adjuncting

AAUP report confirms: ‘Adjunct Justice’ is a costly proposition

The American Association of University Professors just released its 2015-16 report on the Economic Status of the Profession. As with previous reports, the employment status and wages of adjuncts are a central theme. The report’s authors express alarm at what they allege to be the mass “adjunctification” of U.S. higher ed, even though their actual figures

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Do Adjuncts and Full Time Faculty have similar work loads?

Historically, adjunct faculty positions emerged as a part time job. The most common example of this practice was designed to allow working professionals to take on a class or two in a university setting. Students benefited from moonlighting instructors who were also practitioners with experience in relevant fields, or perhaps even faculty from different departments or

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Dear AAUP & Media: Non-Tenure Track does not equal Adjunct

One of the most pervasive and pernicious myths of the adjunct activist movement is the claim that somewhere in the neighborhood of 75% of current university faculty are adjuncts. This figure derives from the frequently hapless, though sometimes intentional, conflation of terminology. Yet another example of this happened today in the Christian Science Monitor, which cited

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Why are there so many adjuncts in English & Literature departments?

Though regulated and at times highly distorted, academic employment is fundamentally a creature of market forces. Full time academic employment has actually kept pace with student enrollment growth since at least 1970, contrary to a number of myths that are often carelessly repeated in the press and by adjunct activists. Full time jobs are not disappearing under any

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The Myth of the “Adjunctification” of Full-Time Faculty

The recent and ongoing debate about the state of the U.S. academic workforce is, unfortunately, dominated by a number of aggressively asserted myths that have little basis in empirical evidence. In previous posts, I have debunked a number of these recurring claims including the “myth of the minimum wage adjunct” and the “myth of the 76% adjunct

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