Negotiating the Paradox: Adjuncts & Writing

• Slipping Down the Knowledge Funnel

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  14 Jun 2010 /  adjuncts, research, writing
  Slipping Down the Knowledge Funnel

   

  I recently read Roger Martin’s 2009 book The Design of Business. It’s a lovely book, and I recommend it highly for anyone interested in innovation, creativity, and/or understanding organizational structures.

   

  Early in The Design of Business Martin introduced a conceptual schema to describe knowledge development. Think of all discoveries, Martin suggests, as starting with a mystery. Someone observes something about the world that he or she doesn’t understand. It could be a universal question that’s interwoven with the nature of the universe (as the mystery of why things fall to the ground is interwoven with natural laws), or it could be something much more localized and specific, such as how to address a specific market demand.

   

  The mystery is the broad end of what Martin calls the “knowledge funnel.” At this point, no one really knows how to answer the question, or even how to phrase it productively. The second stage is the heuristic stage, where “an incomplete yet distinctly advanced understanding” of the former mystery has been articulated (p. 12). At this stage, you can act to solve the problem, but it takes a fair degree of expertise. Some mysteries, like the creation of art, are never systematized beyond the level of the heuristic, and always require expertise among practitioners.

   

  Our understanding of many mysteries, however, can and is taken further. We reach the third stage of the knowledge funnel, that of the “algorithm.” At this stage, the mystery is completely understood. It is reduced to the level of step by step directions which anyone can follow and get the same results. This is a great boon to industry, and to society. It took a master craftsman to make most things in a pre-industrial age, but workers on an  assembly line can create far more advanced and dependable products while bringing a much lower level of craft to the job.

   

  Martin does not discuss educational systems in this book. (He is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, but his focus is on the corporate world.) However, when I read this book, I couldn’t help but apply this model to the situation of adjunct faculty. During our training, we are grounded in the heuristics of our disciplines. Our dissertations are demonstrations of our mastery of those heuristics, though there’s always the hope that we’ll rise to the level of the mystery, and we both study and venerate those who do. Tenure is awarded for successful application of a disciplinary heuristic; academic status is won through mastering mysteries.

   

  And…adjunct labor focuses almost entirely on the level of the algorithm. Class structures and materials are often mandated by the institution, while individual adjuncts often repeat the same course materials time and again in a kind of self-defense, because they simply have no time to otherwise. We may rise to the level of the heuristic when teaching, as it’s not possible to totally routinize human interaction, but we don’t reach the level of mystery.

   

  Martin argues that individual organizations who come to depend too highly on algorithms will eventually be left behind: their focus on exploiting knowledge while leave them vulnerable to those who create it in new areas. I would add that this can apply to an entire field, namely higher education. It will be bypassed if it defaults on knowledge creation, which it does through cutting adjuncts out of the mystery loop.

   

  I would add a second point, one implied but not stated in Martin’s book: delving into the mystery rejuvenates. It is why the Picassos of the world stay young even as their bodies age. In cutting adjuncts out of the mystery loop, and relegating them to the realm of the algorithm, higher education is cutting us out of the spiritual fountain of youth.

   

   

   

   

  Tags: design, innovation, knowledge funnel, Roger Martin, The Design of Business

• Guilty!

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  31 May 2010 /  awards, research, writing
  My recent posts have ranged over publications and interviews; it seems time to bring this back to me for an embarrassing confession: the common criticisms of adjunct faculty are becoming true about me.

  That is to say, I’ve heard it said/seen it written that adjuncts don’t stay current in their field the way that tenure track faculty do. If we’re playing blame the adjunct, the reasons are a lack of initiative, other interests, a lack of discipline, or just a failure to really be a true scholar. If we’re looking at institutional and structural reasons, we might point to lack of time, lack of institutional support (money, time again, interest), etc. Whatever the causes, I recently realized that I’m guilty.

   

  In graduate school, my scholarship was idiosyncratic at times, as I followed my interests down whatever path seemed appropriate. However, my standards were very high, even exhaustive. I thought little of reading 100 examples of something to make sure my points about it were well-grounded. I also sought out new faculty members with the conscious intent of making sure I knew where my field was going, what the latest research was, and what new theories or methods had emerged. A sense of excitement, even zest, accompanied this scholarship, and at peak times I felt a growing sense of mastery.

   

  Now, my scholarship is exceedingly pragmatic. I research, and regularly, but for functional reasons. When I’m publishing, it is to find something that does what I need for a biography, a review, a study guide. I find what I need, and I stop. I have to, because I have to move on to the next thing, which is often unrelated to the thing I was just on. This rarely feels like my choice, as I’m researching whatever the next course preparation I’ve been given is, or whatever freelance assignment I’ve taken on. As I think about it, I probably do more research than I did in graduate school, and encounter more that’s new— but I do so in a more haphazard fashion. Rather than excitement, I most often feel anxiety, which translates into words as something like “I’ve gotta find this, and now, okay, on to the next.”

   

  My research used to be intrinsic. Now it is, dare I say it, alienated at times? In a round about way, I suspect this makes me a better teacher. This is, after all, how most of my students experience research: as a series of tasks imposed from the outside, tasks that aren’t connected to one another.

  But if you asked me what was new in my field/fields, I wouldn’t know how to answer you. And if I were a department looking to hire a cutting edge scholar, I wouldn’t hire me.

  Can the rest of you adjuncts do so? If so, can you share a few ideas about how you keep your writing focused on that new edge of scholarship?

  Thanks.
  Greg

  Tags: cutting edge, research, scholarship

• Lore to Kairos (and the envelope please…)

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  24 May 2010 /  adjuncts, awards, research, writing
  I recently wrote about wordriver (and my ambivalence regarding it). This week I’d like to touch on a markedly different publication, Kairos. Kairos is subtitled “A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.” They’ve been around for more than a decade, which means they were publishing about the intersection of computers and rhetoric back in the early days, at least in academia.

   

  Kairos is a useful publication. They’re flexible, as they must be to analyze a topic that is being created as they look at it. I’ve generally found the folks there friendly. (I wrote a few conference reviews for them back in the digital stone age; you’ll find them in the archives.) As people and scholars, they’re committed to good teaching, and to examining the role computers play in good teaching.

   

  More to the point for our purposes, they also give the Kairos Award for Graduate Students and Adjuncts. These awards are given for teaching, but also for service and research. Besides the honor, they carry with them a $500 prize.

   

  They’ve taken over the responsibility for these rewards from Lore, which is largely defunct (and was discussed in this blog). The funding for the award comes from Bedford-St.Martin’s Press. One of Kairos‘ editor, Erin Karper, who’s currently coordinator for the Kairos awards,  indicated they grouped graduate students and adjuncts together for the award because neither group is properly recognized for their contributions.

   

  The award also fits with Kairos‘ purposes. Doug Eyman, senior editor at Kairos, indicated traditional tenure evaluations often fail to recognize those working in genuinely new areas (like on computers and rhetoric). (Eyman, who is an Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University, also mention that most members of the Kairos staff when the award was founded were either graduate students or adjuncts. [He was an adjunct.])

   

  You’ll find a list of the past award winners here, and I’ll return to comment on this year’s winner or winners after they’re announced in May.

   

  For now, I’ll just say that I’m glad this award exists, and make a few observations. First, I’m not surprises that innovative scholarship suffers in the tenure evaluation process…but I’m not precisely sure what to do about it. Second, when I looked into the past winners, I found them academically active and successful, which is not something that can be said for all winners of adjunct teaching awards, alas. (I know this is a small sample, but it is still encouraging.) Third, if you look at some of the winners’ websites, you’ll find them clean and well-organized, even snazzy. These are people who know how to use current technology well. And fourth, that means they’re staying in academia because they want to be here. Not a bad tally.

   

   

  Tags: adjunct, award, computer, graduate student, Kairos, rhetoric, writing

• Dipping in to the Research

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  04 Jan 2010 /  adjuncts, research, teaching
  One of the things that struck me when I started working on this blog was how little research had been done into the great sea change of academic labor that is using adjuncts instead of tenure-track faculty. However, little research is not no research, and this week I went looking for studies related to adjuncts and writing.

  I was fortunate enough to locate papers by Jeffrey Klausman, who has been Writing Program Administrator at Whatcom Community College  since 2007. Klausman had presented a paper on the role of adjunct faculty in writing programs at the 2009 TYCA-PNW and another on the same topic at CCCCs. An article on the subject is scheduled for publication in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Klausman and was gracious enough to both share a copy of the paper with me and to answer a few questions about his research.

  As is often the case with discussions of pedagogy, Klausman starts his study with a brief contextualizing narrative. Interestingly, this account includes a mention that when he began his research, Klausman found “almost nothing” on how depending on adjunct faculty affects writing programs.

  To address this, and to give himself tools for his new position as administrator of a writing program (at a community college depending heavily on adjuncts), Klausman began his own research on the subject. He developed a survey (using Survey Monkey) to review adjunct attitudes on their relationship to writing programs. The survey covered a fairly wide range of factors, such as how much voice adjuncts should have on curriculum and if the administrator of their writing program valued adjuncts.

  When I asked him why he started with the attitudes, rather than other places (such as, for example, affects on student learning, Klausman indicated it was to deal with specific issues he’d faced, namely difficulty implementing changes in his own program due to resistance from the adjuncts. (This resonates well with my experience as an adjunct.)

  His initial findings were useful but not overly surprising: adjuncts wanted an equal voice in developing programs, wanted to be respected, and enjoyed their work, but found the conditions under which they worked to be the main obstacles to improving that work. More interesting were the results of the follow up interviews Klausman did to address seemingly contradictory responses to one area of the initial survey: that adjuncts reported feeling respected but undervalued at the same time. These interviews exposed that adjuncts often have little or no say in the writing programs they teach for, and little or no loyalty as a result—but that those who do feel loyal and respected.

  This seems to arise not from agreement or disagreement with the program’s actual decisions or from clashes with individual administrators, but rather from institutional structures and attitudes: adjuncts who were invited to play full roles in programs often did so, while adjuncts who were treated as disposable labor…felt like it.

  While the survey and interviews focused on adjunct writing faculty, and on their relations to writing programs, in this case, I have to suspect the results would apply to other disciplines as well. Is there, I have to ask, anything specific about adjuncts teaching writing—or do working conditions trump all? I’ll keep looking.

  In the meantime, thank you, Dr. Klausman. I’ll be looking for your future work.

  Tags: CCCCs, Greg Beatty, Jeffrey Klausman, research, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Whatcom Community College

• How Do You Write Productively (Installment 2)?

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  07 Dec 2009 /  publishing, research, writing
  Perhaps I should better call this, how not to write productively. I’m about to air my own dirty laundry, in the service of learning, blogging, and honesty. I’ll be sending this post in two days late, and the reason why is largely because of my adjunct work situation…or at least, how I dealt with it this week.

  You see, I teach for more than one school. One of the schools I teach for has been offering fewer sections for me to teach, and so I have been applying to new schools in hopes of, um, paying the mortgage. One of the schools I applied to hired me, and I’ve been going through their training to teach online this week. The problem? They gave very specific deadlines by which the training must be completed, and then their server crashed and slowed and sloooowed and…yeah. I spent the time I usually spend writing this waiting to move from page to page within a training website (more than a minute per click) and the sheer frustration drove the blog out of my head. Mea culpa.

  Now, about the question of if adjunct working conditions ever affect scholarly production…ahem. Suffice it to say that I admit it: the personal productivity gurus are correct. I could have overcome this. I didn’t. However, I would have had to overcome it if my schedule weren’t popping like popcorn.

  Turning back to the question of how to write productively (as an adjunct), I thought I’d draw a little inspiration from a few writing heroes.

  Take a glance here and here for lists of extremely productive literary writers. Immediately you’ll see that in terms of general productivity, you can take a lesson from the industrial age (and your savvy lazy students): write the same thing over and over, or the same sort of thing. This is done in genre fiction; it can be done in scholarship. Phrased more acceptably, you might think of it as capitalizing on your existing knowledge base, or as finding a rich vein you can explore in depth. In either case, working in what Kuhn called normal science would make it easier to be productive: work within an established framework, working out the implications of paradigms already established, rather than insisting on seeking groundbreaking discoveries.

  To write productively, you might also consult existing literature to see what research says about productive writers. A recent article in the Journal of Education for Business studied the characteristics of the most productive academic writers working in the field of accounting. It found that the most productive writers (in that field) collaborated with others, and tended to produce longer articles when they did so. Ambitious adjuncts might therefore seek out writing partners; this would also address the lack of connection many adjuncts feel.

  Another step that would generate connection and productivity but that might be difficult for adjuncts is hiring researchers to work for you. It’s a common tool of academic superstars. Lack the funds for that? Yeah, me too. (Remember where we started…)

  One set of tools that might work for anyone regardless of financial status is to use tools of academic productivity. In general, this means getting rid of excuses, writing on a schedule, holding yourself to deadlines and quotas, and setting up a writing/scholarship support group, so you aren’t in this alone.

  There are other suggestions, and I’ll be sharing those as well in future weeks. Promise.

  Tags: Greg Beatty, Journal of Education for Business, productivity

• Considering Surveys

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  30 Nov 2009 /  research
  This week I’d like to touch on a two surveys related to adjuncts (and writing).

  The first is a recent survey done by The Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s dated October 18, 2009, and it reviews data gathered from April through July of the same year. Robin Wilson’s article discussing the survey is careful to point out its qualifications and limitations it only focuses on adjuncts in the Chicago area, it makes no claims about those who didn’t reply, and so on.

  I have to say, I was surprised by a number of the results. Given the number of schools in Chicago and adjunct working conditions/the cost of living there, I was surprised to see that two thirds of those surveyed taught for just one school. I figured that more would be scrambling from school to school. I was also surprised by the low percentage (30 percent) who report they are adjuncts because they can’t find full-time positions. Here too I thought the number would be higher. But more central to our purposes are these numbers: 34 percent report that they “almost always” pursue their own research and writing, while 38 percent report that they “sometimes” do. That’s 72 percent overall, which is markedly higher than I expected.

  This is even more striking when combined with the fact that 66 percent report their academic employers never help pay for them to attend conferences. The most amusing figure here is that 16 percent, or 1 in 6, don’t know if their employers provide funds for travel to conferences. Taken together, those numbers speak to a well-defined mindset among adjuncts: these are people who will teach regardless of compensation, write and research independently, and expect so little from their schools that they don’t even know if there is help available. In a very real sense, these faculty blend a calling with a freelance mentality: love meets the market.

  The second is an older and more ambitious survey. Funded by CCCC back in 2004/5 and organized by Gloria McMillan, the National Adjunct Writing Faculty Survey Project set out to document precisely how the working conditions of adjunct writing faculty shaped their teaching. It aimed to collect at least 1000 anonymous responses.

  And I have no clue what the results are. Consider this an update on an inquiry in progress, but the link to take the survey (http://users.dakotacom.net/~glomc/forms/Adj04.html ) is dead. When I search in Google, I see the call for participants several places, but no results. When I search academic databases, I get only one result, for the initial announcement of the survey.

  To date I’ve had no responses from Gloria McMillan or others I’ve tried to contact on this (nor any error messages on my emails to them). I suspect this is because they’re adjuncts—I’m trying another email for Ms. McMillan. I hope to have more to report in the long term, but for now, my temptation is to draw conclusions from these non-responses. I hope to be proven wrong, but my temptation is to conclude that the survey hasn’t reached its goals, or that it has, but was never synthesized into conclusions. I’m also tempted to conclude that this is more indicative of the real conditions of adjunct faculty in regards to writing—that their conditions shape and even trump their research—but we’ll hope I’m wrong on that one.

  Tags: Chronicle of Higher Education, Gloria McMillan, Greg Beatty, National Adjunct Writing Faculty Survey Project, surveys

• A Science Writing Star: Interview With Marcia Bartusiak

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  10 Nov 2009 /  publishing, research, time management, writing
  This week I had the opportunity to talk with one of the stars of science writing, Marcia Bartusiak. When she won the AIP Science Writing Award in 1982, she was the first woman to ever do so. Since that time, she’s won that award again (in 2001, for Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony , and, in 2006, won the Andrew W. Gement Award from the American Institute of Physics

  Ms. Bartusiak is also an adjunct faculty member at MIT (though she was careful to explain how that differs from most adjunct positions, as you’ll see below). She was also kind enough to share her experience with me.

  AA: Why do you write?

  Marcia Bartusiak (hereafter MB):In the classic 1952 movie musicalSingin’ in the Rain, Gene Kelly has a number called “Gotta Dance,” which provides one way to frame it.  I often have that feeling, but in my case responding, “Gotta Write, Gotta Write.”  And, for me, it’s always been linked to a love for science and the mysteries it uncovers. Science (particularly astronomy and physics) was a fascination to me from an early age.  But I was perplexed as a child that few of my friends shared this passion.  I usually found I could get their attention if I explained some fact or idea in an entertaining way.  This desire (obviously) never left me. I find joy in the search, trying for the perfect metaphor or analogy that can make someone at least get the “feel” of a scientific concept.  I want them to realize they don’t have to solve a mathematical equation to be fascinated and intrigued by nature’s laws. 

  AA: How does your academic writing relate to your teaching? How about writing that doesn’t qualify as traditional scholarship?

  MB: Everything I do as a writer is related to my teaching, given the position I have as an adjunct professor in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.  My very job is to take the expertise I have built up over my thirty years as a science writer and pass it along to my students: how to interview, craft a snappy news note (important when they first start out), extend their writerly skills into longer features, and even start them thinking about tackling book-length topics. 

  AA: How do you find time to write as an adjunct?

  MB: I have been teaching at MIT over the last six years in a half-time position.  (Previous to that I was a fulltime freelance writer.)  So, while I have time to write, my adjustment has been to the reduced schedule.  Where in the past I could devote fulltime to, say, a book project, I now have to squeeze it in and around my classes, along with strategically using the summer months.  I just had a book come out last April, which I spent about two-and-half years researching and writing.  For the first nine months, I conducted my library research when not in class and scheduled two months of travel around the country for archival research during the summer months.  Upon returning, I wrote up my manuscript, again, whenever I had the time outside of classroom responsibilities.  There were lots of weekends lost to the project as well. 

  AA: How have the institutions who employ you responded to your writing? (Do they support it? Ignore it? Even know about it?)

  MB: The Graduate Program in Science Writing is part of MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, which by its very nature is very supportive of my writing (and certainly encourages its continuation).  Recently upon being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for my science-writing contributions over the years, the department paid for my travel to receive the award.

  AA: You’d mentioned that being an adjunct at MIT is different than working as an adjunct elsewhere. Let’s address that issue directly. What does “adjunct” mean at MIT?

  MB: This can be confusing outside of the MIT community, as it is different from what adjunct has come to mean in academic institutions across the nation.  In the mid-1990s, I was an adjunct at Boston University for two years, where I came in to teach one course during the spring semester.  I was paid a flat fee ($3000 at the time) to teach a graduate-level course in science writing.  I had no other benefits or links to the larger university community.  At MIT, on the other hand, adjunct really means “professor part-time.”  In fact, I was vetted in almost the same way as if I were coming up for tenure at a university.  It was a year-long process that involved a complete assessment of my work over the years and letters of recommendation from scientists and writers.  Upon acceptance, I received a five-year contract, which is renewable upon review.  My salary is commensurate with fulltime professors in my department, adjusted for my halftime hours. MIT also includes me in their pension plan, matches my 401K contributions, and provides full health-care benefits.  Here is how MIT’s Policies and Procedures describes it: “Adjunct Professors are equivalent and made only to practitioners who have developed a high level of expertise in fields of particular importance to the MIT academic program and who also demonstrate a deep commitment to teaching and research. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to, teaching and conducting and supervising research. Each appointee should teach at least the major part of one subject per academic year, may be the instructor in charge of subjects of instruction, may supervise theses with departmental permission, and may be principal investigator on research projects.”  I am a non-voting member of the Faculty and am encouraged to participate in university matters. 

  AA: Wow. That’s both impressive in itself, and great for the MIT adjuncts. I am officially jealous. One more MIT-related question to close, if I may. What writing-related challenges and/or opportunities do you see MIT offering?

  MB: Having the connection to MIT has already opened many doors for me.  Since I have been on staff, I have had many more invitations to serve on conference panels and give lectures at other universities.

  AA: Thank you!

   

  Tags: Greg Beatty, Marcia Bartusiak, MIT, science writing

• What Makes Me Real?

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  07 Oct 2009 /  publishing, research, teaching
  When I was in graduate school I was pulled towards two different realities.

  On one hand, the faculty encouraged scholarship. More than once I was essentially told that to be a real academic, I had to publish. In some cases, I was told this quite explicitly and literally. In other cases, it was communicated through advice cloaked in various degrees of politeness and helpfulness. Such comments ranged from “You probably won’t want to teach in that program; you’ll want to choose something that will require less energy from you, so you can focus on your own dissertation” to the more straightforward “So, what are you working on?”

  In a few dozen repetitions, even a first year graduate student un-socialized in academic culture (me, in other words) can learn to answer with discussions of papers underway, not teaching projects.

  On the other hand, while I did well in my coursework, I found myself at sea emotionally with most of my studies. The level of abstraction and the theoretical assumptions seemed divorced from life…but teaching did not. Teaching—even teaching a bunch of hung over, resistant freshmen at 8 AM—was real. Dragging them from stasis and fear to understanding carried an excitement with it. I spent hours plotting class sequences and even dedicated time trying to figure out how to reach each student.

  These two gravitational fields pulled me back and forth. At times I achieved synthesis: insight from my own research and writing flowed into my teaching. Most of the time, though, the two didn’t seem to connect and I was simply torn.

  As an adjunct, I am too often free of both tensions. That is to say, there are no tenure reviews keeping me on the publishing track. My employers don’t ask about my writing—and most don’t seem interested. In more than one case, there’s no regular form or time to report it. I find myself feeling like a scholastic ghost: there’s no real scholar here.

  I should be free to focus on my teaching. It’s true that my time is spent teaching, but too much time is spent there. I have to take the advice I got in graduate school on repeating assignments, just to survive, but that means the creativity, connection, and reality are squeezed from my teaching. I’m infinitely more experienced as a teacher than I was as a graduate student…but I don’t feel real.

  What makes an adjunct real? It isn’t writing. Maybe it is fatigue.

  Tags: Greg Beatty, scholarship, teaching

• Write On! An Interview With Dana S. Dunn

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  27 May 2009 /  adjuncts, publishing, research, time management, writing
  This week we’re shifting focus a bit. Dana S. Dunn is Professor of Psychology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Moravian is a small and selective liberal arts college with a long and distinguished history. Professor Dunn has edited several books on pedagogical practices, published scores of articles, and several of his own books, including A Short Guide to Writing about Psychology. Professor Dunn was gracious enough to share his perspective on adjuncts and writing.

  Adjunct Advocate (AA): What specific challenges do adjuncts face when writing?

  Professor Dunn: The most common challenge the adjunct writer faces is discretionary time. Time to reflect. Time to read. And most of all, time to actually write. Multiple courses, which are sometimes taught on multiple campuses, which adds a commuting time, take a toll. So does lecture and discussion preparation and grading. Factoring in some “down” time for family or leisure pursuits (or possibly additional, non-teaching-related work) leaves little time for writing. So, the aspiring writer who is an adjunct must either be or become a whiz at time management. He or she must also learn to make maximum use of small amounts of writing time. For concrete guidance about writing often but in small amounts, I suggest adjunct colleagues consult the very good works of Robert Boice, who researched effective and not-so-effective strategies pursued by new and junior faculty. (AA: Boice is author of books such as Advice for New Faculty Members [2000] and Professors as Writers [1990].)  

  Having a quiet space to write can be a challenge. Adjunct offices are also usually shared by several adjuncts, which means they are a quick way station for students and the adjuncts themselves for before or after class meetings.

  AA: Do you find that adjunct faculty members focus their writing on different areas than tenure track faculty do? Are more or less in touch with current theory?

  Dunn: I can really only speak for psychology, but my guess is that adjuncts are apt to focus on carving out writing projects from their dissertations simply because the primary research has already been done. For writing in new scholarly directions, it may well depend upon the field. Faculty in the humanities, for example, may be able to continue in their intended area of interest if they have access to adequate library or other archival resources. Faculty in the natural sciences and some social sciences (including psychology) really need access to dedicated lab facilities. Unless a college or university is willing to provide such facilities (and few do), adjuncts in those area will be hard pressed to begin or continue original research. One possible solution is to develop a scholarly collaboration with a colleague who has access to a lab or the equivalent or to continue working with one’s graduate mentor (if one exists).

  Keeping in touch with current theory is a matter of reading journals, monitoring or taking part in online discussions, and attending conferences. The first two options are easier than the last, which requires funding. But even the first two are a challenge if you are teaching 3, 4, or 5 courses a term to make ends meet.

  AA: What could interested institutions do to help adjuncts engage in more writing/write and publish more successfully?

  Dunn: I don’t mean to be flip, but for starters such institutions could pay adjunct colleagues more on a per class basis and/or reward longer term adjuncts with use of institutional resources (e.g., copying privileges, secretarial support, paper and other supplies, a place to work).

  Adjuncts can try to orient writing assignments in class to pedagogical outcomes that might be publishable in teaching or pedagogy journals. Interested institutions could run adjunct training workshops devoted to professional development activities (e.g., time management skills, manuscript preparation, negotiating with editors) in addition to teaching strategies. Everyone benefits if graduate students, new faculty, and adjunct faculty all receive guidance preparing for the classroom and professional/scholarly activities.

  AA: Are there writing-related challenges or opportunities that are specific to psychology as a discipline?

  Dunn: Psychology is a science, which means it is driven (largely) by empirical data. Academic psychologists conduct research, which means they need access to research participants, resources to pay for research expenses, and so on. Research is a big undertaking and not for the faint of heart. The chief writing-related challenge is having data or access to data that can be written up into publishable journal articles. Besides empirical articles, of course, psychologists also write theory and review articles, commentary pieces, book reviews, pedagogy and teaching articles, and so on. However, empirical journal articles are the coin of the realm for new and untenured faculty. I would advise an adjunct faculty member in psychology to complete and defend the dissertation at all costs, and then pull out as many empirical articles from it as can be done.

  The article(s) should be placed in as rigorous a journal as possible through the peer review process. I would then counsel the adjunct colleague to network in order to form a collaboration with a colleague or colleagues who has research facilities. The goal is to continue to produce a record of reasonable scholarship (e.g., co-authored papers or chapters, conference presentations) while being an effective adjunct faculty member and continuing to search for a full-time position (if that is the adjunct colleague’s goal).

  AA: Let us shift focus a moment. Is there a benefit to schools and/or administrators to provide the kind of support you suggest for adjuncts? (What might motivate them to do so?)

  The main benefits for creating such support are to (a) develop some institutional loyalty on the part of the adjuncts (i.e., what is to be lost by treating them well?) and (b) markedly improving the experience for our students (i.e., faculty who are treated well and fairly, whether adjunct or full-time, will perform better in the classroom, take their work more seriously, be more conscientious, and so on). Kindness and decency are always good ideas.

  Motivating administrators is, of course, always a challenge, more so now due to the economy. Still, an argument can be made that modest outlays of resources for adjunct colleagues will pay dividends to the institution where reliability, professionalism, and students’ experiences in the classroom are concerned. If nothing else, trying an “experiment” in this vein is probably a good idea. Perhaps encouraging an administration to do a trial run (say, a year or two) where resources for adjuncts is concerned is one way to learn whether it is cost effective and beneficial to the institution. Again, I don’t see any great risks here, although I am sure that some administrators would worry that creating (positive) expectations can be problematic if the (experimental) benefits are later withdrawn. To deal with this problem, I would counsel candor at the start.

  Thanks so much for inviting me to comment. I hope my observations prove to be useful.

  AA: Thank you! Your comments have been very helpful indeed. 

  Tags: Dana Dunn, Greg Beatty, Moravian College, psychology, publishing, writing

• Money. Money. Money.

  2 Comments
  28 Apr 2009 /  adjuncts, funding, publishing, research
  As I noted last week, many schools don’t have a strong sense that adjuncts write. (Okay, that’s putting it mildly…) As a result, they don’t provide much funding for conference attendance. Actually, that too is putting it mildly. Many schools provide no funds at all to support academic research/writing by adjuncts. Those funds are reserved for full-time faculty. It seems part of the general mindset that adjuncts aren’t real faculty, and/or that they aren’t really part of the institution where they teach.

  However, some schools do support adjunct scholarship both psychologically and financially. These schools are institutions that have reconfigured how they think about academic labor; a number of them accent online education, and expect adjuncts to play a major role in their institutions, and plan accordingly.

  For example, Baker College, whose home campus is in Michigan, has a thriving online program. Officials make funds available to adjuncts on a case-by-case basis for presenting papers at conferences. They also actively solicit research by faculty that relates directly to teaching and/or that would directly benefit Baker students.

  Upper Iowa University makes research funds available to adjuncts. The University of Phoenix provides funds not just for conference presentations, but in the form of honorariums for academic publications. Granted, the $200 for each publication won’t pay the rent or take the place of tenure, but University of Phoenix adjuncts who publish can accumulate up to four of these each year (for publishing or presentations), and that helps buy time to research and write.

  Each of these schools mentioned also supports publications socially/emotionally; school officials publicize papers and/or presentations, and send congratulatory emails.

  The funding policies at some of these schools also reflect a shifting attitude toward academic labor/the academic market in general. That is to say, in addition to supporting research and faculty development, some of these schools speak directly of faculty publications as branding/promoting a school’s brand. For an adjunct who’s also a scholar, the distinction in the short run may be moot; he or she may actually be better served by this more business-like approach to publishing than by attitudes at more traditional schools. In the longer run, this is part of a larger shift in what publication means for academics.

  Tags: academic conferences, adjunct faculty, Baker College, funding, Greg Beatty, University of Phoenix, Upper Iowa University, writing

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