Posted on 05/26/2020 5:24:55 PM PDT by fluorescence
Colleges are laying off their adjunct faculty, who mostly are women and people of color.
Keisha Blain attended a top program in her field, collaborated with renowned scholars and wrote an award-winning dissertation — all of which she was sure would lead to an immediate and secure academic appointment.
But upon graduating from Princeton University with a Ph.D. in history in 2014, she discovered that she had vastly underestimated the number of scholars seeking tenure-track positions. Blain was competing not only against her direct peers, but also against talented scholars who hadn't been able to find steady work in the aftermath of the 2008 economic recession and had become even more competitive applicants in the intervening years.
"That's when I realized all along that I had felt some undue sense of security," said Blain, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in African American history.
...
administrators may perceive departments like African American studies and women and gender studies as "low-hanging fruit during periods of deep budget cuts" because their market value isn't as immediately evident as it is for a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) department, Doe said.
Blain echoed Doe's concern that departments like ethnic studies, which have served as "gateways for scholars of color, who have often been excluded from older, more traditional departments," will be targeted in cuts because their purpose has been misunderstood.
"Whereas people see African American studies as a black space or the product of black people angrily demanding more black professors, it actually exists because a multicultural coalition of students across various races and ethnicities recognized that we could not have a democracy without making sure diverse voices were included in how we teach our history and culture,"
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
I disagree. Daily I have requests for engineering positions in my inbox. Some with 0-5 years experience.
Bona-fide Software Engineering jobs or lying, cheating off-shore Indian recruiters, whose only purpose is to disqualify Americans in order to bring in more Indian H1B scabs?
If you only had the English proficient in college at this point, you’d have about two dozen colleges in the entire country.
Most people have no clue what has gone on in education in the last 30-plus years. How reading is taught so poorly from the start that few students have read enough to be literate by the time they are promoted along to college.
This is especially so and especially damaging for poor, immigrant and minority students who haven’t learned standard English at home. But no matter, ALL students in ALL classes, including now graduate students can simply go to the “learning excellence” or “writing” center to have someone else essentially write, or drastically rewrite, their papers for them free.
Yes, that makes the traditional college experience essentially a charade, as professors know most of what they are looking at and grading in too many cases isn’t the students’ own work. But you grade it all on a very low curve, with lots of As and Bs, and the gravy train keeps running.
Oh, what else do too few people realize? That more than three-fourths of junior’s “professors” are actually part-time adjuncts, paid approximately the minimum wage, getting just a couple percent of the total inflated tuition and other costs for a gravy train that mostly runs for administrators and bureaucrats charged with making sure junior enrolls and stays enrolled for the great college gravy train.
I’d consider the military to be different from academia, with different criteria for admission. My point was that academic colleges should not have to offer remedial courses, because the unqualified should not have been admitted in the first place.
Unfortunately true.
True. Tenure and full-time is a thing of the past. Most college teaching jobs are extremely low-paying adjuant part-time positions.
Only PhDs can achieve full-time today.
Why remedial courses in colleges/ universities? The total failure of secondary education as a lot if is social justice teaching instead of the 3Rs... unless you want American colleges to cater exclusivity to Communist Chinese and Indian students these courses are required (actually a vast majority of Communist Chinese and Indian students lie and cheat on the TOEFL, so their English skills are poor to non-existent).
I put it back earlier, with primary teaching.
The “whole word” and “blended” methods of teaching writing are known to create dyslexics and generally poor readers and learners.
Yet it persists. And don’t get me started on what “common core” has done to basic math.
Just wait until next year’s results are out. Most students do not have patience or discipline for online work, and most teachers can’t teach online effectively.
Home schooling is nice, but many parents can’t do it either. Even less so with both parents working (that’s still a thing, right? Two parents of opposite sex)
But I think the character of children will improve. Too many parents take the easy way out of mindlessly indulging kids, but creating unpleasant long-term company in the process.
Spend a little more time with them and I bet parents will start instilling basic manners, etc., again.
Bona-fida electrical engineering jobs.
Huge difference.
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