Missing the Obvious

Heather Barbour at Athene provides a pdf link to recent report from the American Political Science Association. Heather describes herself as a “political analyst, writer, and college professor,” and in yesterday’s post laments the recommendation that “was not” made by the APSA to hire adjunct staff when tenured positions do come available. She writes:

Only 24 percent of full-time, tenured political science faculty is women. However, an increasing number of women, and decreasing number of men, are teaching adjunct or in non-tenured positions.

No surprise there.

What is really surprising is what the report *did not* recommend as a means to fill the gap: giving adjunct faculty first shot at full-time tenured positions. In other words, hire from within and use your adjunct pool, which we know has plenty of women in it, as a kind of apprenticeship program instead of as a temp agency.

The recommendations they do make -- about encouraging more women in graduate school, making research more collaborative, etc. -- are all fine, but you can tell they've been made by people who never had to do a strategic (SWAT) analysis. I don't doubt these things will help, but geez, talk about missing the obvious.

technorati tags: adjunct, Athene, APSA

The Phantom Professor

Have you heard of the Phantom Professor? the adjunct instructor who was “found out” for writing anonymously about her experiences in teaching at a small private institution? I’d only been able to piece together bits of this story, but today David St. Lawrence at Ripples provided a synthesis of the Elaine Liner story. David highlights some of his favorite episodes with links directly to those posts. Go take a look.

The upshot on the E. Liner story is that her contract for an annual contract for a wage of $18,000 will not be renewed at Southern Methodist University – a small, private university in a very affluent part of Texas, but her writing continues online at Phantom Professor, and her stories about all the “Brads” and “Ashleys” can be quite a hoot.

technorati tags: adjunct, teaching, blogging