This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Jun 2008, by someone privately.
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12 Jun 08
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working at an institution that has no vast endowment, that is often strongly affected by the state’s economy and politics, and that is frequently forced to make very tough financial decisions
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The book really grew out of those graduate seminars on academic labor, and I’m deeply grateful to the students who took them
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As universities have more and more come to function as occupational training centers, places where students come for vocational credentials
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U.S. News & World Report has, since its annual America’s Best Colleges issue debuted in 1983, fixed this new principle by implying that the abstract notion of prestige can be converted into an assortment of rank-ordered lists. As a result, many universities present the narrative of their ambitions as a quest for prestige. It’s now one of the principal organizing fictions of American higher education.
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11 Jun 08
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Academia is one of the last workplaces to come almost completely under this management philosophy, where payment by the job replaces the traditional salary, benefits and, in the case of professors, job security. Medicine and the law are currently engaged in less acute versions of this transition from one management system to another. Among the professions, only the clergy and the officer ranks of the military seem to be immune to the erosion of tenure or its equivalent.
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At most institutions, professors have a lot of input in the hiring of other professors, but not in the hiring of adjuncts, either the people themselves or the terms of their contracts. Decisions about adjunct labor have, by and large, never been made by faculty, but have instead been part of larger administrative policies.
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Humanists typically don’t do consulting work, they don’t compete for large corporate or government grants, they don’t have the option of working in the private sector (and thus insisting that universities pay a competitive wage). These factors conspire to put humanists in a bad bargaining position: We depend entirely on our home institutions not only to pay us a fair salary but to determine both the kinds of work and the amount of work we have to do (publishing, teaching, service, outreach) in order to earn that salary.
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