Tuesday, April 24, 2018

"Volunteer adjuncts?" [from Frankie Bow]

The Southern reports that SIU Carbondale's Associate Dean for Budget, Personnel, and Research is asking department chairs to recruit alumni willing to serve as zero-time adjuncts. 

These blanket zero-time adjunct graduate faculty appointments are for 3-year periods, and can be renewed. While specific duties of alumni adjuncts will likely vary across academic units, examples include service on graduate student thesis committees, teaching specific graduate or undergraduate lectures in one’s area of expertise, service on departmental or university committees, and collaborations on grant proposals and research projects.

(In an amusing coincidence, the very next article down in The Southern announces that SIU Carbondale has hired a new associate chancellor for enrollment management. Presumably not on a volunteer basis.)

--Frankie

4 comments:

  1. Is there any way I can block Batshit U's access to that link?

    Of course, if Batshit U did implement such a system, it would have some kind of gamification, "likes", and multi-level marketing aspects thrown in.

    Love the 3-year contract, though. If I start at SIU Carbondale this year, I can plan to work for actual money around 2021.

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  2. I've been here at Ambitious State too long not to be cynical about how that would work out here:
    A semester or two of outstanding alumni,
    then alumni with solid credentials,
    then alumni willing to work for free to say that they teach college,
    then PhD candidates at the nearby Ivy, who are outstanding and will get great experience here and maybe want to work here,
    then PhD candidates at well-regarded universities nearby,
    finally to any one willing to work free.

    So by 2021. Anyone willing to work for free.

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  3. oh may I have another comment please?

    IF we were to limit this "opportunity" to appropriate alumni, then I could see the university requesting that the classes be held on site, to ease the lack of classroom space, created by the need for administrative offices and students services.

    I will recommend adjunct alumni admins at the next university meeting---who am I kidding? I no longer go to those.

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  4. I cannot imagine that working anywhere I have attended or taught--not my tony boarding school, my bottom-dwelling SLAC, my almost-elite law school (perhaps some limited exceptions for specialties like tax, SEC, environmental, family), my factory public university, my current two-year-cum-four-year. We might get some retired CFOs who once loved Chaucer, some ex-chemists who imagine dancing on the lab stations, but they'd know nothing about teaching and would sour within weeks. TPP is correct that we might get a couple of people so inadequately qualified or so emotionally defective that they would do anything to put a line on a CV. But we know how that would go.

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