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    DB12Hamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 2:25pm

    I’m still not seeing any solutions being presented. You’ve done a good job explaining that the adjunct position is a joke of an employment situation, and I think everyone agrees with you. But how do you want to fix it? By cutting "administrative excess" that nobody can actually define?

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      Dirt CheapDB12
      5/23/16 2:34pm

      HamSandwich’s solution is the same as ever:

      1. shower the squeaky wheel with cash.

      2. ???

      3. profit

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      FridayFridayDB12
      5/23/16 2:41pm

      The only solution right now for the adjuncts, on a personal level, is to leave. Cut your losses and leave. I know it hurts, I left academia myself and with that I left behind a big part of my identity. It’s worth it to have food and health care and a place to live.

      I really don’t think things will change on an institutional level until more adjuncts decide to just opt out of this game.

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    Alex RuthrauffHamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 2:45pm

    Even in community colleges, it’s absolutely sickening what these old irrelevant 80 year old tenured dinosaurs are making. You really don’t need to have any knowledge that a student couldn’t read in a 30 year old text book, or any talent for teaching. If you started in the 70s and you didn’t make waves, there’s a good chance you’ve got well over a mil in your TIAA-CREF account.

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      Alex RuthrauffAlex Ruthrauff
      5/23/16 2:45pm

      did I mention old? I really don’t have anything against old people, I promise. Some of my best grandmothers are old.

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      TheDogIsStillBarkingAlex Ruthrauff
      5/23/16 3:16pm

      You’re right. In my math department, once someone hits 60, they’re no longer able nor qualified to teach students how to take a derivative. They should really all just retire with their millions of make believe dollars. Or maybe just die, and give that money to the millennials, who represent all that is good and true and know what’s really important in life.

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    TheDogIsStillBarkingHamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 2:52pm

    Admittedly off topic, but is this:

    Send out a 70+ page packet including cover letter, cv, syllabi, writing sample, letters of rec, syllabi, student evaluations, statements on research and teaching, etc etc. You’ll probably never hear back from them.

    really the standard in some fields? In mine, you’d never send writing samples, syllabi, or evaluations until requested, which would only happen in the last stages of the interview process. The last two hiring committees I served on read over 300 applications each year - we’d still be working on it if all of them were 70 pages long!

    And no, you won’t always hear back. Our committees are staffed by 3-4 overworked professors in the middle of an academic year. I know it’s hard, but we just don’t have the mechanisms or time to personally respond to each and every one. We do update our job ad with the current phase of the search, including when we’ve hired, but that’s about all we can handle.

    For those reading this far who are on the market for a TT position, here are some tips for the application process, all from experience:

    1. Pay attention to the ad and respond to it in the cover letter. We know you want a job. We want to know why you want this job.

    2. Follow the directions in the ad. If we ask for four things, and you send three, it’s incomplete. If you send eight, you’re wasting our time and showing us you have difficulties with efficiency and following directions. Petty, maybe, but we’re looking for reasons to pare down the pile of astonishingly similar applications, so don’t give us a reason to throw yours out.

    3. Make sure your letter writers are really interested in your success. We get so many letters that basically amount to “I have met this person and have nothing against them.” It doesn’t help your case, and it just looks as though you were unable to find three people that know you well and like you.

    4. Keep the CV honest. Don’t inflate a talk given in class to an “invited talk”. Don’t list blog posts as publications. Don’t claim to have taught courses independently if you were just the grader or discussion section leader. Don’t list skills you don’t actually have. They will be caught and it will either get your application tossed or make for an extremely embarrassing on campus interview. I’ve seen all of these, and it didn’t end well.

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      FridayFridayTheDogIsStillBarking
      5/23/16 2:56pm

      That seems to be the standard for the humanities, at least. Not sure about your field. I witnessed the hiring process for an associate position in history, and they put those folks through the wringer. They were each required to give guest lectures, as well.

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      TheDogIsStillBarkingFridayFriday
      5/23/16 3:03pm

      Oh, we do the talks, once they make it to the on campus interview. But a 70 page initial application package is nuts! It would take days to read through each one. Assuming these departments also get a few hundred applications for each job, I don’t know how they’d do it. We’ll ask for the extra documents like teaching evaluations after we’ve narrowed it down to the top 15 or so.

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    PunditGuyHamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 2:50pm

    These stories aren’t getting any less “out of touch” as time goes by. Exhibit A:

    “most of the jobs in this nation guarantee a salary even if the employee isn’t always engaged in work.”

    What the everloving fuck?

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      You might be wrong.PunditGuy
      5/23/16 2:54pm

      Most people are on the clock as they shuffle from their cubicle to the conference room and sit through meetings and fill out paperwork. Adjuncts aren’t.

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      acmeindustriesPunditGuy
      5/23/16 2:55pm

      Also, “flight attendants get paid even when they’re not on a plane serving customer...”

      I’m pretty sure this is not true. I always understood that they don’t start getting paid until the plane door closes, so all of that stuff that they do during boarding is unpaid.

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    NaturesFistHamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 2:36pm

    Serious question: If you are getting paid $15k to be a adjunct college professor, why not just go teach secondary education at a middle or high school and at least make a livable wage? I’m assuming there are some certification requirements, but that would be insane if you were somehow capable of teaching college level history but not high school level.

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      FridayFridayNaturesFist
      5/23/16 2:46pm

      I have a MA in history and a degree in a foreign language as well. Yes, I could teach high school, but in my state that would require going back to undergrad and taking education courses for 1-2 years, and then spending a semester as an assistant teacher at a public school. The issue is the time and additional money that’s required up front before you can enter that career. Any tuition I would need to pay would have to be paid out of pocket, because I, like many people with graduate degrees, have maxed out the number of student loans I’m able to take. It’s just not a feasible option.

      And let’s say you do transition to teaching public school, at that point you’d still be overworked and underpaid.

      I chose to enter a totally unrelated field instead.

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      puzzlepieceNaturesFist
      5/23/16 2:49pm

      Haha it would be insane, wouldn't it??! HAHAHAHAHA (signed by a Ph.D. deemed not qualified to sub in the public school system)

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    Pink SkullHamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 3:40pm

    Before anybody says “Yeah but then we’d have to raise tuition” I’d like to point out that there are currently 90 colleges and universities in the US with endowments over a billion dollars.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c…

    So let’s fuck off with that excuse right now.

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      TheDogIsStillBarkingPink Skull
      5/23/16 5:43pm

      Yet in 2012, the total endowments of all universities was $425 billion. So, that doesn’t leave much for the other 4,000+ colleges and universities in the country.

      This is equivalent to saying that the american economy is in great shape and we’re all rich, because there are over 500 billionaires in the US.

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      Pink SkullTheDogIsStillBarking
      5/23/16 6:02pm

      I’ll ignore how much it would cost at the smaller schools (Though whatever their endowment is, they probably can afford it. We’re not talking about millions extra for every state school). But conceding that point which I don’t have time to research, you would say that at minimum these 90 large institutions have absolutely no excuse, correct?

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    pre-emptive sighHamilton Nolan
    5/23/16 2:41pm

    I work in the administration of a large public university in Texas. It’s amazing how much money flows through this place. My office is trying to figure out ways to spend the rest of our budget because if we don’t spend it, we’ll lose it and our budget will get reduced next year...but we’ve got $40,000 for travel and nowhere to go. It’s not like we’ve got huge salaries either, but I guess it’s easier to justify expenses than salaries.

    There’s also a state mandate that all computers get replaced every three years. For a school like UT that’s probably around 20,000 computers every year. That means every 70 year old English and classics professor is getting a brand new i-7 processor, ssd harddrive, 24-in monitors, etc every 3 years.

    There are so many places to cut waste but because it’s such a large system cutting one department’s excess may mean cutting another departments requirements and most of it is done by the state legislature. And you can be damn sure that if the waste was somehow cut, it wouldn’t go to anyone’s salaries.

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      Ed SpockHamilton Nolan
      5/23/16 2:37pm

      So just for undergrad you’re paying $30,000 a year for 4 years. That means when you finish up you’re $140,000 in debt.

      Fuck that noise. Lack of education never made me any less intelligent.

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        IanEd Spock
        5/23/16 2:39pm

        Yes, it did.

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        Mr.DuckSauceEd Spock
        5/23/16 2:43pm

        Yes, it did. If you aren’t aware then I don’t know what to tell you. Oh wait, I do.

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      Tidal TownHamilton Nolan
      5/23/16 2:47pm
      I applied to 50+ jobs this year and got one interview. ONE.

      Fair warning, this is the case with lots of fields at the moment. I’ve got a BA in design and an MA in advertising and for my last job (that I got laid off from because business expansion rarely goes as planned) and this job I probably submitted 60~ résumés each and both times got one or two interviews after only getting a handful of replies at all. The hiring process is egregiously impersonal.

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        fluxusvalentineTidal Town
        5/23/16 2:53pm

        Yeah, but imagine if you applied to those same 60 jobs in October, since they were only advertised once a year on September 30th. Then imagine if you got one interview in January, didn’t hear anything until May, and had to wait until September 30th again just to see what other jobs will be offered the next year. In the real world, you can apply for as many jobs as you want at any time. The academic job market is rigidly seasonal, and if you don’t get a job one year, you have to wait another 1.5 years to actually get a paycheck (semesters start in the full, so if you are lucky). That’s why so many people are forced to adjunct during this process.

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        Tidal Townfluxusvalentine
        5/23/16 3:29pm

        I wasn’t trying to downplay the struggles of academia or say my situation was equitable because, as you noted, they are not. I was simply pointing out that unless you’ve gone into a particular set of fields throwing tidal waves of résumés out to receive hardly anything in return is unfortunately the norm. It got to the point that I would’ve preferred to get canned rejection letters than the radio silence I was getting most of the time.

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      CnslrNachosHamilton Nolan
      5/23/16 2:33pm

      Can you believe we make less than those dirty fast food workers?!?!

      - someone with no allies

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        NatTheBurnerTurnerCnslrNachos
        5/23/16 2:50pm

        As a society, we teach teenagers and young adults that education is the key to a better lifestyle. We tell them how much more people with degrees make when compared to people with high school diplomas. Why wouldn’t someone feel misled?

        I agree that the approach he or she took there is not ideal, but contrasting yourself with unskilled workers isn't out of line here.

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        CnslrNachosNatTheBurnerTurner
        5/23/16 3:22pm

        Yea, I was 90% trolling there.

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