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compensated you see the students doing this work are getting paid with course credit the financial magic of this arrangement in which faculty wave a curricular wand want to convert graduation requirements into research effort is deeply embedded among our accepted traditions it s the way the world works students and faculty just acknowledge that this is the way things have been and the way they are continue reading this entry was tagged academic credit equity fairness labor research student pay date 15 march 2023 author terry mcglynn recommended reads 206 standard the loss of bodily autonomy is making prospective college students rethink where they ll go off to college the great forgetting on the teaching tenure track about positions in some university systems that have full time positions with security of employment that are focused on teaching continue reading date 10 february 2023 author terry mcglynn good bad and worst dates for academic conferences standard looking at social media today i have developed an unambiguous case of fomo because i m not at the sicb conference in austin but did i even give any thought to attending this meeting heck no a meeting during the january break count me out have i ever been to one of these meetings nope this time is just too valuable for personal time and or research for me granted there is never a good time to hold an academic conference we are busy people which is not inherently a bad thing and taking time away from family work and basically all other commitments to go to some distant place all for the pleasure involved in listening learning and connecting with with science friends and colleagues is quite a luxury finding that window of time when everybody is most available is impossible once an organization picks an annual time frame for that meeting then people who are regulars at this meeting plan their calendars around them continue reading date 04 january 2023 author terry mcglynn the slac job market and disappearing jobs standard just in case you thought blogging was dead i read an interesting blog post that i want to share with you and comment on it in my blog this post was about disappearing faculty positions at small liberal arts colleges slacs on a blog for early career philosophers it points out enrollment declines in slacs and a notably substantial drop in the number of new tenure track positions being offered at these institutions the comments section in that post are quite illuminating and it communicates the precarity of being a tenure track or tenured professor in an institution that may have trouble with enrollment and keeping the lights on continue reading date 07 december 2022 author terry mcglynn the adjunct hiring process is ridiculous standard once in a while i get an email that sounds like this hi everybody i know who is driving distance from campus we re looking to hire an adjunct to teach something for us before the semester starts in a few weeks ideally this person has a phd related to this topic and some teaching experience but if you know of a grad student who is looking to gain experience teaching a course of record and would appreciate a few thousand bucks for a ton of work please send them to us sincerely an overburdened departmental chair meanwhile let s contrast this with the emails i get for tenure track faculty positions hi everybody in the entire galaxy our department has opened up a tenure track search in the area of specialization please encourage everybody to apply because we want a really deep pool that way we can pick the candidate who has the most publications in the most impressive journals has the biggest chance of bringing in big grants and we need a large pool to convince hr that we are following their lightweight compliance process for equitable searches the search will take several months and the position starts about one year from now we anticipate spending a good amount of money on startup there will be reassigned time from teaching for this person to launch well and we work hard to support this person to make sure they earn tenure we re a great place to work so send us your best sincerely an overburdened departmental chair i think we all appreciate the factors at play in our system that result in this dynamic when we hire non tenure track positions the process is slapdash whereas tenure track searches are whatever the opposite of slapdash is i think it s worth thinking about hat this slapdash hiring of non tenure track ntt faculty means for communities adjuncts are hired with little to no vetting because departments looking to hire these instructors are often in great need considering the workload and compensation associated with these semester long gigs when you find someone who is willing to take on a section then many folks are positioned to be too picky as far as i know at most universities the hr process for ntt faculty is wafer thin because it appears to be very common at some places for adjuncts to be hired literally moments before a class starts or maybe during the first week of classes i think in many departments chairs are tasked with not only creating a schedule but also hiring all of the people to teach those courses there s no hiring committee the search process is whatever the chair decides it to be if there s anything in the process designed to create a fair and equitable outcome then in every department that i m familiar with that s entirely at the discretion of the chair who has to fill those slots but this usually is little or nothing because there are a lot of slots to fill and this search process is probably about 1 of the workload of the person who is responsible for filing these posts i have not yet been in this position but i can t imagine fitting in a full and proper search for every ntt position that needs to be filled in the midst of all of the other job duties i think due diligence often consists of a phone call or two to check references to make sure that they re not horrible and maybe that s as good as it gets i once knew a department chair who joked not joked on occasion that hiring ntt faculty is just like hiring day laborers at the home depot parking lot but that the pay and working conditions for the day laborer construction jobs was better is this a problem yes it is what kind of problems does this cause first of all does the absolute lack of any kind of fair hiring process for ntt instructors mean that you might be increasing the fraction of bad teachers i don t think so i think you re just as and perhaps more likely to bring bad teachers on board when you have a huge process of hiring a professor into a permanent position most of contingent faculty that i interact with are passionate about teaching and put a ton of effort and concern into their course are ntt faculty phoning it in i would say that s a bigger problem with tenured faculty at least ntt faculty know that they re being paid albeit poorly to teach whereas tenured faculty might be under the impression that teaching is not necessarily the most important part of our jobs and behave accordingly while some ntt faculty are duds let s be honest here and recognize that there may well be a higher fraction of duds among the tenure track and tenured professoriate even if you wanted to argue that the lack of a formal process results in more faculty who aren t good at teaching i don t think that s the biggest problem we have so then what s my problem with the process if it doesn t result in the hiring of bad teachers gosh it s hard to know know where to start while our institutions are exploiting ntt labor to some extent and that extent varies greatly among institutions we still are hiring for professional positions and there should be a transparent and equitable process think about all of the time and trouble that gets involved into hiring undergraduates for reu positions big applicants statements letters of reference a committee all for a position that pays a few thousand dollars over the summer and then ends the amount of money for ntt positions is not smaller and all of those concerns about equity justice and representation matter if the opportunity to become an instructor of record is one of the major stepping stones to becoming a professor and in many places it is then how come the process providing access to such an opportunity is so darn inequitable i don t know about your university but at mine there is a sizable community of ntt faculty who are very important on our campus not only do they do so much teaching they contribute in a lot of other ways even if their employment contracts do not expect such a a contribution they serve on our academic senate and help make big decisions about the institution they help run our student research conference and are advisors to student clubs and so much more not all ntt instructors have this level of engagement but it s been several times where i ve worked with someone for months only to discover that they re not tenure track and that they re doing this stuff even though they don t have to but only because they want to there are many folks who are making a career out of this role the people who evolve into this position come at it sideways usually by getting hired by a departmental chair in a slapdash manner and then they stick with it over the years i think it s a problem that we have parallel professional pathways for university faculty with one pathway getting more support scrutiny and respect it s been a while since i ve written about how tenure track faculty are essentially parasites of non tenure track faculty but that situation still is exploitative even if our universities have been working in earnest to professionalize what it means to be ntt faculty perhaps one of the reasons that faculty and other people in universities aren t investing enough into ntt faculty is that there s such little care or concern invested when we recruit people into these roles everybody deserves respect and professional support and perhaps we might begin this process as we should proceed by putting thought and concern into who gets hired i honestly don t know how to operationalize this idea of conducting a transparent and equitable process for hiring adjunct faculty and if i were in the position where i was expected to do this i would be asking with what kind of support because we only are creating the academic calendar a few months in advance of when these job opportunities arise and sometimes because funding is short we can t float sections we want to and sometimes because of demand some get added at the last minute the hr and faculty affairs offices wouldn t have the staff to handle this and are we asking people to sit on more committees what does this look like it sounds like a disaster but what we have right now is a disaster of a different kind that we ve just grown to live with i don t know what to do with it and the lack of professional support for ntt faculty is a downright epidemic and the slapdash hiring procedures is just one small consequence of a much bigger problem final note this post isn t about anything specific going on at my institution or at any other institution it was triggered by one of those emails that i got this morning but those emails are a steady trickle near as we prepare for a new semester it s not about you it s not about me except for the fact that it is about everybody and you and me are part of everybody a short note on nomenclature adjunct can mean a lot of different things what are the differences among contingent faculty adjunct faculty lecturer non tenure track instructor and other terms of art there are a lot of subtle differences and some of these differences vary depending on the institutional context for example in the california state university system all faculty who are not tenure line faculty are lecturers that s the terminology built into the collective bargaining agreement contingent simply means that you re hired at will and don t have a long term contract this gets complex because some non tenure track faculty are more contingent than others depending on policies and guidelines for employment in your university for example in the csu the cba provides for entitlement for ntt faculty who have been on the job for a little while it s not exactly tenure and not a guarantee of future work but it s makes it harder to give those teaching assignments to anybody else adjunct can be interpreted as a label that a person isn t a part of the regular faculty but they re just a temporary add on so this term when applied to folks who are a well engaged with the campus isn t quite appropriate and can be othering date 28 november 2022 author terry mcglynn recommended reads 205 standard a couple more research articles showing how teaching valuations are sexist and the interaction effect with age is quite something if you re involved in teaching evaluations in any way this is important to know about book the guidebook for the engaged university do i really want to be a professor what a frog pandemic tells us about humans it s not too late to bid on items from joan didion s estate book women in field biology continue reading this entry was tagged recommended reads date 08 november 2022 author terry mcglynn on bureaucratic obstacles to field experiences for students standard if your university is like mine then you hear a lot about everybody is working hard to make sure that students have exposure to high impact educational practices we all want to make sure that while students are in college that they have the chance to have meaningful experiences for students in a bunch of science fields it s pretty clear that one of the most transformative and impactful educational practices in our toolkit is bringing students to places in nature for genuine field experiences yes it s possible to become an ecologist or a geologist without going into the field but i think everybody who is getting professional preparation at the undergraduate level in the field sciences should have ample opportunity to go out into the field with their courses and their instructors right but it seems a lot of our universities aren t on the same page they might think it s a good idea but there are also so many bureaucratic obstacles to taking students into the field that we re doing it less than we should be i know so many people who aren t taking students on field trips simply because their institution is making it too hard to make this happen continue reading date 07 november 2022 author terry mcglynn nsf s accountability for the waterman award standard usually we talk about accountability when people are getting it wrong and perhaps on the occasional moment when someone or some organization experiences appropriate negative consequences for their own actions that s only the first step accountability includes taking the steps to right the wrong to move forward doing the right things so i d just like to take a br...
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