Hello, readers! (If any of you are still out there. :) )
Unsurprisingly, with the passage of time and distance from my grad school life, I haven't had as much free time or motivation to keep up with this blog as I did for the first several years. I periodically come on here to clear out the spam comments and/or to see what people in this world are reading and writing about, but in general - since I haven't made a career out of postacademia - I've just gravitated away from this world and into my "real life" world.
Which is definitely how it should be! Hopefully those of you who read my blog back in the day (who have fully left academia) have done the same thing. If you're making a writing or coaching or whatevering career out of the postacademic world, then of course you should still be watching and reading academic news on a regular basis. Otherwise, hopefully you've slowly gravitated away from a daily perusal of the job market forums and things like that.
However, I have been meaning to write an update to tell you all how I've been doing after all this time has passed, and I have read a few articles recently that I wanted to pass along to anyone who still finds themselves arriving at my blog and thinks that the problems I discussed several years ago have disappeared. They absolutely, 100% have not!
Showing posts with label academic hiring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label academic hiring. Show all posts
Monday, August 28, 2017
Monday, February 17, 2014
Columbia University and the Continued Rise of Adjuncthood: Does Mentoring Even Matter Anymore?
Now that I am back from my blogging hiatus, one of my goals going forward is to work harder to raise awareness of "academic justice" issues - i.e., how faculty, adjunct instructors, and grad students are treated by their institutions and by higher education more generally.
(Hint: the treatment is oftentimes not very good.)
As I mentioned years ago on this blog, during graduate school I had no idea about how widespread the labor problems in academia actually were. In my program, the cheap teaching labor came from graduate students; therefore, the "fulltime adjunct" problem was not as obvious to me as it was to folks in other disciplines. In addition, my graduate program was highly ranked and seemed to be able to hire an endless stream of new tenure-track faculty, year after year. Meanwhile, I watched graduates of my program go on to solid tenure-track positions or good postdocs every single year. From my perspective, then, things in academia appeared solid and stable.
It wasn't until I left academia in 2011 and started reading about the wider academic job market and the working conditions in colleges and universities other than my own that I realized that things were not as rosy as I had assumed. To my surprise, I discovered the existence of full-time adjuncts. To my greater surprise, I discovered the graduating Ph.D. students who just sort of "disappeared," never to be tracked by their graduate institutions unless they got a tenure-track job. To my even greater surprise, I discovered the existence of faculty (both tenured and non-tenure-track) who were laid off from their institutions without notice and often without cause.
In the past few years as I've continued to read these stories and as my blog gained an audience, I've found that negative stories about academic labor just keep on coming. So even as my personal story about academia has come to an end, I want to use this blog to keep the conversation going about academia's working conditions.
So here we go...a few stories about academic labor justice to start off your week. One relates to general patterns of faculty and staff hiring, and the other to a series of worrisome faculty layoffs that are currently occurring at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
(Hint: the treatment is oftentimes not very good.)
As I mentioned years ago on this blog, during graduate school I had no idea about how widespread the labor problems in academia actually were. In my program, the cheap teaching labor came from graduate students; therefore, the "fulltime adjunct" problem was not as obvious to me as it was to folks in other disciplines. In addition, my graduate program was highly ranked and seemed to be able to hire an endless stream of new tenure-track faculty, year after year. Meanwhile, I watched graduates of my program go on to solid tenure-track positions or good postdocs every single year. From my perspective, then, things in academia appeared solid and stable.
It wasn't until I left academia in 2011 and started reading about the wider academic job market and the working conditions in colleges and universities other than my own that I realized that things were not as rosy as I had assumed. To my surprise, I discovered the existence of full-time adjuncts. To my greater surprise, I discovered the graduating Ph.D. students who just sort of "disappeared," never to be tracked by their graduate institutions unless they got a tenure-track job. To my even greater surprise, I discovered the existence of faculty (both tenured and non-tenure-track) who were laid off from their institutions without notice and often without cause.
In the past few years as I've continued to read these stories and as my blog gained an audience, I've found that negative stories about academic labor just keep on coming. So even as my personal story about academia has come to an end, I want to use this blog to keep the conversation going about academia's working conditions.
So here we go...a few stories about academic labor justice to start off your week. One relates to general patterns of faculty and staff hiring, and the other to a series of worrisome faculty layoffs that are currently occurring at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
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