I’m sitting here at the computer with a lukewarm cup of coffee and a sore throat. I have about seven tabs open on my browser that open up to a bevy of good things. I’ll link to the articles, nuke my coffee cup, and then decide which one I should expand on.
The whole story about what happened to Margaret Mary Vojtko, the adjunct at Duquesne University who died in poverty.
Great letters to the editor in the New York Times about the study that found that adjuncts were better teachers than tenure track professors at one college. “While the tenure-track faculty have comparatively high wages, great benefits and lifetime job security in the form of tenure, one million contingent professors have none of these things, often teaching for decades for poverty-level wages, and wondering whether they will even have a job next quarter.”
For obvious reasons, I have several friends on Facebook who are academics or writer-types with disabled kids. A few weeks back, they all exploded about a review in the Chronicle by Christina Nehring of a book, Regarding Henry. Nehring hated the book and said the author was a narcissist. Historiann has two posts about the controversy and her own review of the book.
I’m not the history book consumer in this house, but Doris Kearns Goodwin’s new book about Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Era looks fantastic. Whenever I dig back into the history of education or other public policies, I always end up in this time period. Also, I would have very much liked to be a muckraker.
UPDATE:
Still reading… More links…
Wendy reminded me to link to the controvery around the resignation of John Elder Robison from Autism Speaks. Autism Speaks is the largest autism advocacy group in the country. Robison resigned from the board, because he was annoyed at the group’s message that autism was a tragedy. Robison believes that autism is both a gift and a disability. I’ve also read parents of more disabled kids complaining that Autism Speaks features too many Asperger-y kids in their videos. Ain’t nobody happy.
Apt. 11d 
You would have been an excellent muckraker!
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Have you heard about the Autism Speaks controversy? John Elder Robison stepped down from his involvement with AS, and now AANE has weighed in.
This blogger has been protesting Autism Speaks for a while now.
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Yes, been following that controversy closely.
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I am always at a loss as to when we should forget about plagiarism. Do you think Goodwin wrote this book? I kind of despise her for blaming her assistants. It is always ugly when someone with power is caught, and the first thing they do is blame someone whom they have power over. I won’t be spending any money in a way that supports her.
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Btw, regarding adjuncts: This issue is hugely complex and lies with administrative priorities. But if I were a reporter on this topic, here is what I would be asking: what do the accrediting agencies have to say about the ratio of adjuncts to TT/full-time faculty? Has what they say changed over the past few years?
An accrediting agency can say “In order to be considered a good university deserving of our accreditation, you must limit the percentage of courses taught by adjuncts to X.” They would do this because their concern is not the finances of the university but the *quality* of the educational experience.
Now, if these studies keep coming out saying that adjuncts teach just as well as full-timers, well then, the accrediting agencies shouldn’t have to care about the quality of the educational experience. And if that’s the case, then screw limits on the number of courses taught by adjuncts. Let Harvard turn into Walmart! Wheeee!
It’s the accrediting agencies, stupid. (To paraphrase Carville and Stephanopoulos.)
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Universities have their own financial problems. Maybe they should pay adjuncts more, but keeping declining, possibly senile teachers on at full pay until they die is not financially viable. No other employer does that. Also, full-time, tenure-track positions are, essentially, reserved for Ph.D.’s. If universities started hiring people with Ph.D.’s for those positions, people would complain about that.
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BAE kept my FIL on payroll as long as he wanted. He was 76 when he retired, and the only reason he did was because he couldn’t live alone after my MIL died. He lasted 3 months. BAE was great to him, and whenever I want to curse the military-industrial complex and corporate tools, I remember how wonderful that company was to him.
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Bio scientists have this same conversation about NIH (which funds most of the research in the academic setting). NIH could make changes in their funding strategies that had significant effects on the labor market in science, and their current funding choices encourage training at both the PhD & post-doc level that produces a cheap labor force for the biomedical research enterprise.
Politically, there’s always lots of talk, and no action on NIH’s part. Why? in the end, I think, because NIH’s mission is to produce the greatest quality science for the money invested by the taxpayer. Can that be done while exploiting the labor force? Maybe.
Unless one can show that the maybe is a no, that in fact, the exploitation undermines the goals (say, for example, because of the inducement to engage in scientific fraud, in an enterprise that is largely self-policed on an honor system), NIH has to weigh less good science against the welfare of the workers, and it hasn’t been specifically charged with balancing that trade off.
If accreditation bodies have hte same kind of client-focused charge — that students get the appropriate education — they are also not in a good position to take other values into account.
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The Susan Wright article is terribly tone-deaf. I’m wary of some of the advocacy on the part of neurodiversity movement, because I think it underplays challenges, especially in a world with finite resources, and the benefits of mitigating those challenges as opposed to expecting that society will continually provide accommodation. But, I think statements like “living in despair” aren’t useful, especially when facing a continuing reality, and not temporary distress. I have a bias that grandparents are particular prone of staying stuck in this stage. They see children sporadically, and are thus prone to comparing them to mythical children (a problem in sporadic grandparent interactions even with typical children).
Now, she’s also aiming for a call to action (and, more specifically, money, from the government), and people always use overblown rhetoric, but, the letter is an example of rhetoric that shouldn’t have gone unchallenged.
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“But, I think statements like “living in despair” aren’t useful, especially when facing a continuing reality, and not temporary distress. I have a bias that grandparents are particular prone of staying stuck in this stage. They see children sporadically, and are thus prone to comparing them to mythical children (a problem in sporadic grandparent interactions even with typical children).”
Oh, yes. Whenever my grandparents get a visit from a great-grandchild, whichever child it is is the smartest, the cutest, the best behaved ever!!!!
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Autism is a really big word. It encompasses people with extreme disabilities, as well as people with real talents and few enough disabilities to blend in with the general population. I actually think the word is too big right now. It’s good politically, because then you have a larger group of people to advocate for, but it isn’t terribly useful as a description of a person.
And families differ in their ability to handle a child with differences. For some families, their kids’ challenges severely limit the entire families’ quality of life. Other families are able to recover quickly.
I wish that groups like Autism Speaks didn’t focus on finding a “cure” for autism, but instead focused on reforms that would improve the lives of all people with autism and help out their families. School reform, adult living centers, community outreach, public awareness.
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