Re: As universities build reliance on ill-paid contingent labor, it's the students who suffer

Robert White <[email protected]> Sat, 26 Oct 2019 20:50:54 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.education.classics
Message-ID <[email protected]>
The person (or persons) can who bring this mindset
to U.S. secondary schools will make *billions* of dollars....

Bob White

On Sun, 27 Oct 2019 00:34:39 +0200, Laval Hunsucker wrote:
> A huge problem, indeed, and not only in the U.S.
> 
> Widely (universally?) recognized. Much discussed. Much lamented. No
> solution in sight (or perhaps even realistically imaginable), as far as I
> can tell.
> 
> I'm long departed from such an environment, myself, but all of this still
> makes me quite despondent.
> 
> - Laval H.
> 
> On Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 23:21 DANIEL P. Tompkins <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> From a news item about University of NC,  Wilmington:
>> 
>> "... the side-effects of growth, the larger class sizes in critical
>> courses, professors taking on more courses each semester, *ultimately hurt
>> the students*."
>> 
>> How many faculty there are tenured / tenure-track?  The data isn't easy to
>> find. (Indeed, we need a good national survey of this.)
>> 
>> Is institutional growth being built on a reserve army of contingent labor?
>> 
>> This has job market relevance:  as people complain about lack of decent
>> jobs, this story reminds us that there are in fact *plenty of courses that
>> need to be taught*: but too often, universities are hiring on the
>> cheap, *refusing
>> decent compensation to the teachers they hire.*
>> 
>> I am not an expert on this, but I can say, it's hurting students and the
>> profession.  I can say that it's the expensive / elite institutions that
>> seem most likely to provide stable fulltime teachers, and that students
>> gain from that.  The question is, is that where we should be investing,
>> when the bulk of American postsecondary students don't benefit?
>> 
>> Dan
>> 
>> 
>> 
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wect.com%2F2019%2F10%2F25%2Fgrowing-pains-uncw-faculty-chancellor-odds-over-growth%2F&amp;data=02%7C01%7CCLASSICS-L%40LSV.UKY.EDU%7Cf2fb636a6e924241b52508d75a77ba55%7C2b30530b69b64457b818481cb53d42ae%7C0%7C1%7C637077342608762097&amp;sdata=ocJjprXhkTAeBz2nT5lqShpQCDyHiGLbRlf%2F%2FITyfWg%3D&amp;reserved=0
>>