[lbo-talk] Disappoint With #125

[Alan Rudy]

Ignorant fink without any sense of solidarity, huh?.... Somehow I think
Carrol and others have come to see Chuck as supporting the use of adjuncts.
Despite the fact that Chuck argued that sometimes adjuncts teach better than
tenured faculty, I don't think he's arguing that adjuncts etc. are
preferable or that they aren't super-exploited.  My reading of his argument
- and I try to read folks sympathetically given that they are contributors
to LBO-talk - is that it is the rise of research faculty lines intended to
garner massive NSF grants and/or university-industry collaborations and NOT
teach much (and therefore almost never get any good at it) that he sees
behind the expansion of the use of highly exploited and contingent adjuncts
and the misallocation of university resources (even if he under-emphasizes
many other contributing factors.)

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 2:29 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Far too many faculty, of course, have the same ignorant view of
> university reality that Chuck Loucks has. I remember hearing faculty in
> the elevator identifying higher pay with higher tuition -- the facts are
> the opposite. The route to higher pay for faculty and lower tuition for
> students is the same as in any sector of the working class: solidarity,
> which means identifying rather than opposign faculty-student interests.
> CL is simply a fink for capital.
>
> Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> >
> > I'm trying to figure out exactly what this means. Speaking as faculty
> > (non-tenure-track at the moment, for the record), I see myself as
> precisely
> > not admin, and, on the other hand, as entirely pro-student . . . at least
> > when it comes to students learning something.
> >
> > And I'll tell you another thing for sure: administration does *not* see
> > faculty as administration . . . faculty are simply the enemy: we cost
> money,
> > and we engage students mainly where they least like to be engaged --
> namely,
> > in classrooms. Also, we surely get more students complaining about what
> they
> > don't like about faculty than about anything else at the school, with the
> > possible exception of food services, which are universally loathed pretty
> > much at every school I've ever been associated with (whether as student
> or
> > as faculty).
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Chuck Loucks <lbo at hvgreens.org> wrote:
> >
> > >  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.
> > >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319