Well, this treatment of an adjunct instructor in Indiana is just too precious. It demonstrates on so many levels what kind of problems are created by the current academic staffing model employed in higher education, ranging from the mistreatment of the faculty member to ultimately a bad decision for students. But hey, it is making its way so quickly around the Internets, I'm not sure I need to say more than point you to here, here, here and here for commentary on this silliness.

Perhaps it is the incessant heat here in the nation's capitol, but I seem to be in a bit of a contrarian mood today. Here are a few items that piqued my attitude today--see what you think.

• Dean Dad is pondering the issue of capping adjunct faculty loads. While he sees the logic behind the cap, he also recognizes that their arbitrary nature causes other problems and doesn't necessarily solve the problem of over-reliance on underpaid faculty. What are the options? Oh, the muddle for a college! For contingent faculty, perhaps the answer is a bit more clear? Organize and withhold services for insufficient payment? Just saying.
• The Chronicle's pseudonymous first-person series features a former full-time faculty member and administrator who discovers the challenges of being a contingent faculty member when she returns to teaching post-retirement. Curious that this surprises her after 23 years of working in higher education.
• New York Governor David Paterson has given the NY Commission on Higher Education report a bit of new life, although he appears mainly focused on student aid rather than the staffing issues addressed in this report.

Thoughts?

The U.S. Department of Education collects volumes of data on institutions that participate in the federal student financial aid program. But getting access to it can be a chore.

Until now.

The AFT has just brought online the AFT Higher Education Data Center. It compiles, institution by institution, data on everything from faculty salaries, to instructional staff levels, to tenure rates, to institutional revenues and expenditures. This is information that colleges and universities report to the National Center for Education Statistics as part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).

A new "visionary" book on academic staffing is out. Managing Adjunct Part Time Faculty for the New Millennium is intended to help administrators who "will experience increased challenges due to the continuing growth in numbers of adjunct and part-time faculty." Like so many business-oriented-higher-education-management-advice books, the problem is "complex," with many variables and considerations. Now, I don't mean to be overly quick to judge, but the introduction, "A Vision of the Future-From the CEO" by Roy A. Church (um, he is actually a college president), gave me a pretty good sense of the direction in which things are going here.

Last week I read an article that had nothing to do with faculty or higher education, but it sure made me think about both. The article, which appeared in the Los Angeles Business Journal (subscription), dealt with the fact that "[i]n a move to cut costs, businesses are increasingly turning to temp services for attorneys to handle legal work." 

Now, I realize that no one is going to worry too much about how much lawyers are earning, temporary or not, but the article really drove home the point that we as a country are continuing to create an employment environment in which work is being pulled apart into more and more discrete tasks and stratified by level of importance, and the attitude that permeates this article reminded me of how I hear higher ed talked about.

Over the jump for some examples.