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Organizing
the Academic Underclass President's Corner
Academic Job Search Archives
September
2001
Volume III, Number 1
The
Profession
Organizing the Academic
Underclass:The Experience at Indiana State University in National Perspective
by
Richard Schneirov
Trevor
Leffler, who has a master’s in Fine Arts from Indiana State University,
is currently employed at three different universities and is responsible
for the equivalent of seven classes each semester.ISU
pays him $1,800 per class; Ivy Tech (a community college) pays him $1,000
per class; while Vincennes University pays $1,500 per class.With
his round-robin schedule he puts 500 miles per week on his car.Leffler
reports. “I am working most every waking hour on some aspect of my jobs
with almost no time for personal or professional pursuits outside of teaching,
which will eventually limit me in obtaining full-time employment as I have
little to no time to create art and seek exhibition opportunities, grants,
etc.”When he told one regular faculty
member how many courses he was teaching, Leffler was told that he must
be making “more money than the President of Indiana State University.”
Marty
Mertens was a microbiologist for 15 years in the private sector before
she fell in love with the humanities.In
1992 she received a master’s degree from ISU.Even
before she finished her degree she began work as an adjunct faculty member.For
the last ten years she has taught on campus and in the university’s prison
program, including the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary.Though
she enjoys teaching in the prison program because the inmates are so eager
to learn, like other adjuncts in that program she is also very dissatisfied.Prison
teaching is dangerous (teachers are told that if taken hostage neither
they nor the prisoner will get out alive); isolating (they have little
or no contact with other instructors or even their department chairs);
and frustrating (they are paid less for prison courses than for on-campus
courses).Early in her career, after
Mertens complained that her students had no books after half the semester
was over, she was let go from the prison program for two years and was
rehired only when a new director was appointed.For
the past ten years Mertens has averaged four courses per semester but is
still paid by the course and hired on a semester-by-semester basis.She
would have liked to devote her life to teaching but low pay forced her
and her husband to develop a greenhouse business, which supplies 80 percent
of her yearly income.
Ralph
Leck earned a doctorate in European history from the University of California
at Irvine and came with his wife to Indiana State when she was hired on
a tenure track line in the Foreign Language Department.For
two years Leck taught three courses per semester—a normal load for full-time
faculty—at a yearly salary of $14,500; then he was upgraded to a full-time
contract at four courses per semester at roughly $18,500.His
income supplied a small but crucial part of what was required to help support
his wife and nine-year-old son.But
in 2000, after more than four consecutive years of service, better than
adequate teaching evaluations, and a manuscript accepted for publication,
he fell afoul of the department chair and was let go without being given
a reason.Leck did not receive notice
of non-reappointment—even though the decision was made in early February—until
mid-June, a violation of AAUP (American Association of University Professors)
policy; but the university rebuffed national AAUP efforts to intervene
on his behalf.Leck eventually found
a job with National University in San Diego, where he now lives and works
apart from his family.
In
the past 25 years the percentage of faculty employed off the tenure track
in two- and four-year institutions of higher education in the United States
has exploded.In 1975, 43 percent
of all faculty were either part-time or full-time temporary employees;
that percentage rose to 57 percent in 1993; today approximately 61 percent
of American faculty are off the tenure track.The
percentage of part-timers is highest in the community colleges, where approximately
two-thirds of all employees are part-time.It
is lowest in research universities where graduate students normally take
on the positions filled elsewhere by part-timers.The
proportions of non-tenure track faculty also vary by discipline.They
are lowest in the physical, medical, and social sciences and in engineering,
while they outnumber their tenure track and tenured colleagues in the humanities,
business, education and the fine arts ....
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The
President's Corner
by
George Huppert
In
my last column, I found it useful to peer over the shoulder of a New
York Times reporter covering the annual meeting of the American Sociological
Association.In this way I was able
to touch briefly upon a distressingly banal topic, namely the high jinks
some of our academic colleagues engage in when they play at revolution.
Such
gesturing is cause for amusement, but it is also cause for concern, because
it turns conferences, committee meetings, journals, and classrooms into
ideological battlegrounds, usually of a truly silly sort.Such
practices have spread to other continents; they travel from one discipline
to another, so that debates over the literary canon, already half forgotten
in California resurface in South Africa, where a committee composed of
(white) high school teachers decided to recommend the exclusion of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet from the curriculum (too eurocentric).
It
is probably true that American academics occupy pride of place in the contest
for the most ferocious expressions of ideological bias in the western world.This
distinction has been duly noted for some years now in serious critical
publications such as the Times Literary Supplement and the New
York Review of Books.More recently,
the disturbing facts about academic politics in the United Sates are actually
being discussed in textbooks written for beginners ....
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Student
Affairs
The
Academic Job Search:Another Path
by
John Coats
In
the May 2001 issue of Historically Speaking, Paul Hatley provided
some excellent advice to graduate students and recent PhDs who wish to
find a job in academia.He warned
of the difficulties of the job search, emphasized the importance of demonstrating
scholarly vigor, supplied useful hints on writing a meaningful cover letter,
and suggested means to succeed in the interview process. Hatley stated,
quite correctly, that a handful of schools supply most successful candidates
for academic research institutions.Given
this fact, many job seekers will appreciate the opportunity to apply to
schools that value excellent teaching over extensive publication.In
applying to teaching institutions, a somewhat different set of suggestions
will help land an interview and win a job.
First
and foremost, recognize that your research interests may be a secondary
concern to a search committee.When
a committee from a teaching institution places an advertisement that states
they prefer teaching experience, they mean it.Three
paper presentations and a published article may display your scholarly
interests, but research does not demonstrate your ability to communicate
the ideas, currents, and life of the historical world to students ....
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The
Profession
Archives:A
Second Look at History Careers
by
Rae Sikula
Asked—too
frequently—about career plans, most graduate students respond simply “teach”
and then make some hopeful remark about the job market.My
colleagues at Loyola take a slightly different perspective: while many
do apply for faculty positions, the majority pursue or at least consider
employment in museums, archives, government agencies, or even documentary
film-making.While some of us choose
these careers for practical reasons, feeling that public history offers
the best chance of employment in a glutted field, others show genuine commitment
to their work and look forward to sharing their interpretations with non-academics.Refreshingly,
I find that few speak of these career alternatives as a threat to their
status as “historians.”In the absence
of tenure-track opportunities, this open attitude shows a willingness to
redefine reputable work through serious, graduate-level interest in previously
discounted areas.In addition, it
may increase academic support for fields that play important roles in scholarship
and education, but are left too often without the moral and financial backing
needed to serve scholars well.
Certainly
archives—my minor field—merits greater support.Increasingly
archivists not only preserve the historical record, but also shape it,
drawing upon their history education as well as their common sense.While
their initiative often discovers important primary sources, they even more
frequently decide which sources or source portions merit destruction or
preservation—decisions that impact the possibilities of scholarship.If
a historian is one who “interprets the past,” then today’s archivists at
least approximate the definition by selectively documenting the past.
Still,
how could the job be so difficult?Most
graduate students would urge the archivist to “keep it all, just in case”—and
yes, most archivists really would like to retain those crucial though bulky
files in their entirety.Space, however,
is a limiting factor.To maximize
the capacity of repositories, archivists appraise each collection that
arrives and decide whether to accept it, redirect it, or destroy it in
whole or in part.Understaffed,
they must choose quickly and without examining the records in great detail;
overwhelmed, they occasionally resort to sampling techniques—saving, for
instance, one set of agricultural data for every ten years.The
proliferation of records in the past two decades ensures that, without
broad expansions in funding, this appraisal process will grow ever more
intense as records overwhelm repositories’ available space and the attention
of their staffs.With space and money
falling short, archivists must make value judgments that guide as well
as preserve the historical record ....
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