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I was ordered out of my classroom by several policemen while my students were making presentations. I was threatened with arrest for an infraction that I did not commit. When I tried to explain myself assertively, I was talked over by the officers and told I was being irate. When I mentioned my professional criminal justice background, I was mocked. Any attempt to insist on making an explanation brought me closer to a false arrest in front of my class. I had the distinct impression that had I resisted following their orders, they would have physically thrown me to the ground and handcuffed me. I would have probably had a heart attack before they could have gotten me into the squad car.
This account comes from a late middle-aged, disabled female adjunct college teacher. The professor does not live and work in a third-world police state. The incident happened near a major California metropolitan area in 2006.
Do the real-world realities of adjunct professors’ lives and the high percentages of job-insecure faculty “hire-able and fire-able” by the semester in California colleges and universities constitute a bona fide system of peonage or a caste system?
What percentage of these professors constitutes the primary breadwinner role in their households?
How are their health and their lifespan and the health and lifespan of their reliant family members affected by the realities of adjunct professors?
How does this job-insecure work impact their contributions to scholarly, scientific, and technical innovation?
How does the use of this labor force shape the kinds of departments available in postsecondary venues and the numbers and types of credentialing programs and courses offered?
What social environments are available to adjunct professors among their untenured and tenure-track/tenured colleagues? Do these constitute support and/or opportunity systems or networks of constraint?
How does this job-insecure work impact students, the maintenance, the reproduction, and the expansion of the California/American brain trusts?
How has the dignity and the authority of the American professoriate been eroded through the adjunctivization of the teaching cadres of colleges and universities?
What are the methods that postsecondary administrators use to keep adjunct faculty from asking for better working and living conditions and to manipulate them and their tenure-track/tenured colleagues? Retaliation? Defamation? Character assassination? Traditional and other types of discrimination? Threat of withdrawal of benefits and resources? Paycheck legerdemain? Wrongful dismissal?
Do postsecondary administrators employ external agencies (i.e., detective agencies, private security forces, financial records-gathering companies, etc.) to collect data on both untenured and tenure-track/tenured faculty beyond routine criminal background checks? Do they deploy agencies to devise harassment strategies to force professors to retire or union-bust?
OPS-Alaska and its partners are devising a methodology to explore these and other similar areas of concern. To begin with, we are soliciting narratives from postsecondary faculty members from California public colleges and universities. Faculty from other states and commercial and private colleges and universities are welcome to respond, although California public faculty members are primarily encouraged to reply with their stories.
Confidentiality is guaranteed. OPS-Alaska is an independent, non-partisan think tank.
Contact:
Thomas Gangale, Executive Director
OPS-Alaska
2262 Magnolia Avnue
Petaluma, CA 94952
teg@ops-alaska.com
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