Tag: tenure

Apparently I’m on a blogging break

Published on by Sanjay Srivastava7 Comments

I just noticed that I haven’t posted in over a month. Don’t fear, loyal readers (am I being presumptuous with that plural? hi Mom!). I haven’t abandoned the blog, apparently I’ve just been too busy or preoccupied to flesh out any coherent thoughts.

So instead, here are some things that, over the last month, I’ve thought about posting but haven’t summoned up the wherewithal to turn into anything long enough to be interesting:

  • Should psychology graduate students routinely learn R in addition to, or perhaps instead of, other statistics software? (I used to think SPSS or SAS was capable enough for the modal grad student and R was too much of a pain in the ass, but I’m starting to come around. Plus R is cheaper, which is generally good for graduate students.)
  • What should we do about gee-whiz science journalism covering social neuroscience that essentially reduces to, “Wow, can you believe that X happens in the brain?” (Still working on that one. Maybe it’s too deeply ingrained to do anything.)
  • Reasons why you should read my new commentary in Psychological Inquiry. (Though really, if it takes a blog post to explain why an article is worth reading, maybe the article isn’t worth reading. I suggest you read it and tell me.)
  • A call for proposals for what controversial, dangerous, or weird research I should conduct now that I just got tenure.
  • Is your university as sketchy as my university? (Okay, my university probably isn’t really all that sketchy. And based on the previous item, you know I’m not just saying that to cover my butt.)
  • My complicated reactions to the very thought-provoking Bullock et al. “mediation is hard” paper in JPSP.

Our spring term is almost over, so maybe I’ll get to one of these sometime soon.

Should we fire all the adjuncts (and hire them back for real)?

Published on by Sanjay Srivastava2 Comments

I just came across a thought-provoking interview with Cary Nelson, president of the AAUP. The video is titled Twilight of Academic Freedom. It deals with the consequences of increasing numbers of “contingent faculty” in higher education — the adjuncts, visiting professors, instructors, and various other titles for instructional staff who do not have the protections of tenure.

Right now, many universities are looking for ways to save money, and one way to do that is to hire fewer tenure-related faculty and shift the teaching burden onto adjuncts who are hired for as little as the uni can get away with paying. (It’s worth noting that this trend started well before the current recession, though I wouldn’t doubt that it’s accelerated.) Nelson is concerned about universities that are moving toward having an increasing share of teaching done by such contingent faculty.

Adjunct positions have a useful place in universities when used for the right reasons. One such reason is to expose students to perspectives that come from outside of the academy. For example, my undergraduate Abnormal Psychology class was taught by an adjunct whose main job was as a clinical psychologist at a hospital. That gave her a wealth of stories and practical experience that she could bring to the classroom.

But using adjuncts as a cost-cutting measure is a different thing. Many adjuncts will tell you that the system exploits instructors who work at low wages as a way to remain in the game while they hunt for better-paying permanent jobs. Those jobs typically don’t exist in high enough numbers to hire everybody who’s circling in the adjunct holding pattern.

Nelson offers a different line of argument, one that stems from the core reason tenure exists in the first place: academic freedom. To quote from the interview, “Academic freedom and job security are inextricably linked.” Tenure ensures that a professor can choose what to teach based on professional judgment. Direct review of those decisions is made by professional peers, protecting individual faculty from legislators, donors, regents, and others who might wield their considerable influence to drum out professors who don’t fit some outside agenda.

Nelson is not just worried about individual adjuncts being vulnerable. Even more ominous are the systemic risks of a university shifting to an adjunct-heavy portfolio. Hiring the occasional adjunct at an institution with a solid core of tenure-protected faculty is not likely to be a problem, as long as tenured faculty care enough about academic freedom that they’ll raise a stink if an adjunct is being subject to inappropriate pressure. (It’s sort of intellectual herd immunity.) But without that core, when too many of your faculty could be threatened for teaching something that someone does not like, the institution loses an important protection. Just look at the battles over secondary school textbooks in biology and history for an example of the kind of political infighting that can result. Is that where higher education could end up — with a state board telling me what to teach and what textbooks to use? I hope not, but Nelson presents good reasons to worry.