Disqus - Friends of axehandle

Re: Educational technologists defend online education

Adam — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 12:08:55 -0000

What's the only real, actual, paid job one can do completely online? Well, that'd be online college instructor.
When the Wall St hedge fund managers and bankers don't have to live near lower Manhattan...
When the politicians don't have to meet in person in Washington, DC...
When the sports stars don't have to be physically present to compete...
When the gravediggers can make the holes six feet deep from afar...
When we are like God in the sky influencing events omnipotently...
Only then will I truly believe that online education is face-to-face interaction's equal.

Re: Panel defends athletes, says ncaa reforms not good enough

Adam — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 09:46:09 -0000

The NCAA functions like a cartel or a corrupt TV evangelist church, protecting their interest on specious legal grounds. Their lifeblood is the massive hypocrisy of their claim that the athletes do not work, when they work a lot, and do dangerous work, and get no say regarding their working conditions or compensation. Without the athletes, the athletic directors and coaches would not make millions of dollars. Taylor Branch's 14,000-word article in _The Atlantic_ is an excellent source: http://www.theatlantic.com/....

Re: Essay: Gillen on students' experiences in college

Adam — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 14:11:33 -0000

Andrew, one of the ideas of this essay is that the costs have risen for higher education. It's easy to decipher the cause of this: funding from government has dried up. What is it about the older generation for whom you speak that shifted the costs from the public (taxes) to the students (who now take on student loan mortgages)? How did this happen so rapidly? As a young adjunct, I bemoan this change (I teach college but do not have employer-supported health insurance nor a living wage), but I'm honestly interested in how the Baby Boomer generation made this radical shift in our country's social contract happen so rapidly.

Re: Leadership Crises Ahead

Adam — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:40:28 -0000

I thought this was the money quote from the Chronicle article: "I asked my visitor why there are so few presidents in their 40s and 50s. 'The older baby boomers don’t want to give it up,' the president said." Thanks to Dean Dad (even if he's anonymous) for connecting the dots between the Boomer generation, income inequality, adjunctification, the externalization of costs. As for the administrators of recent history, they've built the reputation of academic administrators to a level barely above Congress.

Re: Friday Fragments

Adam — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:47:44 -0000

What's with the BOLDING of your writing here? Or is it that the size is bigger? Either way, annoying.

"A quick glance showed that a college I know has its rate for a 3 credit course understated by about 40 percent, so I strongly encourage the NFM to do some serious fact-checking."

Dean Dad, you write under the cover of anonymity, and call others unreliable? It sounds much more believable that an administrator pulled a fast one on an adjunct and made a contract for under the standard rate. In fact, this is probably standard operating procedure for academic administrators.

Re: Division I Universities Plan Massive New Sports League

Adam — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:04:18 -0000

Division I college athletics should not have nonprofit status. If the realignment debate didn't prove that, then sending 18- to 22-year-old young men (not women, for they don't play in "revenue" sports) from Hawaii to Greenville, North Carolina, to play in a football or basketball game -- yes, for "
highest level of integrity and sportsmanship -- should.

Re: Studying the Plight of Full-Time Adjuncts

Adam — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 11:09:09 -0000

Adjuncts do best when treated like mushrooms: keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em s***.

Joking aside, the results of the study do not surprise me, but I don't see things changing. Despite miserable working conditions, pay, and (zero) benefits, 'tis better to work as an adjunct than at Wal-Mart or the other job "opportunities" our postindustrial economy offers.

Re: Not My Type

Adam — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:59:11 -0000

Re: the odious Word default settings: Make a file with your preferred settings and save the file on your desktop, and call it "Doc1." Instead of opening Word, open that file.

Re: Class Dismissed

Adam — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:00:54 -0000

In the process of globalization, there will be winners and losers. Romney seems to personify the "get yours or starve" vision and Obama the "let us gradually accede to the new order while maintaining a semblance of quality of life." Globalization has clipped a handful of Boomers near retirement, but it's younger folks taking the brunt of it. It's a realignment.

On a personal level, I am a bit envious of those who came of age when college was heavily subsidized and an upper-level degree was a ticket to a career, but times change, and Rush Limbaugh just told me how "corporations are people" (a notion defended by moneyed politicians on both the Left and Right) and we can't really go back in time.

To start one's career in a time of retrenchment instead of growth is tragic; statistical analyses show that the mere luck of graduating in a bull market instead of a bear market can help determine lifetime income by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Dean Dad has written that had the for-profit sector not been in a growth phase when his career got going, it's unlikely he would have had risen to administrator posts. Adjuncts are cheap, and all the administrators are male and over age 50, and the tenured professors never retire. What can we expect?It's too late: the colleges are already getting blamed for the lack of jobs for new graduates (see "The Imperiled Promise of College" by Frank Bruni, NY Times 29 April 2012). I have this to say: the political order offered us by the Baby Boomer generation holds a special standing -- one of ignominy: for the first time in American history, they offer young people a lower standard of living than they enjoyed.

Re: Revenge of the Underpaid Professors

Adam — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:54:43 -0000

After reading Tom Friedman publish a similar online education cheerleading piece in the New York Times, I am frankly shocked that the Chronicle offered the title "Revenge of the Underpaid Professors" for this article. Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that with all of this technological "innovation," Kevin Carey and the people whom he represents will end up making the money and the instructors will end up getting screwed? The people at Udemy, the online for-profits, and the Gates Foundation and the whole lot are doing nothing new: trying new ways to get rid of the teachers and their salaries and health insurance. Regarding health insurance, they've found a solution: adjunctification.

"Online" education hasn't entered a new era, and why the cheerleading has been spiking lately I have no idea (other than big companies can smell some sort of bounty), but Carey's argument is ridiculous on its face: "Today the cost of storing, processing, and moving digital information is indistinguishable from zero. People walk around with networked supercomputers in their pockets. Broadband is everywhere, or getting there soon." If education was as simple as getting, storing, and receiving information, then a library would an education make.This is breathless ra-ra talk little different from the marketing for "correspondence courses" of yore, and surely the same argument was made when television came into wide use: Get rid of that darn teacher and turn on the oh-so-impressive supertechnology -- it's no suprise that Carey uses "super" as a prefix. Get rid of the colleges, too, he tells us. That sounds great, doesn't it! Take away the credentialization system, and it's a race to the bottom.

The fact is, real education means talented teachers adjusting to the changing needs of learners in a face-to-face setting. It's how people work. When the children of the wealthy stop going to the Ivies and the top land-grant universities for their credentials, let me know.

Re: US legacy in Afghanistan: What 11 years of war has accomplished

Adam — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 14:30:48 -0000

Typo at "everyday" -- should be "every day" -- "At the Ministry of Health, Bashir sees the effects of corruption everyday, and it costs lives."

Re: Competing with “Free,” Part Two

Adam — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 23:55:47 -0000

Can a student trained only in MOOCs perform well in a capstone project or senior seminar paper for bachelor's-level major in psychology, sociology, women's studies, English, accounting, engineering, architecture, chemistry, biology? Matter of fact, ANY major? Now, one step further in this argument: do you want your surgeon solely MOOC-trained? Your dentist? A journalist covering the 2012 campaign? Shall we have MOOC-only trained profs teaching the MOOC?

Granted, some students will be clueless in the traditional setting anyway, but our hypothetical MOOC-only student won't have a damn clue. A real professor won't have looked at her writing or responded to her ideas. Like it or not, Mr. Administrator, the active faculty role is inseparable from actual learning in the higher education setting.
Dean Dad's outright hostility to the unique value presented by the faculty shocks me. "Hey, you were a TA and I know you don't want to do *that* again, but here's what we're doing." Response: "Golly gee thanks Boss Administrator!" How about letting teachers teach?Does the average student at your community college *actually do* hours of sustained work on homework, outside readings, guided discovery, and so on? What was the last time you actually taught a course, start to finish, Dean Dad? My students show up willing to work, but to expect them to teach themselves basic content with hours of patient study is just a bridge too far. They have work, children, and chaotic home lives; they learn best face-to-face, in a dedicated space separate from all that.

Re: Brown And Warren Trade Fire: ‘I’m Not A Student In Your Classroom’

Adam — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 22:51:28 -0000

"But Brown persisted in casting doubt on Warren’s honesty, saying that she has failed a test of trustworthiness"
Where's the comma on this sentence?!

Re: Calling All Adjunct Heroes

Adam — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:16:46 -0000

I agree with T. Robert's points here about the economics of adjuncthood, but I am also in agreement with Mr. Warner about the need to shine a light on the issues. For my part, whenever I read of accomplished, bright academics struggling to make a living, it's motivation for me to move on from highway flying, as much as I like the vocation of teaching.

Re: Gentrification in Higher Education

Adam — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 11:19:45 -0000

Just wait until your institution starts accepting Chinese students en masse; administrators love them because they pay with cold hard cash (no Dept. of Ed. loans), and you'll love the way they cut and paste from the internet because their culture tells them to avoid original thinking.

Re: The Teaching Track? Really?

Adam — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:27:48 -0000

My reaction to the post and the comments here is this: Is this *really* how much power faculty have ceded to the administrators, where a few of us thank the stars because we have just-above-decent compensation, benefits, and working conditions, and the rest of of wail and moan? The faculty *are* the university, and the administrators are ancillary. As in the finance industry, the bad effects of the tail wagging the dog will continue to shackle us.

Re: Administration as Academic Alternative

Adam — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:43:48 -0000

How do the young academics working as adjuncts become administrators?

How can I hope to get one of those jobs when I can't even get health insurance or anything beyond contingent status from my employer(s)? Shall I do what you did, Dean Dad, and work in the shady fly-by-night for-profit sector as an administrator? When I think of the MAs and PhDs who can't even make enough money to replace their battered early-1990s Honda Civics and so on, this whole discussion seems useless.

Re: Hi

Adam — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 16:51:36 -0000

Lots of positive comments here, but I'd rather Dean Dad had stayed anonymous, so that readers like me could fume and fulminate when he wrote yet another defense of at-will, part-time adjunct status for faculty. I doubt such gems will appear now. Anonymity allowed Mr. Reed's id to run free, kept his writing voice acerbic, and showed the step-by-step rationalizations that have effectively made college teaching in the "evergreen subjects" more like volunteering than a career.

Re: On the Humanity of #TvsZ

Adam — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 23:47:53 -0000

Excellent post; thanks for sharing the quotes. I liked this one: "What she means is that workers have become fungible and replaceable, and the idea of loyalty on the employers’ part has gone out the window. But at the same time, employees remain very committed." This describes perfectly what Dean Dad has called the "evergreen subjects" -- writing and math -- and how they've become more like volunteering than career.

A couple edits? "But there is little dignity is..." -- in?"What can’t we bring..." -- final sentence; should this be "why"?

Re: Friday Fragments

Adam — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:42:42 -0000

What a miserable job market -- one where the hiring managers are trying to push good candidates away. Any sort of decent career field is typified by the hiring managers *coming to the candidates* instead of what is happening at CSU. They're called "recruiters," and they look for people who do things which have value. Clearly, academia is reaching a point where the core product -- education -- is not seen as valuable by the people running institutions; the adjunctification nightmare is further proof.

Re: Office Hours in the Pool Hall

Adam — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:55:54 -0000

If someone like Mr. Soares works as an adjunct for a well-regarded institution, and meets with students in random spots around campus instead of an office, and can still put a positive spin on it, there is something elementally wrong with the direction of higher education. Trying to make a living off of adjuncting is hell, period.

Re: Why Scott Walker's focus on pushing graduates into specific majors is wrong (essay)

Adam — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:18:12 -0000

Also, Walker did not graduate from college.

Re: Pincers in Pittsburgh

Adam — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 10:43:55 -0000

Another "pincer" is that both higher education costs and health care suffer from Baumol's cost disease, which makes it very easy for politicians of both the left and the right to say, "When I went to college, it was so much cheaper, so we must be over-funding higher ed."

Re: Go Negative?

Adam — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 13:32:26 -0000

Out here in the proprietary higher ed hinterland, we're getting killed by the community colleges and their low tuition, as well as the Department of Education's increased scrutiny. As someone who believes in a true public good, a commonweal, I see these as good developments, and it means I no longer have composition courses with 35 students (and 35 research papers), but it threatens my adjunct-volunteer-pseudo-career, because nowadays the CCs hire PhDs, not MAs -- and they hire PhDs as adjuncts!

Re: Ungoogleable—who owns new words as they come into use?

Adam — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:04:26 -0000

Yet another "don't be evil" fail. Thanks Google.