Adjunct Faculty & Catholic Identity: the hidden connections

American higher education's adjunct dilemma is well-known.  Colleges and universities, facing the very real financial bottom-line, hire adjunct faculty to expand instruction.  Thus more courses are available to students. What could be wrong with that?

Well, lots, actually.

There's a justice issue:  adjunct faculty provide more than fifty percent of all instruction in American higher education yet receive exponentially less pay and benefits.  The increased profit margin--get the same instruction for far less money--insures institutions will not break their reliance on adjuncts easily or willingly.  See, for example, this satire here. Let's be clear: sometimes the line dividing full-time from adjunct faculty does involve ability.  Faculty searches are structured, supposedly, to return the best qualified candidate given the institution's parameters.  So, even when institutions seek to fill faculty lines according to categories like race/class/gender, the faculty search is supposed to result in the hiring of the best-qualified person fitting those parameters.  That is an important issue.  It is also important, I think, to acknowledge that institutional bias--where'd you get your degree?--and perspective bias--do you think like us?--exert real influence on faculty searches.  Not every single one, obviously, but those factors do exist.

Students do not benefit, either.  As reliance on adjunct increases, first-year students take increasingly more courses with adjunct faculty. Full-time faculty--the ones who've made it through the extended hiring process--actually teach fewer students.   More and more, adjunct faculty are the first "teachers" students see, and this experience occurs precisely in the foundational courses institutions and major-granting department insist are so important.  In other words, precisely where and when students need quality instruction, they are least likely to obtain it. The result of all this is that student retention sags.
Why keep taking classes when they're all like this?


source:  Giphy

I have taught long enough to know that could be anybody, full-time tenure-track or adjunct faculty.  But the student array--all jammed into an anonymous lecture hall, wondering what the point is--is quite accurate.

liberal, as in liberating

as opposed to servile, which means "an exceeding willingness to serve" something else.

WHAT WILL WE DO WITH THE LIBERAL ARTS?

As noted previously on this blog, that version of college education has taken some hits recently. Why study the classics and old-fashioned disciplines (Religion, History, English, Biology, Sociology) when what the kids (and their parents) really want is job-training? Out with the liberal arts, in with "Competency Based Education" (CBE)!

And the hits keep comin'...Steven Ward sees this high-level vocational training as furthering an already troubling bifurcation in American education. Liberal education has become elite education.

However, in the rush to emphasize marketable skills over a deeper liberal knowledge content, proponents of CBE in all forms are forcing students (particularly the underserved in lower-tier institutions, whom they claim to be helping) into a “knowledge-less” version of liberal learning in order to “hurry things along” and not get in the way of their job training.

Despite the rhetoric of “serving the underserved” and “closing the skills gap,” they are responsible for generating new hierarchies between those who receive a cheap, fast food-style or “good enough” education from those who receive a quality one. They are forging new barriers and strata in an already highly stratified higher education system, not removing them as they often claim.

More:

CBE stands in marked contrast to a past emphasis on quality, across-the-board liberal learning to be acquired regardless of the type of student or institution that was at the heart of general liberal education. This was partly what a Dewey-style social democratic vision of liberal arts education was supposed to be about -- general knowledge available to and shared by all -- a kindergarten for adults.

CBE essentially gives up on this dream of democratizing knowledge and promotes a division between those who need a thorough, content-centered liberal education and those who only need a light, fast and vocation-friendly version. It suggests that the big questions, or what the British sociologist Basil Bernstein referred to as powerful or sacred knowledge, where the unimaginable becomes imagined, is not really relevant for most middle- and working-class students who attend community colleges and regional state universities where most of the CBE experiments are being played out.

These students will not need to concern themselves with the bigger questions of theoria -- those can be left up to those with more elite training who will occupy the corridors of power, making laws and running things, but can instead stick to the mundane knowledge and the basics of everyday praxis happening in their assigned cubicles.

In this new model, students in more elite institutions will go on receiving broad liberal training and having access to powerful knowledge as a core part of their university experience, while those at lower-tier public institutions will be loaded up with watered-down, box-checking skills and vague competencies like “critical thinking” or “intercultural understanding” to be provided by standardized, online platforms.

Read it all here.

surrender cobra

from an ESPN report on a familiar scene in sports television:  a player or team makes an amazing play to win the game at last possible second and the opponents' fans stand, dumbfounded, with their hands on their heads.  It often looks like this:

Image courtesy Reddit.

A fitting image, especially when Catholic colleges make decisions and announcements like The College of Saint Rose did Friday, December 11, 2015:  twenty-three faculty positions cut and several programs and majors cut from across the curriculum.  Some of these were professional and graduate programs (e.g., Bachelor's program in Art Education and the graduate program in Communications), while others covered liberal arts subjects like Economics, American Studies, and....Philosophy and Religious Studies.  These last three are/were the majors my department offered.

The Sisters of St. Joseph, the women's order that founded Saint Rose in 1920, issued the following statement about the cuts:

Nearly 100 years ago, Sister Blanche Rooney, CSJ, and other brave Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet saw a need and acted.

Inspired by the legacy of the original Sisters of Saint Joseph, who as women in 1650 took the radical step of going into the world to minister to the poor, the sick and the desperate of Le Puy, France, Sister Blanche envisioned a college that would teach and empower young women to be citizen leaders grounded in faith and dedicated to excellence and service.

In founding The College of Saint Rose, the local Province of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet recognized that, just as they were responding to a need, fulfilling its mission would forever require the college to be alert and amenable to a changing reality in the larger society, and especially among its current and prospective students.

This is a TU+ story. Click for more information.

In other words, to meet and serve people where they are.

This founding principle is why we support President Carolyn Stefanco, the Board of Trustees and all those on campus working diligently to lead our beloved Saint Rose in updating academic programs and priorities to meet the changing needs of students who count on the college to prepare them to succeed in a world they will inherit.

and then a bit later:

Change is upsetting for many in all walks of life, including our own. It creates anxiety and uncertainty, and can leave some feeling overlooked, forgotten, left behind. That is why it is so important in times of change to extend grace, love and affirmation to all in our community. Change also is an opportunity for renewal, and renewal is empowering. Responsible leaders are obligated to recognize the need for change and act carefully but resolutely.

Read the statement and you'll soon note what is absent:  any reference or indication of the College's founding as a religious endeavor.  It's utilitarian endeavor now;  what serves the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  A principle that many, including the Sisters themselves, would argue is not part of the Catholic social justice tradition.  And that is correct.