What attack? Adjunct's in my field often have valuable industry experience and usually have a great attitude towards their students since they want to teach. People on this list are clearly on the Admin/Professor side of the world. I guess I now understand what it was like being around that professor denied tenure in Huntsville who went postal! My perspective is on the student side. In fact, when I was an undergrad at UofM, I often felt I got a better experience as a student working with TA's rather than tenured Profs. This was not always true and in fact, the best instructors were tenured Profs. However, the worst experiences I encountered were with tenured profs who I felt had their head's stuck up their asses. Many profs (at least at UofM) really don't want to teach and view having to teach as a form of punishment. I heard and read anecdotal evidence that an aspiring professor who is good at teaching and is loved by his/her students is likely to be denied tenure since the thinking appears to be that one cannot be a good instructor and researcher at the same time and since it is publish or perish, good instructors must perish. Undergrads usually have little or no contact with research projects; it's mainly grad students that are involved with research.
If a tenured track professor is hired mainly to do research, why should undergrads have to pay the cost of that research for the length of time said professor spends on research? It is an unfair accounting gimmick to allocate to the cost of instruction the time spent by a professor on research. The time spent on research should be paid for out of the research budget; not by undergrad tuition dollars. Note, I'm not saying more adjuncts and TA's should be used to replace tenure track profs; I'm saying the research the tenure track profs engage in should not be funded with undergraduate tuition dollars. State aid to universities should be earmarked for the intended purpose. If it is to help undergrads, it should help undergrads; if it is for research, it should be used for research.
I'm not jumping on the "let's give more public money to the universities" bandwagon because I see what the universities do with the money: the last people to get any benefit are the students who attend them. The best way we can help students is by keeping the cost of attending low (but not by ripping off the instructors and profs either.) Research should be conducted when it fully pays for itself otherwise the profs should either teach or find research jobs in private industry or government.
Note that I'm speaking about the public universities and I really don't care what the privates do. I'm appalled that public institutions like UofM are increasingly acting like the private ivy league schools; they exist to serve the public who created and own them, not the other way around. My gripe is that the undergrad experience that I got almost 30 years ago, from what I can tell is not much different from what undergrad students today are getting, yet tuition, room and board are far more expensive (about double) in real terms at UofM (and many other state schools.) The abuse the Regents and the administration at UofM have subjected the undergraduates to the last 30 years cannot mainly be explained by funding cuts from the state. Mary Sue Coleman would agree with most of the people on this list!
ChuckL
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2010 11:38 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Disappoint With #125
>I was mildly sympatetic to CL's positon until he came out with this
> attack on adjunct labor: his position is no diffe4ent from the possition
> of someone who argues for chepa farm labor to keep the prices of
> vegetable sdown. His arguments are not just wrong, they are vicious.
>
> Carrol
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