks to the forgotten part-time teacher

Victor Davis Hanson

Last week within about an hour, I got a form email from a UC administrator deploring California's cuts to higher education, asking for money, and pleading for support for the university-even as You Tube was airing the UCLA student protests over tuition hikes.

.which got me to thinking. The students, of course, have no answers to the problems of California that sees some 3,500 professionals and the well-paid leaving the state each week, since our officials cannot explain why-with the nation's highest state income, gasoline, and sales taxes-we have among the nation's worst infrastructure, schools, and educated populaces.

If the students were really worried about injustice in the CSU and UC systems, they would not be protesting tuition hikes that will still not result in their educations even approaching the costs at private colleges. Nor would UC administrators be swarming the internet and emails systems warning that cuts will hurt their tenured faculty and research.

Instead the dirty secret in California is that at JC, CSU, and UC campuses, nearly half of the instruction offered-whether calibrated in the total number of students in classes, or by the number of courses listed or by the number of those employed-is taught by non-tenure-track lecturers, TAs, and part-time faculty.

If one were to compare that cost per unit with instruction by regular tenured faculty for often essentially the same work, the exploitation makes any in the private sector mild in comparison. Wal-Mart is saintly in employment practices in comparison with CSU.

An English 1A class taught by a TA or part-timer might service 30 students at a cost of $4,000 to 5,000 in instructional fees; an upper-division required course for the major, with 10 students, like "The Construction of Manhood in Blake" taught by a full professor might run the university $25,000. Part-timers might make $35,000 without benefits for juggling together 5-7 classes at different campuses, while tenured professors might make well over $100,000 for teaching 4-6 courses with full facilities, benefits, and support.

The problem is that all the old justifications for such wide imbalances-tenured faculty advising, publication, intangible college governance-don't wash any more, at least in the case of the humanities and social sciences-not when TAs, lecturers and part-timers often have PhDs, and are as good or better teachers than full professors, while the scholarship of the affluently tenured, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is either irrelevant or unreadable, while their teaching is not subject to the same scrutiny or consequences as part-time evaluations.

So next time students nearly riot at UCLA, the angst should be on behalf of a near majority of their faculty who are paid a pittance of what an elite makes for nearly the same sort of work.

The fact is that the students are subsidized by the bankrupt state. The governing administrative elite and cohort of tenured professors are, in turn, subsidized by tens of thousands of mostly unknown, exploited part-timers. The latter each day in California teach hundreds of thousands of college students at JC, CSU, and UC at a fraction of the wage that a tiny priesthood receives for essentially the same job.

So on Thanksgiving Day, give thanks to the part-timers and temps who keeps the liberal system of higher education running by the very illiberal treatment they receive.