A professor teaching at San Jose State University who can’t afford a place to live in the South Bay tells KPIX 5 she is spending most nights sleeping in her car.Ellen Tara James-Penney is adjunct professor at San Jose State.
She teaches four classes of English 1-A and has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree.
That has not kept her from becoming another member of San Jose’s homeless population.
The article:
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/08/30/homeless-san-jose-state-professor-struggles-living-out-of-her-car/
Did we ever hear from Professor Pottah again?
ReplyDeleteStories like this make me sad. I wonder if she can't find work at a 2nd (3rd and 4th) institution, or if she doesn't realize that that's what people do or what. If she wound up in contingency from another field, maybe she doesn't realize that those of us who've lived the adjunct-only life for ~a decade had to have 3+ employers at a time.
She probably doesn't get much consideration since she's coming from industry. It's ironic - because access to professional experience is what the adjunct route was supposed to provide, but now it's just been distorted into a way to justify underpaying the last people to get in on the pyramid scheme of academia.
Very sad - I'm wondering where the husband and dogs are. She says she keeps few possessions to try to avoid detection - I would detect 2 dogs and a dude with nowhere to be.
I have not heard from Prof. Pottah. It would be interesting to get an update.
DeleteI, too, would like to know how Prof. Pottah is doing (and I very much hope the answer is "better," to at least an incremental degree, since it often takes a lot of slow, small steps to find one's way out of a mess that was also a while in the making).
DeleteSad, indeed. It sounds like she made (and perhaps is making) some less-than-wise choices, but there are also plenty of ways in which the higher ed industrial complex encourages such choices, starting with the labeling of debt as a form of "aid" and continuing with using adjunct professors to teach multiple sections of intro/core-level classes rather than the occasional upper-level class focused primarily on the application of ideas from the discipline to professional practice. I hope she'll find her way out of the quagmire soon, but adjunct teaching is easier to escape than student loans taken on in the hope of becoming a professor (or, rather, some rose-tinted picture of what a professor is, which faculty unfortunately have little incentive to debunk to starry-eyed students).
ReplyDelete