#TUhearing or #HEnotHearing?

21 March 2015

Whatever the outcome of the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board (PLRB) hearing on Temple University (TU) adjuncts’ bid to vote on unionization, the proceedings spotlight the crux of adjunctification: when telling adjuncts to only do the work stated in our tentative assignment agreements, what admin means is, Psst! meanwhile, we will rely on your dedication to students to work off the clock.

Here’s an overview of the situation in case you missed it:

Hundreds of the university’s adjunct faculty petitioned the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board in December [2014] for the right to vote on joining the Temple Association of University Professionals union, which already represents 1,400 full-time faculty members. In a Feb. 17 letter to the Temple News, the TAOC wrote, “Unfortunately, Temple administration is delaying the process because they don’t respect us. Provost [Hai-Lung] Dai continues to send misleading and offensive emails to adjunct faculty discouraging us from unionizing. His actions show that he regards us as nothing more than cheap labor.”

To be clear, this is a seminal moment, for the TU adjuncts’ fight for voting rights is a weigh station on the long snaky path that is the vicious cycle of precarious academic labor, or, as Academia Obscura duly notes, the Professorletariat.

The PLRB hearing began Thursday, March 19 in Harrisburg, where, in the words of Temple Association of University Professionals (TAUP) president Art Hochner, six adjunct faculty members testified as to “their impressive educational credentials, their teaching, their interaction and collaboration with full-time faculty, and the activities outside of the classroom that they involve students in to enhance educational goals.” Sounds like adjuncts doing the bang up job on which we pride ourselves, right?

Sadly though not surprisingly, Hochner’s assessment isn’t shared by the official voice of Temple administration, as revealed by live tweeting of the event from adjuncts, allies, and the United Academics of Philadelphia (@UAPhilly) local using a #TUhearing hashtag. No, rather than being treated like the human beings, citizens and public servants they are, the witnesses were treated to a rather antagonistic mode of operation by Temple’s attorneys. Summing up the day, one witness wrote about being “dismayed by the demeaning way [in which she and her] colleagues were spoken to by Temple’s representatives”:

I did not feel valued or appreciated by my employer, regardless of what they try to tell us on campus. In Harrisburg, Temple made it clear they view our service and devotion to our students and to Temple as ‘voluntary’ and we could ‘just go home’ [if we thought we were working so many hours sans pay].

United Academics of Philadelphia’s correspondent put the matter squarely, tweeting in response to witness descriptions of the long unpaid hours adjuncts give in service to their students:

[NOTE: references are to TU attorney John Langel and TU adjunct Chris Raab]

The @UAPhilly citizen journalist ultimately shows dissatisfaction with the way TU attorneys suggest that adjuncts are free to not work outside the hours stipulated by our tentative assignment agreements.

Hm. Well, concerned fellow twitizens had quite a bit to say about this idea, slyly summed up by local Metro Philly news reporter Sam Newhouse, who noted the complete illogic of such an approach:

Educators and, yes, lay citizens know that it’s impossible to carry out the duties of teaching strictly within the confines of the hours spent with students. As well we know, along with the complementary cycle of assessment and evaluation (grading), precious contact hours are the end result of many more hours spent outside class researching and preparing: syllabi, calendars, lesson plans, handouts, presentations, questions, tests, prompts, demonstrations, just to name a few items on the educators’ daily to do list, and we haven’t even mentioned administrative duties such as inputting grades, record keeping and email.

But it looks like Temple would rather adjuncts divide class time between teaching and the long list of steps that equate class time. How would that work? Students sit idly by in class as we do all the unpaid hours of work that goes into every contact hour? Sam Newhouse’s wry comment shows the absurdity of the TU attorneys’ argument.

Never mind that the lawyers raised this notion directly in reference to witness David White’s explanation of how many hours he gives his students outside class in order to help them put on a one act festival – a point the lawyers will surely try to stick. But don’t believe the hype. As one twitizen observed, the “gap between [University attorneys and University operations] is never more apparent than in these fora. They’re very lucky no one takes them up on it.”

The admin attorneys let the cat out of the bag on this one, though, because using David White as a vehicle, every adjunct is being told that any hours we put in outside class are freebies. And as such, not only should non-contact work hours be donated by us, we have no right to expect compensation, that it’s our choice to perform duties not stated in our assignment agreements. The laughter you hear is the unstated irony turned weapon every adjunct knows: one cannot teach on contact hours alone.

Wow, let me say that another way because framed a wee bit differently, the concept is so heartwarming yet clearly 21st century un-American, it bears repeating: the company is relying on my honor and good will to work many more unpaid hours than paid.

And here we have the crux of adjunctification, the loud clear message to public education that what’s wanted not only in academic but global labor is an all precarious workforce all the time. That’s the future of public education encroaching year by year: not the Professoriate, but the Professorletariate. If we think a 75% part-time academic workforce is outrageous, consider the day when we hit 99%. Not quite 100% because there’ll be a +/- 1% margin for full time non-management overseer positions a la chairs, plus various superstar or endowed positions receiving twice or three times the going rate for what were once known as tenured faculty.

This isn’t a pleasant thought, and I’d love to be able to muster the forces needed to fight against it, but in reality, Americans are pinned by the weight of decades of austerity measures and corporatized political power. Our attempts to fight back are decidedly reactive, and if we’re going to save our education system, save ourselves, we’re going to need some proactivity.

And so the #TUhearing is actually a clear sign of #HEnotHearing. The hearing signals a resounding need for investigation of not only widespread labor malpractice but undue corporate-political influence. This doesn’t have to be done by the government, although that’d be nice. There are plenty of leads to go around for professional and citizen journalists alike.

At the end of the day, as an adjunct, I very much want to see the Temple adjuncts be allowed to exercise their right to vote. As a citizen, I’m appalled that fellow Americans would even have to take such a notion to court.

#InvestigatePublicEd

The Doublespeak of Let’s Get Together

8 March 2015

I began researching part time faculty working conditions in 2010, the year I had abuse shouted at me by a peer at a local university who confused himself for the boss of me.

He’d tricked me into a casual get together with him, inviting me for coffee by email, the subject of which was: Let’s Get Together, a false message at best. When I arrived at his office at the appointed time, he began accusing me of something I hadn’t done. When it got to the point where he told me the person accusing me had an excellent reputation, implying that I hadn’t and so wasn’t to be believed, I realized this was no coffee chat.

Of course I felt confused, as I so often feel from the way so-called grown up people behave, and so I tried to tell him that he was listening to one of his mentees, and that he might try to get to know me a bit better before making assumptions about my character based on hearsay. He didn’t like this, and he ended up yelling at the top of his lungs.

When he did this, I pictured my huge, dearly departed alcoholic husband yelling right in my face about my liberal politics and calling me a hippie puke, neck veins bulging, face red as a fire truck, and I thought, “You don’t scare me, buddy, I’ve got you beat. I’ve been yelled at by an enormous, raging alcoholic.”

But George was an old-fashioned man’s man, a gentle giant whose bark was far, far worse than his bite. Not that he wouldn’t use physical means to defend himself or, especially, others. Because of his upbringing and his personal ethics formed by years of protecting those weaker than he, the idea that a man would hit a woman was foreign to my husband. Yelling, yes. Hitting, never. But I didn’t know this about my abuser of the moment. I collected myself, and calmly told him he needn’t worry, that nothing of the sort would ever happen again. I said this because I knew right then and there that after the semester, I would refuse to work with a department and people who foster such abusive practices.

Even though I’d been mistreated and didn’t deserve the severity of my aggressor’s manipulations, I knew neither the chair nor anyone else would care that this man had harassed me this way. The man who’d tricked me with his passive-aggressive email was a favorite in the department. He’d had a bad attitude about me for years, and I could tell that he believed his chance had come to instigate trouble for me. I knew I’d get no help because whenever I’d spoken to other part time faculty about the atmosphere of wanton backstabbing and abuse in the department, they’d change the subject or simply sigh. Meanwhile, the chair pretended to ignore the negativity, for doing so allowed others to do most of the dirty work for him. He knew exactly what was happening – the lying, the spying, the backstabbing – he just didn’t always know all the details. In politics, we call this plausible deniability. In life’s day to day happenings, it’s a rotten way to treat fellow human beings.

I was clear I’d been bullied, but I wasn’t clear as to what I could do about it other than run and tell my mom. It occurred to me that there was something much deeper fueling the rage behind my aggressor’s assault. The tension in the department reflected the atmosphere on the campus, and I realized this was not the same atmosphere of investigation, deep thought, and learning I’d come to know in college in the late 70s. I wondered what had happened to education. What happened that causes seemingly reasonable, highly educated people to behave like starved dogs fighting over a bone? The benefit I gained from being bullied was to focus my energy on finding out.

One thing I discovered quite quickly is that adjunct faculty are a symptom of a far-reaching epidemic: privatization models set up to casualize the work force. In other words, sacrificing hard fought labor rights for corporate profit by creating a flexible, at-will workforce.

But my view after only a little more than two month’s worth of researching privatization became that we will really get nowhere unless we concert efforts on all levels of education – K12 through PhD institutions. I didn’t come to the idea of joining efforts right away. It took another few weeks to realize that the voices I was seeking were not being highlighted. In fact, just the opposite, they were often being ignored, muted or suppressed. But that was half a decade ago, and today more and more people are aware that terms like Student Success and accountability are doublespeak meant to fool us into submission.

From this point of view, it makes no sense, for example, for contingent faculty to waste time and energy arguing against tenure. It’s already being done for us. And us doing so not only widens the two tier chasm between educators who should be focused on joining forces, it actually helps corporatizers achieve the goal of an all precarious, all the time workforce. When we think tenure, we should think union-busting. That’s the way our oppressors view it. Regardless of how we feel about our unions, these are part of the bedrock of a democratic society that broadens access to our freedoms. Being anti-union undermines our desire to empower the silenced majority. Too, think about how much easier it is to be taken advantage of while we’re at each others’ throats.

But we can choose not to see ourselves as enemies fighting for leftover bones. We can reject the black and white, us v them polarization model so in vogue today and consider alternate ways of working together. When you stop and think about it, it’s going to take a whole lot of people to save education – and our democracy – from the ever-ravenous jaws of privatization.

Let’s face it, for a long time now our general mood in lobbying and negotiating efforts has been defeatist and reactive: accepting contingency as a norm is in the back of our minds, and the structures of our organizations for change are not set up for the challenges brought by 40 years of austerity measures. But in order to address these problems, we need to take a different approach, so instead of allowing ourselves to be swept into the national fervor for shutting down discourse, let’s challenge ourselves to open discussion based on our differences. Isn’t this what we teach our students?

In order to add the necessary force behind our efforts and amplify our calls for equity and genuine concern for students, we need to imagine more fluid leadership structures, ones that allow for much freer interplay between advocate and advocated for, and that can create multi-voiced, proactive planning. This cannot happen if we adhere to leadership styles that mimic corporate structures and focus on obsolete notions of speaking privilege. We who spend our lives teaching students about free speech are engaging in practices that silence one another. We shut down discussion in fits of emotion instead of seeing differences as opportunities for exploration. This irony doesn’t have to exist if we commit ourselves to building bridges rather than constructing walls.

Way back in 1961, President Eisenhower warned us to stay alert and keep informed because he could see that greed + access to public funds not only creates economic disaster for the lower and middle class but undermines our democracy. We are on the verge of missing DDE’s window of opportunity to maintain an alert, informed citizenry that can check the abuses of a privatization complex. Spreading the message that our lives are being legislated in favor of private interests needs to run deep, and this includes every person connected to education. Our advocacy has stalled at a crossroads for a very long time, and it’s time to realize that we cannot reach any consequential sense of unity or solidarity without some painstaking self-examination that includes forward thinking solutions of inclusiveness. Ultimately, we must take responsibility for teaching ourselves how to create new models of working together in meaningful ways.

Open Letter to Media from National Adjunct Walkout Day

National Adjunct posted the following open letter to media on the National Adjunct Walkout Day (NAWD) FaceBook page, February 19, 2015. The letter also doubles as ideas for talking points. The NAWD Tumblr page is abuzz with submissions from precarious faculty in- and outside the United States, as denoted on the map of events below.

Map by @vireeon. Send logos to @vireeon to map your event.

Dear Media,

Thank you for your requests.

It’s good that you are focusing attention on the “plight” of adjuncts, and we thank you for getting “our” story out there.

But the story of adjunctification is larger than the story of adjuncts.

It’s the story of higher education, and how it is losing its mission.

In addition to questioning adjuncts, are you also putting administrators in the hot seat? Are you asking why a system that claims to value education is exploiting 75% of its faculty?

Are you asking why, as tuition has risen at unprecedented rates, instruction allocations have gone down?

Are you asking where student fees are going? How much administrators are earning? How much money is being spent on building projects, athletics, and aesthetic upgrades?

Adjuncts are part of the story–but the whole story can’t be told by adjuncts alone.

Please also direct your questions to students, whose learning conditions suffer at the same time their tuition has risen; and full time faculty, who share many of our same concerns.

And please don’t forget to direct the hard-hitting questions to the administrators who are paid generous salaries to answer your questions–and then ask them some more

If you have already looked at these angles, it should already be clear why adjuncts are coming together on February 25.

Thanks,
‪#‎NAWD‬

Visit the National Adjunct Walkout Day Facebook page for updates, news and camaraderie here; and the Tumblr page for #NAWD ideas and to submit your event with or without logos here. For Twitter, visit @NationalAdjunct here.

Adjuncts Are But a Symptom

15 December 2014

One way to exert power in restraint of democracy is to bend the state to a market logic, pretending one can replace “citizens” with “customers.” Consequently, the neoliberals seek to restructure the state with numerous audit devices (under the sign of “accountability” or the “audit society”) or impose rationalization through introduction of the “new public management”; or, better yet, convert state services to private provision on a contractual basis.

– Philip Mirowski “The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism”

Who’s minding the store while thousands of academics across the globe debate ‘best practices’ for activism? The free market analogy is apropos, for while we focus our attention on the divisive nature of the two tier system, the assault on public education and the part-timization of the workforce go on unabated.

Adjuncts are a white collar symptom of systemic and deep global wounds to freedom. The plight of adjuncts is often compared to that of fast food and WalMart workers, but we need to consider that our advanced degrees provide us a privilege not shared by most of the wounded. We are equal to our fellow wounded but possess an additional step to economic access. So, even though many adjuncts subsist at or near poverty levels, we also exist within a realm of opportunity granted via advanced education – an irony we can’t afford to ignore.

Because the piece of the pie relegated to education keeps shrinking, we are all fighting for our very existence, and without realizing it or meaning to, we are being conditioned to accept a norm that says there is no public good, only allegiance to oneself. Such a focus erodes freedom. We need a concerted effort to fight the undermining of programs that actually helped bring about the ideals of democracy for forty-plus years, one of which is public education.

The ongoing Adjunct Question is a tool being used to misdirect us from the subversion of public education since the 1940s and the big push against New Deal programs. This era saw the formation of Friedrich Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society, the adoption of ideas by Ludwig von Mises, and the birth of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), “generally regarded as ‘the first libertarian think-tank,’” into which both Milton Friedman and future John Birch Society founder Robert Welch put energy:

The purpose of the FEE – and libertarianism, as it was originally created – was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations. (Mark Ames)

Think of it this way – there is billions at stake in the testing-accountability movement that accepts public funding into its own coffers as a way of doing business, framing the siphoning as ‘public-private.’ This means that tax dollars are being used to make profits at the expense of all of us, profits that are not being returned to the classroom. Nor are these monies being used to support citizen interests such as job security, pro rata compensation, student loan subsidies, or education the way we ourselves practice it.

No, as it turns out, public education is an investor’s dream. Often cloaked as social enterprise investing and venture philanthropy with directive strings attached, education investment opportunities include everything from owning charter schools, student loan corporations, and assessment facilities to manipulating curriculum and operating billion dollar hedge funds. As reborn education activist Diane Ravitch put it:

What’s in it for the hedge fund guys? A fun hobby; power; a chance to call themselves “civil rights leaders” (not too many to be found in the big cities’ exclusive clubs); and, yes, a chance to make money. Those who invest in charters can double their money in seven years, thanks to a federal program called the New Markets Tax Credits.

It may seem realistic to accept the neoliberal argument that education is not a right (and it is eek, socialist!), and therefore schools must compete for consumers just like businesses, but it’s actually opportunistic and clearly doesn’t work. The question should be: how do we fight the nexus of the behemoths of big politics and business in order to redress the contingency crisis?

The two-tier system is an excellent tool for the divide and conquer strategy of Jeffersonian free markets. Forcing tenured professors to protect the tenure system misdirects attention away from the assault on the teaching profession as a cover for union busting and removing obstacles to the godhead of the market. While educators as a whole are attacked on multiple fronts, the unions we rely on to protect academic freedom and tenure are in a fight for their lives. The business-political elites have been busy forcing education unions to spend large sums fending off legislation meant to weaken our voices. Unfortunately, the two tier system, viewed by assailants as a socialist program, unwittingly and conveniently helps weaken public education. This is not a justification for the inability of unions to protect academic freedom and make gains for all faculty members – just a demonstration that the assault on multiple fronts is working very well.

So, if the unions are busy fighting for their existence (relying on the same methods used in the past), and tenured faculty are busy protecting tenure (relying on academic freedom arguments that necessitated the rise of faculty unions), and the adjunct faculty are busy working to improve their working conditions, who is minding the store?

Our old ways of handling academic infighting is made obsolete by the legislating of our lives in which every move is calculated toward repealing any semblance to the freedoms we understand as guaranteed in the Constitution. In “Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom,” Political Science Professor Corey Robin argues that big business, “uncurbed and unchecked, portends…personal domination,” and that government is a source of freedom:

When government is aligned with democratic movements on the ground, as Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. understood, it becomes the individual’s instrument for liberating [oneself from one’s] rulers in the private sphere, a way to break the back of private autocracy.

Contingent labor is being made out to be the new norm, not just in academia, but worldwide. We need to consider that our fight is not just a fight for adjunct faculty, but for the denial of what the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states as

The right of everyone to the enjoyment of just and favourable conditions of work which ensure, in particular:

(a) Remuneration which provides all workers, as a minimum, with:

(i) Fair wages and equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind, in particular women being guaranteed conditions of work not inferior to those enjoyed by men, with equal pay for equal work;

(ii) A decent living for themselves and their families in accordance with the provisions of the present Covenant;

(b) Safe and healthy working conditions;

(c) Equal opportunity for everyone to be promoted in his employment to an appropriate higher level, subject to no considerations other than those of seniority and competence;

(d) Rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay, as well as remuneration for public holidays.

We must take the big picture into consideration to broaden our thinking and thus our discourse. This doesn’t mean abandoning our work to claim our rights and improve our working conditions, but enriching it. Educational budgets are ensconced in state budgets, and changes to Ed Codes are likewise made without consulting the public, so working to change the very legislative conditions that cripple education is a necessary tool. In this way, lobbying advocacy groups such as California Part-time Faculty Association (CPFA) are vital. We must also challenge the entrenched power of the business elite who seek to further shift Americans from citizen to consumer with calls to investigate this unwarranted influence at the local, state, and national levels. Equally important, adjuncts should join efforts against the business elite, working hand-in-hand at every level of education and connecting to efforts from those who, like us, are being denied freedom through economic manipulation.

Think about how we have become accustomed to doing so much more with so much less – and with little to show for it but our sense of loyalty to the public. If we are to take back education and our freedom, we need to be a solid front of citizens who seek to denormalize what is being force fed us as givens.

This article appears in the Fall 2014 issue of CPFA’s Community College Journal.

Flow Chart: How Privateers Undermine Our Education System

Advancing the Quality of The Common Core Flow Chart

Many thanks to Karen Bracken for painstakingly clarifying Morna McDermott’s original chart.

Video explaining the Flow Chart:

Walking the Labyrinth of the Corporate-Owned-Common Core

This chart shows the insidious web of assault on our public education system. While the chart reveals the system behind privatizing our primary and secondary schools, many of the same groups are actively involved in similar takeover of our higher education system. The goal in all this at every level of education is to access public funds and bust unions so as to have more control over the entire operation.

Feelin’ Like I’m Fixin’ to Teach Part Time Rag

With thanks to Country Joe McDonald for your everlasting gift…

MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS APPLIED TO ADJUNCT FACULTY

 

 

 

 

 

Schadenfreude & Adjuncts

Much has been written about the working conditions of part time professors for good reason: they stink. The more we talk openly about the academy’s hypocritical two tier system, “a system which not only exploits the 70 percent of the faculty with contingent appointments but cheats the current and future generations of students in profound and long-lasting ways,” the more likely change will come. But along with the need for equity and academic freedoms for all is the need for relief from the daily emotional harm being done on campuses across the country. I’m talking not only about the head games played at adjuncts’ expense but the attitudes that shape these games.

One form of the head games stems from a sense of entitlement that often goes along with being a professor. Don’t get me wrong, I carried this sense with me into academia. I believed the hype that retirements and the Boomer-fueled student population growth ensured enough tenure track openings for hard working and well qualified temporarily-adjuncting applicants. I expected that as one of many well qualified temporarily-adjuncting workers, I would be given materials, space, and time to meet with students and prepare for class. I assumed I’d be accorded the same respect and dignity I’d always associated with the professors with whom I‘d worked in grad school, which is why, based on the abundant in-class discussions we’d had on equality and the variety of –isms, it never even dawned on me that pay equity was virtually nonexistent. I even thought that there was something wrong with being an adjunct: you were either on the short list to get hired, or you were somehow found defective and thus delegated to the loser pile of permanent adjuncthood.

I thought I’d paid some dues as a grad student, but I had huge lessons ahead.

Any delusional sense of entitlement disappeared when I ran into a widespread, unfortunate, deeply entrenched persona non grata and/or persona non esse attitude toward adjuncts. It hit  me strongest when our email inboxes got hijacked by a weeks-long reply-all discussion of new office furniture and computers for full timers. This consumer-laden discourse occurred smack dab in the middle of budget cut negotiations in which not only were overload hours being cut, which meant adjunct jobs were being cut, but we were also being asked to take a pay cut. While some of us tried to carry on a serious discussion about the adjunct double whammy (which many either didn’t catch or didn’t care about), we were vehemently told by both full timers and fellow part timers to stop cramming their mailboxes with “trifling whining.” Okay, so pretty, sparkly, new furniture and computers, yes. Jobs and wages, no.

An even sillier example of this entitlement is musical office chairs. I work at a campus with a designated adjunct office. Since apparently such a designated office is rare, we are fortunate to have it. At least, this is what one of the chairs told me when I started looking into more office space for the adjunct hordes. “You’re lucky to have one at all,” said the chair. A couple years back I requested new chairs be switched out for some broken ones. Facilities was both kind and efficient, for the very next day I was greeted by six new chairs. Our relief was short-lived, though, for it wasn’t long before the chairs one by one mysteriously disappeared, replaced of course with worn out, broken chairs. This event happened not long after – for reasons unknown –  the locks to the adjunct office were switched to conform with the same key used to open the building. Now everybody had a key, not just adjuncts. Where’d the chairs end up? Who knows – anywhere but for use by adjuncts.

Silly? Yes, but very telling.

Such silly “mean girl” tricks are played on adjuncts every day, from plopping your contagiously sick students in the adjunct office to take a test, to referring to us as dispensable during budget discussions like you have a bad taste in your mouth, to hyper-vigilance on the part of some chairs who apparently don’t trust that we adjuncts can do our jobs so we need babysitters. To clarify: I’m not talking about recently graduated new hires who could use some help. No, these are people with five plus years experience who are being micromanaged to the point of being bullied. I contend that the two tier system is a form of bullying that allows the “mean girl” mindset to go unchallenged.

The United States doesn’t take adult on adult bullying very seriously, mainly due to our form of capitalism which encourages intense competition. To too many of us, bullying is just a part of competing. In “Academic Bullies,” staff Chronicle Review writer Piper Fogg states that  academic bullies may roll their “eyes at your new idea. . . , spread rumors to undermine a colleague’s credibility or shut their target out of social conversations.” Along with countless others, I know I’ve been a dupe for all these forms of abuse. After realizing this several years ago, I began researching online to find out what I might do. I was quite taken aback to find a list on the UK website Bully Online, which under the subheadings “Isolated,” “Subjugated and Controlled” and “Eliminated” pretty much sums up the everyday life of an adjunct professor.

An underground swell of academics have been writing and blogging for more than a  decade about the common occurrence of bullying on campus, coming to a head in 2008 in calling for legislation to include workplace bullying in laws against “discrimination for religious, sexual or cultural reasons.” The heading for this site, Bullying of Academics in Higher Education, reads: “The bullying of academics follows a pattern of horrendous, Orwellian elimination rituals, often hidden from the public.” Herein lies the “mean girl” attitude of the entitled, accompanied by an odd sense of what I can only name the schadenfreude of bullying.

Last month, in her review of Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System, containing essays about two decades of the adjunct movement, Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty reported editor Keith Hoeller’s overview: “the book’s biggest takeaway is that the adjunct faculty movement is really a civil rights movement. If equality for all faculty really matters, he said, “‘we should be against [rankism] just as much as we are against racism and sexism. Contingent faculty are not inferior. They are equal and should be treated as such.’”

One startlingly simple way to effect positive change and help repair the broken system from within is to look deep inside to discover if you are, as they say, a part of the solution or a part of the problem. Do you secretly (or openly) believe there must be something wrong with people – including yourself – who can’t seem to get off the adjunct track? Do you treat adjuncts differently than you treat full timers? Full or part time, it doesn’t matter: don’t internalize the oppression. If we harbor negative attitudes of inferiority or dispensability toward adjuncts, we are only playing into the corporate game, making it easier for the corporatization of the academy to tighten its grip, subsequently making such ideas as academic freedom and its no longer necessary guardian, tenure, obsolete.