I just went through some complicated online process to apply for the position I will hold next semester when I am teaching at UNC Chapel Hill. The form identified the position I was applying for as "Visiting Assistant Professor."
I think I may have passed what they call in grocery stores the "sell – by date."
Affirmation
ReplyDeleteDonald Hall - 1928-2018
To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.
Perhaps "sell-by" but not "use-by"
ReplyDeleteIf you long as you get the position and can teach whatever you think fit, why should you care what the position is called?
ReplyDeleteThe title of the position most probably has to do with some bureaucratic procedure than with anything about you personally or about your academic merits.
The person who sent you the forms undoubtedly has no idea who you are or how many books you've written: processing forms not understanding Kantian scholarship is their professional role.
It's better than "Visiting Assistant Professor Emeritus." (Is there such a title as "Assistant Professor Emeritus?" Sounds like an Ignobel Prize.)
ReplyDeleteI agree with s.w., in the professional business world I've found that titles are more and more just about what salary range you're being paid, rather than anything to do with your seniority or qualifications. It also means you get these silly constructed titles like "Assistant Senior Lead Director of Product Strategy - Global Division, Sales and Marketing"
ReplyDeleteRegarding the recent trickle-down-economics comments posts here concerning unions, I note this article in the NYT today:
ReplyDelete"Help Wanted: Adjunct Professor, Must Have Doctorate. Salary: $0.
After protests, U.C.L.A. took down a job posting that offered no pay. But it turns out colleges often expect Ph.D.s to work for free.
...
Institutions are able to persuade or cajole people who have invested at least five or six years in earning a Ph.D. to work for free, even though, academics said, these jobs rarely lead to a tenure-track position.
'If your theory is that association with U.C.L.A. is itself compensation, then it makes sense,' said Trent McDonald, a Ph.D. candidate in English and American literature and union organizer at Washington University in St. Louis. 'I think there is the belief that you can eat prestige.'
...
The union [representing contingent faculty at UCLA] won a settlement with the administration in 2016 requiring compensation for lecturers, who are mostly part-time and make up a majority of contingent faculty, Dr. McIver said. But while lecturers are now unionized, adjuncts are not, allowing the university to have adjunct positions known as 'zero percent appointments,' meaning that they are unpaid.
...
Linn Cary Mehta is a longtime lecturer at Barnard and says she has seen a devaluation, even though adjuncts often have similar credentials to tenured professors. 'When I first started we were called instructor and then lecturer,' she said. 'The title changed to adjunct instructor, adjunct lecturer, almost aggressively, as if trying to put us in our place.'
Dr. Mehta, who has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia, has spent a career as a part-time worker because she needed the flexibility to care for her husband. She said that unionization at Barnard had provided increased job security through multiyear contracts, and higher salaries per course."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/ucla-adjunct-professor-salary.html
Eric,
ReplyDeleteBrian Leiter had a brief post about that ad a while ago. He speculated that UCLA wanted to hire a particular person (someone they knew, maybe someone already there as a postdoc, e.g.) and advertised the position bc required to do so by law or regulation. Leiter further noted that the ad did not say "no benefits," so it might have been a way for the person they had in mind to get health insurance. That's all speculation, but it sounds plausible. (I haven't read the NYT article you linked, but I wd note there's a difference betw being "allowed" to have 'zero percent appts' and actually having them.)
p.s. which is not to deny that adjuncts etc are usually ill-paid, esp if not unionized.
ReplyDeleteFrom an article on the Marginal Revolution website about adjunct professors:
ReplyDeleteHow an economist thinks
I saw this on Twitter:
Hard Times for Adjunct Professors: 25% of part-time university faculty nationally rely on public assistance programs.
My immediate reaction was “Given the crowding in the sector, and that they presumably earn non-pecuniary returns from the enjoyment of teaching, shouldn’t we be taxing them at a higher rate?”
—Tyler Cowen (Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his Ph.d. in economics from Harvard University in 1987.)
I posted the whole article, but here's a source for those who want to read the comments. Some people thought that Tyler was joking, others thought not.:
How an economist thinks
p.s. I swear I tried really hard not to comment, but here you guys are again talking about unions in a post that had absolutely nothing to do with unions. Me posting this is probably not going to help. Also, Tyler Cowen is really smart and if you disagree with him, then you are probably wrong.
I see that I won't have the opportunity to comment on the blog in the future. I have sometimes flared up with comments, over the years. Not sure if the comments section has deteriorated or just remained silly in the traditional ways -- for example, my politics is not the most popular kind around here, I might describe them as being 'moderate'. I reflect on a blogger's expectations for the comments. How often even, is something offered up which is grammatically correct English? Sometimes I have outright mocked Wolfe for this and that which needed to be mocked, but I disapprove of extraneousness more than I do of impertinence.
ReplyDelete'Forget about my threat to ban comments.'
ReplyDeletedeleted.
Get a load of this exchange between Rep. Gaetz and Secretary Austin in which Gaetz claims that a guest lecture by Thomas Piketty at the National Defense University constituted embracing socialism. I was waiting for Sec. Austin to tell Gaetz to “shut up, you little white punk.”
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/04/05/austin-gaetz-socialism-military-wokeism-sot-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/this-week-in-politics/
S. E. Cupp got it right:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/opinions/2022/04/06/se-cupp-unfiltered-gaetz-austin.cnn
Adjunct Anonymous
ReplyDeleteMy father graduated from a state aligned medical school. For the next 71 years he was listed as an Adjunct Professor of Medicine. He never taught a class. Delivered a guest lecture 3 times. There was no salary or compensation. The reason for his appointment was because the state allocation of funds to the the medical school was based on the number of faculty, whether they taught or not.