still exploitation.
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Post by still exploitation. on Apr 7, 2015 23:22:17 GMT -5
not an attempt to delegitimate at all. just pointing out that this doesn't seem like a good forum to create social change (though the adjunct project might be if that is this person's real goal). trying to vilify faculty at one institution won't accomplish much either. faculty are operating under constraints just like other people. seems to me like people are just upset that they didn't land a job this cycle and are displacing their anger on faculty at one particular institution. i guess everyone copes with distress in their own way. but i wouldn't go as far as referring to this position as "ruthless exploitation". they're paying almost double the going rate for adjuncts. not exactly a sweat shop.
Not petty or immature at all -- nice delegitimizing move, btw -- but frustrated and outraged, and rightfully so. Venting on a message board may contribute to greater awareness of the situation and in that way possibly help build up determination in people around the country to start becoming involved on the ground. Actually, now that you mentioned it, perhaps it would be quite useful to use this board for collecting information on particularly outrageous cases, such as this one, precisely in order to initiate, if not change (right away), at least discussion and awareness. They are paying $4700 per course, yeah, which is 1.5x the adjunct rate at my institution, but they are paying $10k less than my salary for two more courses and required summer teaching, which would not fly for an adjunct or a VAP at my university. It is less than the per course pay a regular faculty member would make as an overload or summer course. It is substandard pay and substandard working conditions. What sucks is that the market is bad from the perspective of the candidate that there will be folks willing to take this. The 'badness' of the market, of course, is a social construction of which we're all aware, so let's not dally on that point, but this is an awful job. Hopefully it has highly limited preps, so you're running a few sections of Intro and a few sections of some other basic gen ed type course, or just teaching 10 sections of Intro. Boring but at least making the workload manageable.
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Post by clarity on Apr 8, 2015 7:44:09 GMT -5
let me be clear. i'm against the working conditions of adjuncts just like everyone else on this board, but this position is not that! it pays 47k to live in a great part of the country. that's about what you'd expect to make if you secured a permanent teaching position at a community college in the area, and 2.5 times what most of us were paid in grad school. just because the position isn't a cushy stepping stone to an r1 gig doesn't mean it's "ruthless exploitation". this will give someone a year to go on the market again or find a job in the private sector. i know a lot of you have never HAD to work a day in your lives, but welcome to the real world.
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Post by Bootstraps on Apr 8, 2015 8:20:02 GMT -5
"Clarity" very clearly has no idea. See original posts about applying for jobs while teaching 10 courses. And don't you dare tell folks they haven't worked a day in their lives. These positions are exploitation. I've worked a job since the day I turned 15 and I'm 38. I know what exploitation looks like. Again, it will be very difficult for someone to teach 10 and do what needs to be done to find less precarious work. For shame. It is not only about this job but about those who purport to be sociologists and yet deploy the bootstraps/work harder narrative. Trust me, those calling these positions exploitation work very hard. Shift your focus.
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Post by clarity again on Apr 8, 2015 8:33:47 GMT -5
i'm tired of hearing middle-upper class white kids complain about their oppression. i've lived in the hood. i know what exploitation looks like, and it ain't making 50k a year to teach at a college. 800 phds awarded a year and 500 openings. do the math. despite what your mommy and daddy told you, you can't always be anything you want. this job pays a fair amount and will buy someone time to find something more permanent elsewhere. after 5-8 years of grad school, you should have things in the pipeline. if not, there's no shame in leaving academia. sorry that buddies at your vhrm will look down on you for it. those of us who have seen real exploitation know there's no shame in it.
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Post by defenses_of_this on Apr 8, 2015 14:49:09 GMT -5
awful job offer are part of the problem....also fuck your bullshit subaltern pissing contests...
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Post by poor clarity on Apr 8, 2015 18:24:53 GMT -5
i'm tired of hearing middle-upper class white kids complain about their oppression. i've lived in the hood. i know what exploitation looks like, and it ain't making 50k a year to teach at a college. 800 phds awarded a year and 500 openings. do the math. despite what your mommy and daddy told you, you can't always be anything you want. this job pays a fair amount and will buy someone time to find something more permanent elsewhere. after 5-8 years of grad school, you should have things in the pipeline. if not, there's no shame in leaving academia. sorry that buddies at your vhrm will look down on you for it. those of us who have seen real exploitation know there's no shame in it. not everyone on here complaining about this is a middle-upper class white kid. other folks have "lived in the ghetto" (which is NOT a proxy for having experienced systematic poverty), and other folks, like myself, have been poor most their lives (and lived in the ghetto, but I'd never say that because of the racist ways that term is used in certain places, like SJMF/SJMR chat boards). you're right, there is entitlement in these circles. And, if that's what you're mad about, then i get it. But there's a rage that folks are expressing that goes beyond the "poor" pay that this one department/institution is offering. It is the adjunctification of academia. And the feminized form that adjunctification is taking, ensuring that women are more likely to be stuck with the non-tenure track route. It is the promises that our grad departments made to us without offering us the brutal reality of postdoc precarity that many of us find ourselves in. Could we have researched that ourselves? Sure. No need to entirely evade personal responsibility. But, I think these unstable futures are obscured by faculty who don't know any better because they were on the job market before 2008. give some of these folks a break and also try to understand what it's like for someone who has a family to feel subjected to the throes of moving across regions or across the country for a relatively short-term gig with relatively low pay.
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Post by No time.. on Apr 9, 2015 6:18:38 GMT -5
..since I am about to teach one of my classes in a similarly crappy job, but I just want to say quickly: just how did "clarity" figure out that this is upper-middle class white kids who have not worked a day in their life complaining? I am certainly VERY FAR from that. And of course the discussion -- based on complete guesses out of thin air -- of posters' "real world: identities and histories is only tangential to the core of the issue.
BTW, on the "too many applicants, too few jobs," it is true to some extent but that it is NOT the main problem: the problem is -- and someone on this forum articulated it very nicely in another thread recently -- that many schools replace retiring tenured faculty with non-TT faculty. I certainly see it playing out in my case: I've had a rather easy time to land interviews for temporary gigs (VAPs), even at good school. But almost no luck in the TT market. If all those VAPs I've interviewed for (and some landed) were actually TT jobs, it would be a completely different situation.
Anyway, gotta go and do my crazily paid job, which prevents me (due to very high teaching load) from getting any new research or papers done, but which pays the bill. Next time easy on the assumptions, clarity.
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