The Professor's Notes

My brother has tagged me with a meme. Usually I ignore all of these, but this one is different, because I am going to break the meme a bit.

The general idea is to write about what I was doing 1, 20 and 30 yrs ago. Well, I will do that, but I will focus mostly on what was going on “today” and then also add “16 years ago today.” Today, of course, being Halloween.

10 years ago, I was at Penn State, starting my second year of my PhD program. I still had some course work to accomplish, and I was dreading the candidacy exam. At that point in the program, I am thinking that Halloween came, and went, with not much fanfare, although I am sure we did something for my son, and for my oldest daughter, who had just turned 11. Halloween, which is normally a well-marked day for me, most likely came and went with perhaps a few cards, a cake, and couple presents.

16 years ago (here I break the meme) I remember quite well. That Thursday morning I took my wife into the base hospital for the delivery of our son. He was born 28 years to the day after me. Yes, we share a birthday. Halloween. After some coaxing, he breathed fresh air later that afternoon, and for the first, and only, time in my life I video taped a birth. The tape later scared my parents as he had some rather low initial APGAR scores, driven in part by the fact that his pancreas was doing a GREAT job of creating insulin, and once he left the womb (mom is a diabetic) he wiped out his supply of blood sugars! The scores moved up quickly, however. Later, a nurse discovered that his collar bone was broken on the way out (he was a BIG baby!) and they immobilized it right away. (In a serendipitous turn of events, it turned out that the nurse had been in my flight during ROTC summer camp at Dover AFB back in 1983!) Later that evening, my parents took our girls to the circus! What a Halloween!

So now, on to 20 years ago. Oct 31, 1987. I was stationed at Pease AFB, having completed my first 1 1/2 years as a Logistics Plans officer. We had celebrated, just the week before, the first birthday of our eldest (yes, that means she just turned 21!) You can imagine how family-focused that event was, since she was not only our first-born, but the first grandchild for either side of the family! As for other events at work–I was beginning to realize just how much fun it can be working in the area of logistics, and planning for everything necessary to support a large operation long distances away from home. And since we were in the Strategic Air Command, you can imagine some of the operating conditions and environments that we had to consider when planning.

30 years ago. Well, I certainly wish I could tell some great story about a huge 14th birthday party. Or some great story about how much fun 8th grade was. But–it was 8th grade! Does anyone have memories from 8th grade that they look back on with any significant degree of fondness? I had some things I enjoyed in 8th grade. Band. FFA. Ag class. Actually, I think* 8th grade was the year we would have a garden as part of our ag class. Mr Durand was my Ag teacher. Mr Davids was my Social Studies teacher (a long haired wanna be hippie type, but a GREAT teacher!)

So there you have it. 30 yrs of history.

As the faithful reader no doubt knows, there are a few blogs I regularly visit. The two I picked on the most through the last election cycle, A Liberal Dose, and Pressing the Flesh, have been somewhat absent in their postings of late. PTF has made a couple abortive efforts to, as he puts it, get back into the jump-rope game. I suspect that the liberals have realized that politicians are, well, politicians, and the changes they thought they voted for were simply promises made to get elected. At least PTF has the fortitude to actually go after the democrats for their failings.

But that’s not what this post is about. The other blog that I frequent in the one written by the Community College Dean. He posts nearly every weekday, and while I have often found myself quite frustrated by his own admittedly liberal bias, I still read on. Which brings me to a regular topic of discussion on his blog–the role of adjuncts at Universities, Colleges, and Community Colleges.

In the most recent post Dean Dad (his psuedonym) discusses the possible states of nature that could arise if adjuncts form unions and enter in to collective bargaining agreements. He has regularly bought in to the notion that adjuncts aren’t paid enough, and that it is unfair to adjuncts that they cannot earn a living wage in that role. In addition, many of his readers talk about adjunct positions as a sort of training ground. He wrote back in May 2007 comparing AAA Baseball and students, and faculty. It is a good read, and I commend it to you. In that article, he writes that in baseball AAA teams are a place to learn one’s trade before moving on to the “big league.” He then notes that this analogy is a good one for students wrapping up their 2 years at the community college, but that he “loathe it applied to faculty.” He points out (rightly) that graduate school is, in itself, the minor leagues. (I would argue that so is the tenure process.) He writes that “To add the expectation of years of adjuncting and chair-pleasing before even getting a shot at a full-time job – effectively, yet another level of apprenticeship — strikes me as adding insult to injury.”

Ahh, what about the fact that the analogy is flawed on its face? AAA ball *is* about development. Adjuncting isn’t. As I have written here before, an ‘adjunct’ should be serving the college/university as an additional job to that which they already have. They aren’t there as some sort of “developmental pool.” It is this trend away from adjuncts working a fulltime outside job, and bringing that experience into the classroom, that I personally believe has cheapened the role of adjunct.

I am not sure if there is an appropriate sporting analogy. I mean, softball leagues would be my first thought. You aren’t doing “ball” as your job, but you do it because you love it (or you love beer.) Of course, you don’t bring all that professional “cred” that adjuncts bring to the classroom. Perhaps the best analogy is that of swim coach. Most often the coach was a good to great swimmer themselves when they were younger. They have been there. They have done that. They have the “Cred” that the young swimmers need. They almost all have full time jobs, though (and in my experience almost all have been teachers.) Only a few, the truly “gifted,” go on to be those swim coaches that get to coach full time, for college or national teams. Do you hear Swim Coaches complain that they have to coach for 3 or 4 different teams, and never get that shot at being the “big team” coach? Nope. They know–they UNDERSTAND– that their role is different. Yup. I like this analogy.

*note: editorial changes/additions since first posted 10 Oct 07

Recorded at Podcamp Pittsburgh 2 in August of 2007, this interview covers why he decided to help start a Podcamp in Pittsburgh (“the need to instigate.”) We take a few minutes to talk about how friendly Pittsburgh happens to be, and how Pittsburgh really is the high-tech city of the Eastern US. It’s good to talk about the “third most blogged about city.”

Additionally, he shares about “Something to be Desired,” the local video series provided online, at http://stbd.tv

You can find Justin, at his blog, Cafe Witness.

Take a few minutes and listen–it’s short!

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