Journalist – Historian – Speaker
The lucky winner of this job will be in an excellent position to opine on the Good Life. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida invites applications for the position of lecturer to teach the Humanities Common Course, IUF 1000: What is the Good Life?, to begin August 16, 2016. As …
Dear Adjunct, Part-Time, and/or Contingent Faculty, I’d like to know how you were hired. Was there a public call for positions or were you just contacted by someone in your network – a friend, a patron, a colleague, a mentor? You can let me know through comments here, on social media, or via email. I’m …
Today is National Adjunct Walkout Day. Around the country, adjuncts have organized walkouts and rallies and donation funds and many other efforts to bring people together and insist on fair wages. And they are right to do so. As a tenured faculty member, I stand fully in support with this movement, I see their movement …
For the next few days, Community Colleges will be in the news, thanks to the president’s proposal. #FreeCommunityCollege was the top trending hashtag in the U.S. yesterday. There are lots of news reports and surely hundreds of think pieces to come. My basic assessment is that it’s a good plan that if enacted, because it’s not a …
In Elle, Alissa Quart has a piece she calls The Hypereducated Poor. It explores the adjunct crisis by looking at the life of a Chicago-area professor, Brianne Bolin. She teaches composition. She has a son with cerebral palsy named Finn. I’ve met them both as we live in the suburb of Brookfield, though until this …
Yesterday I had a piece at Vitae on ending the conference interview and last week I had a blog post on the same topic, as a sort of prequel. Today, I offer a few fundamental premises. 1. The job market today is about adjuncts, not graduate students. A lot of my friends and colleagues and random …
On Chronicle Vitae, today, I will have a new essay about ending the conference interview. In it, I offer ways to make the shift into a positive rather than a surrender to austerity. Listen. The conference interview is, in fact, already dead. Video interview technology is getting better and better, funds are limited, and like …
It was a very good writing week for me. I pitched four columns, landed three, one of which came out immediately. I also wrote a first-draft treatment of a book (more on this later once it’s ready). Most fun, I did an interview and part of a call-in show with an Australian radio program! You …
There is power in a factory, power in the land Power in the hands of a worker But it all amounts to nothing if together we don’t stand There is power in a Union. Just in the last few weeks, the rhetoric of the adjunct crisis in American Higher Education has shifted, intensifying around the …
This is my first attempt to generalize some guidelines for talking about people with less power than yourself, especially when trying to highlight an injustice that you, to some extent, are responsible for perpetuating. Almost a year ago, I wrote a piece on how to talk about feminism if you’re a guy (especially a straight …