The Danger Is Beauty: Talking with Éireann Lorsung
Éireann Lorsung discusses her new collection of poetry, THE CENTURY.
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Posts Tagged: adjunct
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #100: Jennifer Colville
From the tender age of eight, Jennifer Colville has known herself to be a visual artist.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tamiko Nimura
Tamiko Nimura talks about the influence of history, memory, and silence on her work; creating a private MFA for herself; and writing a generational memoir.
...moreJob Insecurity 101
At California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, adjunct faculty have been trying for two years to win their first union contract. They are part of the Service Employees International Union’s Faculty Forward movement, through which some 13,000 adjuncts at fifty colleges across the nation have unionized in the last three years. In […]
...moreLiving Wages Cost More Money
A new study has revealed why academic adjuncts are paid so little: living wages would cost universities a lot more money. A new study says that converting adjunct faculty to tenure track positions would cost $27 billion dollars. The study also suggested that as more faculty became full time, as many as 450,000 adjuncts could […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
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Guildtalk #3: Lori Ostlund
For our ongoing Authors Guild series, Lori Ostlund speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo about what it means to live a literary life in the 21st century.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Taking Comfort in Futurama
I’m a comfort watcher… I retreat into the worlds I know well, with characters that are friends, with outcomes I already understand.
...moreThe Adjunct Crisis
Nearly a third of all adjunct college faculty live below the poverty line. But its not just low pay that make these jobs miserable: lack of job security, long hours, and the expectation of filling roles that were once tenured, full-time positions. The Atlantic takes a look at the growing crisis on the university campus.
...moreProfits Over Integrity
Universities have spent the last several decades expanding the number of adjunct professors they hire, reducing full-time faculty and paying pauper’s wages to these part-time employees. Samuel Hazo explains how cutting full-time faculty is a disservice to academics in the pursuit of profits: However, the recent trend toward hiring adjunct teachers and professors, competent though […]
...moreBranching Stories on the Web
If you loved Choose Your Own Adventure stories as a kid and still wonder where all that branching narrative magic went, you might want to check out ADJUNCT by Ishmael Gilgamesh, in which you are a writer (of some kind) who may (or may not) become an adjunct to pay the bills. This cheeky postmodern […]
...morePart-Time Faculty Are Poor
Writers expecting to supplement their art by teaching college level courses might need to find a new day job. A quarter of all part-time college faculty receive some sort of public assistance, reports Slate. Those numbers include Medicaid and nutrition assistance (better known as food stamps). Though other occupations like fast-food workers still have higher […]
...moreO Adjunct! My Adjunct!
In the New Yorker, Carmen Maria Machado writes about the poor adjunct situation throughout American universities.
...moreOur Part-Time Labor Problem
I teach part-time. My students work. They work in fast food or slightly slower food or hospitality. Last spring semester, two were veterans, with at least four trips to the Middle East between them. One of my four parents cut her hours short to race to my class. Every time my students do not learn […]
...moreThe Grimmest Adjuncting Story Yet
D. Watkins is an adjunct professor. He doesn’t make much money, but most of his family and friends are even worse off, struggling with wrongful convictions, the impossibly high cost of health care, and the loss of loved ones to drugs and guns. Read his account of life in East Baltimore at Salon: Ten-plus years and three […]
...moreSurvival of The Adjuncts
We’ve talked about the struggling plight of adjunct teachers in the past, but The New York Times has put out a pained portrait of James D. Hoff, an adjunct English teacher in the CUNY conglomerate and it’s worth a look. Hoff’s story is one of many seeing that over sixty-percent of CUNY’s instructors are part-time […]
...moreWhy Don’t Adjuncts Just Find a Different Job?
We’ve blogged before about the increasingly untenable state of academic careers and the plight of adjunct professors. If it’s as bad as all that, why don’t adjunct professors just quit and find a different job? The answer, according to Slate‘s L.V. Anderson, has to do with the hidden costs of securing a tenure-track position, the limited […]
...moreWho is really your professor?
Who started the rumor that every university teacher should be called “professor”? The Billfold is here to refute the misconception with a list of cold facts on the labor practices of adjuncts vs. tenured professors, and how those distinctions define who should be called “professor.” Karen Gregory, a PhD candidate, and other adjuncts teaching within […]
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