If any faculty are struggling with the fact that they're being treated as utterly disposable by their institutions, I can offer some advice based on experience as a career contingent instructor.
What is happening is terrible and tragic and is doing great harm to the teaching and learning missions of every institution and it has been happening for decades already. I spent my career as a human shield protecting the privileges of others. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
I take zero pleasure in so many faculty discovering what has been always true for contingent faculty, that you are utterly fungible when it comes to the mission of preserving institutional "operations."
One of the "operations" contingent faculty protected at Clemson when I was there was the 2/2 teaching load of TT/tenured faculty. Tuition surpluses generated by my labor supported the research of tenured fac. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
I'm not even bitter anymore. I'm just sad because what we're presently experiencing was utterly foreseeable. Look at the dates on these blog posts I'm sharing, 5-6 years ago, it was already totally apparent. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
If public higher ed is going to survive, shit is going to have to change and one of the things that has to change is for the labor of ALL faculty to be valued. That's going to upset some of the status quo, but it is utterly necessary, otherwise, it's curtains.
Faculty are laborers, not knowledge workers, and tuition cannot be used to support "departmental research" when some of the faculty laborers are making poverty or near-poverty wages. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…
Maybe I am still bitter. Nope. Just angry. It was avoidable, now it isn't.
Got a couple of chapters in "Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education" dealing with how we need to be thinking about labor if we want institutions to survive resembling anything like what we believe they should be. beltpublishing.com/collections/pr…
I mean, how can you not be intrigued by a book that has this in it:👇 
