Academic Labor

The Endarkenment at Home: Benchmarking Academics (guest post by Elijah Millgram)

The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization is a new book by Elijah Millgram (Utah). In the book, Professor Millgram looks at the implications of our becoming, more and more, “a society of specialists” in which “communication across the barriers between the professions and disciplines is our own very pressing problem,” a problem that “threat..

Iowa Bill Proposes Faculty Play “Survivor” (updated)

A bill (Senate File 64) under consideration in the Iowa legislature, proposed by State Senator Mark Chelgren, would turn faculty positions into something like Survivor. Or maybe the Hunger Games. The bill would:

Require that any professor employed by an institution of higher learning under the control of the board teach at least one course offered for academic c..

Sexism in Academic Hiring — A Myth? (updated)

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences produced findings that appear to show that hiring practices in certain fields are not biased against women. Here is the paper’s “significance” summary:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist ..

On Warwick’s Outsourcing (a few updates)

A few days ago news surfaced of the University of Warwick’s plan to outsource some of its teaching to a company called Teach Higher. According to the website Fighting Against Casualisation in Education (FACE):

Hourly paid academic staff… will no longer be employed directly by the university but by a separate employer: ‘Teach Higher’. Teach Higher has been set u..

Solutions to the Jobs Problem Revisited

Last year, Daily Nous reported that Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at University of Reading, had been collecting various possible responses to problems associated with the high ratio of PhD holders to academic jobs. The full report is here, and the helpful summary, which groups the more popular responses by type, is here.

Professor Dickey (et al) report th..

Honoraria in Philosophy

A philosopher writes in with a query about paying philosophers for talks and the like…

I’d like to learn more about honorarium practices for philosophy talks. How common is it to offer an honorarium? Under what circumstances (e.g. departmental colloquium, conference, public lecture, etc.)? What is a typical amount? It would be especially helpful if respondents ..

Serious Cuts and Stark Choices at Aberdeen

The University of Aberdeen is attempting to cut £10.5 million from its expenditures for the 2015-16 academic year, and they are starting with faculty and staff. It aims to cut 150 positions, according to an email sent to faculty and staff from new Senior Vice Principal Jeremy Kilburn, provided to me from a source at the university who prefers to remain anonymous. Th..

How Much Do Philosophers Earn?

The College and University Professional Association for Human Resources has released the results of its annual survey of faculty salaries. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that

For the second consecutive year, salary increases for professors at public colleges outpaced those of their peers at private institutions: Their salaries rose by 2.1 percent and 2..

Promotions 2014-15

It’s that time of the year when many colleges and universities are beginning to announce who has received promotion to associate or full professor, or to a named chair or other special position. If you have received a promotion during the 2014-2015 year, or you are in a position to make announcements about who in your department has done so, please list that informa..

TAs at York and Toronto Strike

Approximately 6000 teaching assistants (TAs) at the University of Toronto are currently on strike, and around 3700 TAs and adjuncts at York University, also in Toronto, just last night voted to go on strike. The main concerns appear to be pay and job stability for the adjuncts. An article in The Star has more details. The Canadian Union of Public Employees is repres..

Today is National Adjunct Walkout Day

Today is National Adjunct Walkout Day (NAWD). There was some discussion of this here last week. Some information about the day and planned activities is at this Tumblr site, as well as on Facebook. The Chronicle of Higher Education interviews Ellen Schrecker (Yeshiva University), whose research includes academic labor and the broader labor movement, about the day. T..

Adjunct Walkout Day: What are you doing?

Adjuncts sometimes say they make up higher education’s invisible class. So an idea pitched on social media a few months ago struck a chord: What would happen if adjuncts across the country turned that invisibility on its head by all walking out on the same day? National Adjunct Walkout Day, proposed for Feb. 25, immediately gained support, and adjuncts continue to u..

Quantifying the Influence of Prestige

A new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers focuses on “who hires whose graduates as faculty” in order to “present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequ..

Thoughts on Academic Freedom

It seems to me we need some clarification of the idea of academic freedom, so I am throwing out these thoughts, rather tentatively, to get the ball rolling. I welcome discussion on this, though keep in mind this is a blog post and not an academic paper. Links to helpful resources as well as discussions elsewhere are also welcome. Ok, so here goes:

Academic freedo..