About

Adjunked & Edploited by the Two Tier System

Adjunked

A Dikshunary or What Lots of Folks Really Think of Adjuncts

adjunked: add ^. junkt (soft stress on add/hard stress on junk/lightly seasoned by a titillating terminal t)

     noun

1.      emphasis on the junk

2.      an unessential though inherent partial teaching unit

3.      a person who, in the eyes of everyone except paymasters and adjunctophobes, maintains the status of a professor, but only part of the time; it is unclear what such a person is the rest of the time (Note: You may be able to spot the illusive adjunked pondering this zen koan of adjunkeddom).

4.      deleterious condition in which the something joined or added to something else while not in actual fact being a part of it turns out to be a human being

5.      a dispensable drone in service to the queen bee of corporatization (see “Union?  We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Union!”)

6.      an unripe professor (see “Adjunked Expiration Dates”)

     verb

1.      in the subjective case, to be treated with disdain, scorn, aloofness, haughty contempt, and the idea that, clearly, you do not cut the mustard (e.g. The junior faculty member adjunked me when he said, “Who’d have thought an adjunct could have thought of raising such an important issue to the faculty?”)

2.      in the objective case, to be viewed as the Other by one’s peers, the set of which is all faculty members. Illustration:

[faculty members] = full professors; assistant professors, associate professors; tenure track professors; graduate student apprentice professors; tutors; adjunct professors.* 

*  In order of peer approval; due to the cyclical nature of Othering, graduate students are subliminally trained via Adjunct Aversion Therapy (AAT), a system wide tool that maintains the ideal surplus production of teaching units while inserting the all powerful and useful weapon of mass adjunct debilitation: internalized oppression (see “Project for the New American Censury.”).

3.   in any case, to be paid an hourly wage that appears to match the amount of advanced training required for such a  position and looks impressive (as in, “Wow, you make over fifty bucks an hour?”) but which hovers near minimum wage due to the unremunerated factoring in of: preparation time; grading; conferencing; office hours; responding to phone calls and/or emails outside of office hours; non-classtime and non-office hour student questions; administrative requirements; mandated meetings; requisite service learning and/or continuing education; and tolerating the smug, sneering attitude of the majority of full time faculty and administration alike. (e.g. Unaware of the paradoxical trace of cannibalism embedded in the system, the faculty adjunked the adjuncts by negotiating for a pay plan adjunked to their own.).

Notes of interest: 1) The hourly rate of pay for many a professional plumber or electrician uses as a start time the moment s/he enters the vehicle in which s/he will drive to the job. 2) When I was a union member in a blue collar job, I got paid while on the clock. Management had no legal right to expect me to perform labor connected with my job while punched out.  Irony: I was earning more in that job in my early twenties than I currently do as an adjunked. 3) The system we use ensures the decline of academia: we are taking part in our own demise by allowing corporate interests to undermine higher education (see “Magic Tricks for the Power Minded”).

Variants

adjunktification add ^. junk ^. teh ^. fuh ^. kay ^. shun

noun

1. emphasis on the shun
2. a state of camaraderie between freeway fliers
3. a precedent for free market globalization: see anyone who has been downsized or outsourced.
4. a state of denial about the reality of academia (e.g. How ironic is it that the adjunktification of higher education takes care of so many of corporate America’s problems? see “Who’s Really the Boss?” by I. M. N. Power).
5. a scapegoating: see Jesus, New Testament (e.g. Professor Judas couldn’t stop himself from aiding Maestro Jesus’s adjunktification.)

adjunktify/adjunkedtified add ^. junk ^. teh ^. fie /add ^. junk ^. teh ^. fied

      adjective

1.      as a way of imposing incompetence on a perfectly capable person (e.g. “Boy, Wally” said Eddie Haskell, “Did you ever adjunktify that one!”)

2.      see above: adjunktification, definition 5 (e.g. She was adjunkedtified for her pedagogical peccadilloes.)

[ Note: 24 June 2012: this appeared on my old account which no longer obeys me.]