I supervise the adjuncts in a STEM department in a small college in a big city. Regionally, there are a number of suburbs that are hot spots for various niche industries, each of which are accurately categorized as applications of what we teach in my department.
I don't officially make the hiring decisions but the chair likes me to screen people before she meets with them. People constantly walk in off the street (literally) with thin and/or incoherent resumes (thrown together within the 24 hours since they impulsively stormed out of an industrial position) and expect us to take them and their zero-teaching-experience and make them professors.
Not only do they expect us to hire them on the spot (regardless of whether or not we're currently hiring), but they anticipate that we'll be grateful to have someone like them. I mean a real chemist who's worked in industry and everything - like wow - how often in a lifetime do we lowly academics get an opportunity to work with someone like
that?
Those silly adjuncts we already have, who also have PhDs, but additionally have 10-30 years of teaching experience... we've got tons of them and the ONLY reason we haven't made room for them on the tenure track is because we've been hoping against hope that someone with 4 years of industrial experience who has never taught or even written a research grant, would walk in off the street and shake things up for us.
I want to tell them we have an orientation video just for them, make them watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LCggmsCXk4
--WotC
