#adjunct underground

Adjunct Underground Communique #10 - 06-30-2014

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

Now Online! -> Chapter 5 – Getting Down to Work: An Organizer's Toolbox PLUS A Final Note read by Joe Berry!

http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org 

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! 69 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast on KCHUNG Radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjuncts' cars as we drive from campus to campus. 

Chapter 5 – Getting Down to Work: An Organizer's Toolbox, features the voices of Joe Berry, Adam Overton, Alex Kudera, Curt Gambetta, Haruko Tanaka, Sandy de Lissovoy, Asher Hartman, Kat Jacobsen, Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut, Agnes Bolt, Amanda Yates Garcia, Nate Page, Martin Lastrapes, Ana M. Fores Tamayo, Kate Durbin, and Alyssa Picard!

Plus a Final Note read by Joe Berry!

Sections in Ch. 5:

• Getting Down to Work: An Organizer's Toolbox • Even Two Make a Committee • Building a Committee: Finding People and Developing Issues • Building Relationships: Taking Care of Each Other • Acting like a Union • Dealing with Divisions • Defining Who Is In • Race, Gender, and Similar Divisions • Communications: From Office Whispers to the Internet (through "Email" section) • Websites • Analyzing the Opposition: Power, Politics, and Strategic Planning • Some Institutional Advantages We Have • We Are Not Alone: Finding Allies • Tenure Track Faculty • Final Note • Acknowledgments

Thanks to all the amazing adjuncts who made this audiobook possible!!

Adjunct Underground Communique #9 - 04-28-2014 

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education Now Online! -> Chapter 4 – A Metro Organizing Strategy

http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! Around 69 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast on KCHUNG Radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjunct’s cars as we drive from campus to campus.

Chapter 4 – A Metro Organizing Strategy, features the voices of Joe Berry, Dorothy Gaffney-Madsen, Jane Arnold, Maria Vitale, Lydia Field Snow, Julian Brown, Maurie Peaslee, Margaret Hanzimanolis, Maria Maisto, and Karen Lentz Madison!

Sections in Ch. 4: • A Metro Organizing Strategy • Research • A Contingent Faculty Center: Virtual and Actual • Services • Assistance for Organizing • Regional Publicity • Direct Demands and Advocacy • Alliances, Coalitions, and Solidarity • Alternatives in Sponsorship and Organizational Structure 

Please stay tuned for releases of further chapters, appearing each week in March, through the top of April, here at http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org.

Duration: 45:58

Adjunct Underground Communique #8 - 03-31-2014

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education Now Online! -> Chapter 3 – The Chicago Experience

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! Around 69 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast on KCHUNG Radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjunct’s cars as we drive from campus to campus.

Chapter 3 – The Chicago Experience, features the voices of Joe Berry, David P. Earle, Betsy Smith, Denise Johnson, Asha Schechter, Don Hassler, Brianne Bolin, Robert Ovetz, Gabie Strong, Lisa Regula Meyer, Betsy Lin Seder, Jack Longmate, Howard Hastings, Sarajo Frieden, William Lipkin, Anne Wiegard, Nancy Kane, Melody Rodari, and Nicole Antebi!

Sections in Ch. 3: • The Chicago Experience • Map of the Metro Chicago Workforce • Head Counts • Demography • Income • Unionization • Organizers' Voices • How and Why We Got Involved • Campaign Beginnings • How We Chose a Union • What We Did Right • What Did Not Work • How the Employer Responded • Organizing Committees and Who Leads Them • Relations with Union Staff • Negotiating a First Contract • Contrasting Viewpoints • Building a Real Union • Future Strategies, Visions, Goals • Lessons from Interviews

Please stay tuned for releases of further chapters, appearing each week in March, through the top of April, here at http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org.

Adjunct Underground Communique #7 - 03-17-2014

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

Now Online! -> Chapter 2 – Contingent Faculty Organizing

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry’s book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! Around 68 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast on KCHUNG radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjunct’s cars as we drive from campus to campus.

Chapter 2 – Contingent Faculty Organizing, features the voices of Joe Berry, Jessica Lawless, Josh Cho, Gordon Winiemko, Lee Kottner, Martha Lattie, Kristina Quynn, Marco Di Domenico, Alison O'Daniel, Lisa Ohlweiler, Tim Warneka, Robert Craig Baum aka Migrant Intellectual, Scott Cazan, Nancy Popp, Anonymous, and G Douglas Barrett!

Sections in Ch. 2: • Contingent Faculty Organizing • Material Conditions and Power Relations • Consciousness: How Our Colleagues Think • Our Full-time Tenured and Tenure Track Colleagues • Administrators' Perspectives and Vulnerabilities • Who Are the Activists? • The Message: Respect • Specific Demands • Competitive Unionism: Good, Bad, or Indifferent for Contingent Faculty • Arguments for Union Competition • The Politics of Lists • Appointment to Union Staff. Promotion or Demotion and for Whom? • Reverse Engineering a Good Union: Participant Action Research • Guide for a National Strategy

Please stay tuned for releases of further chapters, appearing each week in March, through the top of April, here at http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org.

Adjunct Underground Communique #6 - 03-10-2014

Joe Berry’s Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education Now Online! -» Chapter 1 – Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry’s book,Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! Around 68 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast onKCHUNG radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjunct’s cars as we drive from campus to campus.

Chapter 1 – Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are, features the voices of Joe Berry, Cecilia Woloch, Ken Ehrlich, Natilee Harren, Laura Bouza, Arik Greenberg, Amanda Ackerman, and Amy Blount Lay!

Sections in Ch. 1: • Contingent Faculty Today: Who We Are • Corporatization: Higher Education in the Service of Capital • A Few Statistics • Are Part-Timers Professional Educators? • Good Work but a Bad Living • How Our Class Position Has Changed • Other Big Losers: Students and Society

Please stay tuned for releases of further chapters, appearing each week in March, through the top of April, here at http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org.

Adjunct Underground Communique #5 - 03-03-2014

Joe Berry's Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

Now Online: INTRODUCTION

Adjunct Underground is proud to present an audiobook of Joe Berry's book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education! Around 68 current or former adjunct instructors have banded together to each read and record short portions of the entire text! Adjunct Underground is proud to offer this broadcast as a downloadable podcast on KCHUNG radio, that can be listened to online, or in adjunct's cars as we drive from campus to campus.

The Introduction features the voices of Joe Berry, Elana Mann, Reid Friedson, Candice Lin, and Marc Herbst!

Please stay tuned for releases of further chapters, appearing each week in March, through the top of April, here at http://adjunctunderground.kchungradio.org.

Adjunct Underground Communique #4 - 01-27-2014

This week:

Cecilia Woloch reads her resignation letter

An extended interview with Cecilia Woloch

mp3 | pdf of resignation letter

. . .

Cecilia Woloch, Popular Full-Time Non-Tenure Track Lecturer at USC, Resigns

Cecilia Woloch, a popular lecturer at USC, recently and reluctantly resigned her position on December 30, 2013. Woloch had taught in the English Department of USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Science since 2006 as what’s known as a Full-Time Non-Tenure-Track lecturer, also commonly known by its acronym as F.T.N.T.T..

While at USC, Woloch created five new courses over six years, as well as two extremely successful marquee programs, The Writer in the Community, as well as The Poet in Paris Maymester—all while working on a year-to-year contract, with little to no chance for merit-pay increases. Both of these programs, which still appear featured on the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Science website, along with accompanying video testimonials featuring Woloch and her students, serve as glowing examples of the education students will encounter if they enroll in classes in the Department of English at USC.

After a series of severe staff reductions and pay cuts, and years of refusals by the administration to recognize the remarkable contributions she’s made, or her considerable professional career outside of the institution, Woloch appealed to USC administration. Her goal was to negotiate a more equitable outcome that would permit these fantastic programs, and her presence, to continue. Her proposals were instead met with additional cuts and punitive counter-offers. A last-ditch attempt to negotiate a plan for her to at least finish out the Spring semester, as well as one last iteration of the extremely popular Poet in Paris Maymester program, was met with USC Vice Dean Dani Byrd’s terse response: “unequivocally no.”

As a result, Cecilia Woloch decided to officially resign her position, effective December 30, 2013.

A petition on Change dot org, created a by a former student of Professor Woloch’s, currently has over 500 signatures.

Cecilia Woloch serves as a chilling example of a loved professor who, despite years of work and several major contributions that were touted by her institution to recruit both students and donors, in the end was unable to receive even a fraction of the pay, staff support, stability, and respect that her tenure-track colleagues are typically afforded. Instead she was ultimately forced out by remorseless, unavailable, invisible administrators. Her story demonstrates the remarkable unfairness that full-time non-tenure-track faculty at USC and elsewhere today are facing, who in exchange for the immense amount of work and care that they generously donate to their respective schools, are unable to advance professionally, are paid outrageously low salaries, and are threatened with year-to-year contracts that risk not being improved or renewed.

. . .

Related Links:

The Writer in the Community Program – USC Promotional Video: http://dornsife.usc.edu/videos/undergraduate/80/the-writer-in-the-community/

The Poet in Paris Maymester Program – USC Promotional Video: http://dornsife.usc.edu/videos/undergraduate/509/poets-in-paris/