Tag Archives: academia

The Adjunct Summit: An Update and Postponement

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With the start (or imminent start) of the academic year, adjuncting is back in the news. Here’s a piece from Hyperallergic. From Toward Freedom. From The New Yorker (going back to May). A CFP and other materials from SEIU Faculty Forward. From Counterpunch. From Bleeding Heart Libertarians.*

Readers may remember the discussion about adjuncting that took place here this past spring, and my floating the idea of an “adjunct summit” at Felician under the auspices of the College’s Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough funding to hold a full-fledged adjunct summit this fall. The $3,000 we get has to cover two other events, namely, our fall symposium–which is on an unrelated topic–and our spring conference. That amount covers expenses for two events, but not three, and those two events were planned before I came up with the idea of the adjunct summit.

But there’s wiggle room here (there has to be, with our budget): what I’m thinking of doing is to have a special session at our spring conference dedicated to the ethics, economics, and politics of adjuncting. The spring conference is to take place at Felician’s Rutherford campus, on Saturday, April 23, 2016. I’ll announce details as I work through them. If that session goes well, perhaps we can hold a full-fledged “adjunct summit” as a follow-up in the fall of 2016. (Here, by the way, is the program for the 2015 FIEPA conference.)

Anyway, stay tuned.

——————————————

*I can’t resist responding to one of the comments at the BHL discussion. Recall that as per Matt Zwolinski’s request in the April 2015 adjunct debate, I’m not supposed to comment there.

A commenter, apparently agreeing with Jason Brennan’s take on the issue, sarcastically comments: “First world problems.” Actually, the adjunct issue is not just a first world problem. Having spent the summer teaching in the West Bank, and having visited universities in Pakistan, I can say from first-hand experience that universities in the “Third World” face some of the same problems we face, including the problem of compensation for contingent faculty. In one form or another, it’s a worldwide problem.

It’s worth adding that even a first world problem is a fortiori a problem, and a problem is a state of affairs that demands a resolution. It’s not clear to me what meaningful claim is made when a manifestly first world person derides a problem as merely “first world,” except to suggest that real problems only exist in the Third World. Newsflash: they don’t.

Obligatory End-of-the-Semester Idiocy

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Last semester, it was Taylor Swift. This semester, it’s Scary Psycho Telekinetic Girl.

Honestly, by the end of the semester, I feel like the protagonist of this video and wouldn’t mind having her powers to use on my classes.

The reactions of the customers in the video are classic. I’m inclined to think that you can infer (or at least hypothesize) quite a lot about the nature of their reactions just from the looks on their faces.

The initial reactions are surprise and shock.

The second set of reactions is a warring mixture of fear and curiosity: “get me out of here,” with a bit of “but I’ve got to stay and see this.”

The woman at 1:33 has a look on her face that looks to me like a cross between disbelief and schadenfreude.

Around 1:44, when Telekinetic Girl pushes the chairs away from her (after discovering or re-discovering her newfound telekinetic powers), people start to panic and flee. My favorites are the ones around 1:47. One woman exclaims, “Oh my God, holy fucking shit!” but the emotion she exhibits is a bizarre (but totally understandable and familiar) mixture of panic and amusement. The woman pictured just after her is obviously frightened out of her mind, but insists on whipping out her phone to take a picture of the scene. These bizarre emotional combinations wouldn’t even seem possible if we didn’t see them exemplified right there on video.

Watching these conflicted people, I couldn’t help thinking of a passage in Plato’s Republic describing Leontius’s struggle with a similar-and-yet-differently alluring scene:

For a time he struggled with himself and covered his face, but finally, overpowered by his appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed toward the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, your evil wretches, take  your fill of the beautiful sight!” (Republic, 439c-440a)

Leontius is drawn to the scene because he’s sexually aroused by what he sees–yet knows he shouldn’t be. He knows that the sight of the corpses will trigger the arousal, and therefore both wants to, and doesn’t want to, trigger them. So he dissociates by blaming the desire on his eyes, as though his eyes were agents of their own.

The people in the cafe are drawn to the scene out of a sheer (Aristotelian) desire to understand the scene unfolding before them. I think it’s clear that they can’t take the scene at face value, but also can’t (in the moment) rule out the face value reading. At one level, common sense tells them that they cannot be witnessing a real-life version of a Stephen King film. But fear of the unknown tells them–tells all New Yorkers–“if you see something, don’t say anything; just run away.”

The woman at 1:52 has a facial expression that says: “At this point, I honestly don’t want to untangle what’s going on here; my curiosity is far less important to me than my safety, so I’m getting the hell out of here. Whatever has happened here is so not my problem!”

The scream at the end is totally gratuitous, but exactly how I feel after I get final papers at the end of the term (and start to grade them).

It’s a terrible confession to make, but I really wish I could enact this scene in my classes.

Postscript, May 17, 2015: I don’t know if he’s in on the joke or not, but at 2:00 there’s a guy toward the back of the cafe (white T shirt) who briefly looks up at the commotion, then goes back to his conversation as though the whole thing were an everyday occurrence. Another amusing reaction is the construction worker who stands frightened but transfixed, as though he were on the job and not allowed to leave.

Adjuncting: Conversations Worth Having, and Not

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BHL Moderator on Jason Brennan and blog policy:

Jason Brennan deleted Robert’s comments and banned them on his own. Per blog policy, he has the right to delete

Jason Brennan on BHL and blog policy:

There’s no official BHL policy.

Annotation by Matt Zwolinski, responding to a query of mine on blog policy:

How you leap from “I…think it is a good idea to publicly indicate when you have [revised a post]” to the conclusion that I approve of secretly deleting threads “simply so as to make the commenter look stupid while preserving the blogger’s illusion of infallibility” is beyond me.

Baffling, isn’t it? How could anyone “leap” to that crazy conclusion? The Moderator of a prominent blog is asked pointblank whether he approves of one of his bloggers’ deleting whole threads in the name of “revision.” He goes out of his way not to answer the question asked, but makes clear in what he says that it is permissible to delete whole threads so as to preserve the blogger’s illusion of infallibility. When he (or his blog) then comes out and ratifies the permissibility of thread-deletion via a “policy” that no one had ever heard of until he announced it, what are we to make of his previous bafflement at the very suggestion that such a policy might come into existence? Was it really a “leap,” or was it an inference to a conclusion that was obvious to anyone who’d bothered to connect a few dots–and that has now been made explicit by the very people who dismissed it as the ravings of an inconsequential troll?

Reading BHL on the adjunct controversy, I have trouble believing that I’m reading something written by reputable professional philosophers for public consumption. Could the profession be more thoroughly dragged into the mud than by an approach to discourse in which people start the conversation by insulting one another, change whatever claims they’ve made whenever they want, delete whole threads (and whole posts) whenever they want, and ban people in the middle of the conversation for any reason or none? How could anyone expect to be taken seriously on moral grounds after a performance like that?*

Not that the pro-adjunct side of the debate (especially the Twitter-based faction) has been all that elevated, either. Whoever had the brilliant idea of attacking Brennan-smiling-by-the-edge-of-a-lake etc etc. didn’t exactly do adjuncts any favors. What they managed to do instead was to divert attention away from the issues adjuncts actually face, and create the red herring of a class war/pissing contest between a guy who thinks that six months at GEICO gives him permanent credentials as a member of the proletariat, and people who think that a guy standing by a lake can be treated like a character out of a play by Brecht. But that’s the conversation we now have–along with the puerile tweeting about Brennan and Magness’s race, their facial characteristics, and their Mommy issues; the taunting of adjuncts as “losers,” the bad faith career advice, and the “barefoot-in-the-snow” Horatio Alger stories, etc. You’d think that educated people could do better than this.

Obviously, I’m not characterizing every contributor to the debate. But in many cases, the shoe fits.

I’ve been thinking of holding an event at Felician this coming fall on the adjunct issue, called something like “Adjuncting: Ethics, Politics, Economics.” I’m thinking it’ll be a panel discussion of some kind involving adjuncts, full timers, and maybe even some administrators (maybe), airing out issues of mutual concern. I’d like to think that we can discuss some of these issues in a more constructive way than we’ve so far seen. If an event like that is of interest to readers, and you’re in the New York/New Jersey area (or can get there) this fall, feel free to indicate your interest in the combox. If there is interest, I’ll look into the logistics of creating the event. No promises, but I think it’s a conversation worth having, and an event worth doing.

*All quotations current as of May 6, 2015 at 4:19 pm EST. But we’re talking BHL, so don’t expect to read the same post or thread twice.

Postscript, September 28, 2015: Here’s another illustration, from BHL, of the increasingly ludicrous contortions entailed by what for lack of a better term might be called its “editorial policies.” It’s from a post by Steve Horwitz, criticizing a post elsewhere by Sharon Presley. The original version of Presley’s post had cited Horwitz in a way that Horwitz evidently didn’t agree with. Horwitz complained out loud at BHL, prompting Presley to delete the offending sentence. Horwitz responds as follows:

[UPDATE:  Sharon has now edited her post to remove the reference to me and my work without providing any sort of explanatory note that an edit has been made. This is very bad academic and blogospheric manners.]

Yes, very bad.

Later, we get this explanation of one of Horwitz’s claims in the post:

[The first paragraph has been edited for clarity to indicate that Sharon’s piece is critical of EP and inappropriately enlists my work in her cause.]

Right, but that was what Presley was saying back in the day. So maybe the first paragraph should be re-edited for clarity to indicate that Presley’s piece doesn’t mention Horwitz at all. Got that? I’m just waiting for Matt Zwolinski to clarify everything by shrugging his shoulders and saying that he doesn’t see the problem.

Horwitz seems to have missed the fact that the very “bad academic and blogospheric manners” he criticizes here are par for the course at BHL, and have been for years–a fact alluded to four days ago in the BHL combox, but so far unacknowledged by him. At the end of the day, listening to BHL lectures on “bad manners” is like listening to a Donald Trump lecture on hairstyling. The difference is that Donald Trump has the sense to avoid the offending subject. They don’t.

Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness: A Request for Disclosure

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Considering the number of times Jason Brennan has alluded, in the context of public discussion, to his once having worked at GEICO, I think it’s only fair that he disclose the following for public consumption:

  1. When did he work at GEICO, and at what location?
  2. What was his title while working there?
  3. What was his salary?
  4. Did he work there through a temp agency, or was he hired directly by GEICO itself?

If the GEICO job is important enough to bring up that many times, it’s worth clarifying the details by way of answers to the preceding questions.

A similar query is in order for Phillip Magness, who’s also been very autobiographically assertive on the subject. The article linked-to in the preceding sentence alludes to 1.5 years spent as a full-time adjunct (I’m presuming that “1.5 years” refers to the period 2008-2010, corresponding to the position of Lecturer at American University on his CV), then invites us to do some “arithmetic” about the income he claims to have earned during that period, and how he managed to live on it while being otherwise productive.

That’s fine, but Magness’s CV indicates that he received three grants during roughly the same period (2007, 2009, 2011). I regard the 2007 and 2011 grants as potentially relevant even though they strictly speaking fall outside of the 2008-2010 period. To be blunt, a year and a half of adjunct work cushioned by three grants is not quite as impressive as the impression one might get by reading the unadorned version of Magness’s apologia pro vita sua.

Three questions for Magness, then:

  1. What was the cumulative monetary value of those three grants?
  2. Does his CV exhaustively list all of his income sources for the relevant years (meaning 2007-2011)?
  3. Did he, during those years (2007-2011), live in a household with someone earning an additional income?

All three questions strike me as relevant to evaluating the story Magness tells.

One problem with both sides in the adjunct debate is that the most assertive people in it seem more interested in parading selective recountings of their valor or misfortunes than in documenting their claims in a way that demonstrates the credibility of what they’re saying to neutral or skeptical readers. If people are going to start going autobiographical in the Great Adjunct Debate–whether they’re adjuncts recounting their minimum-wage woes, or academic stars recounting their Horatio Alger stories–I think they owe us fuller disclosures than any of them have been making about the stories they tell us. Brennan and Magness clearly think of themselves as exemplars for the rest of the profession. How about exemplifying some disclosure about those stories you’ve been telling?

Postscript, 11 pm: I’m satisfied with Brennan’s answer, but on second thought, I have to say I’m not just puzzled but mystified by the autobiographical claims Magness has made in his increasingly-famous essay, “The Myth of the Minimum Wage Adjunct.”

As someone who spent the last ~1.5 years of grad school as a so-called “full time adjunct,” constituting my only real source of income at the time, I can state first hand that it will not make you wealthy.

So he was an adjunct for 1.5 years, during which time adjuncting was his “only real source of income.” I take it that the word “real” implies that there was some other, secondary source of income. I’m curious what it was.

Later he tells us,

I can also speak to this first hand as it is something I learned to do quickly during my own period as a full-time adjunct ca. 2008-2009. I was not anything close to well off during this period of my career, but with a little basic time management I not only met my teaching obligations but I (1) finished a dissertation, (2) wrote several peer reviewed articles, (3) composed a substantial part of an academic press monograph, and (4) found more permanent employment.

The problem is, his CV lists a Doctoral Research Grant from George Mason University for the year 2009. I can see how the grant might not literally have overlapped with the adjuncting: if he started adjuncting in January 2008, and continued through fall 2008 and then spring 2009, that would be 1.5 years of adjuncting; he could then have gotten the research grant for the latter half of 2009. But I’m speculating. I think we’re entitled to hear the explanation directly from him.

Literal overlap or not, he cannot, on this basis, claim to “speak to this first hand,” where “this” refers to the experience of the average full-time long-term adjunct–which is what the discussion at BHL was about. One and a half years of adjuncting sandwiched between two grants, along with some undisclosed secondary income source, is not long term adjuncting in any sense relevant to the ongoing controversy. And we don’t even know what he did during the summer of 2008, when he was a “so-called ‘full time adjunct’.” According to Magness, adjuncts don’t teach during the summer months (point 5 of his enumerated points), from which it seems to follow that he didn’t. So did he simply go without income during the summer, or is that when the non-real income source kicked in? If so, what was the source? The answer surely has some bearing on the relationship between his personal experiences and the predicament of the long-term adjunct.

Whatever the answers, we’re left with a mystery in Magness’s account that’s worth clearing up. He wants us to believe that he knows what it’s like to be a long-term adjunct, but the story he’s telling is consistent with saying this:

I was a so-called full time adjunct during 2008-9. Of course, I got a grant in 2007, then one in 2009, and I wasn’t an adjunct during the summer of 2008. During the summer, I got a real job–a real job, albeit with an unreal income. Meanwhile, I had established a relationship with the Institute for Humane Studies, which eventually gave me an administrative job as Academic Program Director, a job I cheerfully hold while suggesting all over Twitter that the university’s problems could be solved if only we eliminated all of those useless administrators on the payroll. I realize that very, very, very few long-term adjuncts could get such a job, precisely because it’s sui generis, and I am now the person who holds it. And yet, I won’t hesitate to lecture long-term adjuncts about what bad time managers they are.

Say it ain’t so, Phil.

Who Is St. Paul?

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Another gem from a lunchtime conversation with a colleague, this time from the professor of Religious Studies responsible for teaching “Introduction to the New Testament.” Her vote for Question of the Semester in that class, three-quarters of the way through the term:

So wait, I don’t get it. St. Paul’s teachings are based on…Jesus?

Did I mention that Felician College is a Catholic liberal arts institution that describes itself (yes, oxymoronically) as “The Franciscan College of New Jersey”?

Saint_Paul,_Rembrandt_van_Rijn_(and_Workshop?),_c._1657.jpg (3167×4000)

The Apostle Paul, reached for comment: “Why do they persecute me?”

Adjuncting at Al Quds

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I’m happy to report that I’ve just accepted an offer do some adjunct teaching this summer for the Philosophy Dept at Al Quds University in the West Bank town of Abu Dis (in Area B, under joint Palestinian-Israeli control). I’m a big fan of Al Quds, and of the Philosophy Dept there. This will be a return trip for me, and I’m very glad for the opportunity to go back.

Photo credit: “Mur abou dis”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mur_abou_dis.jpg#/media/File:Mur_abou_dis.jpg

I’ll be teaching a single section of political philosophy–Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx–to about fifteen Palestinian undergraduates. I’ll be teaching in English, the students will be reading in Arabic, and a translator will be there to translate our conversations to one another. I gave three lectures at Al Quds back in 2013 under a similar arrangement, and it was one of the most challenging-rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. Believe it or not, there’s already a literature on experiences of this sort, so I guess I’ll be taking my copy of Carlos Fraenkel’s Teaching Plato in Palestine for guidance, and comparing notes with him. (The last time I was in Palestine, I vividly remember thinking that Plato in particular seemed intensely relevant to the place.)

I’m looking forward to blogging this summer for PoT from Abu Dis and from the West Bank (and Israel) generally. I’m hoping to do some “political sightseeing” throughout the West Bank and Israel, and would be grateful for any questions PoT readers have about local conditions that help me frame the sightseeing and blogging I do.

By sheer coincidence, I’m also looking forward to connecting with a Felician student of mine, Hilwa Abdallah, whose family is from Ramallah and who will be there when I am. I understand that I’m invited to dinner, and I intend to eat without takallaf. How I manage to navigate Ramadan in the West Bank remains to be seen.

Thucida Who?

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Actual comment by a colleague of mine over lunch, not intended as humor:

I firmly believe that every citizen of this country should read Thucydides.

Frankly, I’d regard it as a major accomplishment if I could get 100% of my own students to pronounce “Thucydides.”

I don’t think my colleague has heard of Bryan Caplan. Honestly, I was afraid to ask.

Ninth Annual Felician Ethics Conference: Saturday, April 25

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Strictly speaking, it’s the Ninth Annual Conference of the Felician Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs. It’s taking place this coming Saturday, essentially all day (9 am – 6 pm), at Felician’s Rutherford, New Jersey campus (223 Montross Ave, Rutherford, NJ, 07070). Fairly easy access from New York City: take the 190 bus from Port Authority (bound for Paterson), and stop at Montross and Union Avenues in Rutherford; turn left onto Montross and walk about a quarter of a mile to campus.

I’m gradually getting permission from participants to post their papers on the Institute’s website. So far, five eight of them are up, and I’m hoping to put more up soon. I’m chairing/commenting on sessions on meta-ethics, evil and harm, and virtue ethics. Besides the ones I’m chairing, there are sessions on distributive justice, bioethics, meta-ethics, well-being, a session on economic issues (Rawlsian and BHL-oriented), and historical papers on Seneca, Sidgwick, Proust, and Kierkegaard.

The plenary is a defense of markets in political votes, by James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey. If you’re in the area and in the mood for some ethics, consider stopping by; at least one PoT-head besides me, Michael Young, will be there. Registration is $10 for graduate students, $20 for everyone else. A bunch of us (so far five six  seven of us) will be going out to dinner after the conference; if you’re interested in coming along, please contact me via the email listed on the website (via the link in the preceding paragraph). (PS, April 23: The reservations have been made.)

I’ve been organizing this conference since 2009, and every time I do it, I’m struck again by how many talented philosophers there are out there, and how much sophisticated philosophy they’re generating. It’s a lot of work to organize a conference, but it’s been a privilege to work with the philosophers who attend the conference; that by itself has made it all worthwhile.

Query: Letters of Recommendation for Grad School

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In blog talk, this entry qualifies as a “bleg,” but since I hate that term, I’m calling it a “query.”

Students sometimes contact me with questions about academic life on the mostly false premise that I know all about how it works, and how to negotiate the various shoals it presents. I do the best I can, but I always doubt the value of the answers I give, and could use a reality check on this one.

I recently got a query from someone interested in going to graduate school in anthropology. He majored in anthropology during his undergraduate years, and graduated from college a few years ago (two years ago, I think). He’s now looking to apply to graduate school, but faces the familiar problem of going back and asking for letters of recommendation from professors who may or may not remember him. He went to a large public R1 university where there was little one-on-one contact between professors and undergraduates.

Here’s a paraphrased version of his question:

Should I ask for letters of recommendation from professors who may or may not remember me (probably don’t remember me), or should I ask for letters from the graduate students and post-docs who taught the discussion sections for the lectures I attended? I’ve kept in touch with the latter bunch, so they have a better idea of who I am, what I can do, and my general fitness for graduate school. I’m just not sure it makes sense to ask for letters from people who don’t have tenure-track positions.

I told him that the ideal thing to do would be to find the sub-set of people who were then graduate students or post-docs but now have tenure-track/full-time positions, and ask for letters of recommendation from them.

Supposing that no one fits that description, however, he should go back to the professors he had rather than to people who are currently grad students or post-docs. My assumption is that admissions committees won’t take letters from the latter group very seriously. I don’t actually know that that’s the case, however, and seem to remember writing a few letters of recommendation when I was an adjunct without a PhD (not that I know how well they worked). Hence the query. (Incidentally, I think the relevant issue is not whether the faculty member has a tenure-track position, but whether he or she has a full-time position, regardless of its tenure-stream status.)

I understand the precariousness of this student’s predicament, however. How do you go back to professors who don’t remember you and ask for a letter of recommendation? What would they say in the letter about you, and on what basis? (“He was one of the many students to whom I lectured in the past few years. Frankly, he’s a blur to me–but an academically promising blur.”) Could you expect letters of that nature to be any good?

I came up with the following suggestion: Suppose that none of your old TA’s currently have tenure-track (or full-time) academic positions. Go back to them and ask for letters of recommendation from them, but have their letters co-signed (or even just signed) by the professor they taught for. That is, as far as I know, a somewhat unorthodox arrangement, but I don’t see anything wrong with it, and it seems to me to make the best of an otherwise awkward situation.

I’m curious what readers think.