I agreeto Idea Faculty Representation Needed at this Summit!
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Faculty Representation Needed at this Summit!

Where is faculty representation?! Why are there no faculty members attending this summit? I suggest you have faculty representation - and that you also have ADJUNCT faculty representation since adjuncts account for half of the workforce teaching community college students. I'm so disappointed to see that Jill Biden, a faculty member herself, neglected to include faculty in this event. It is not too late. I implore you to include faculty!!

Submitted by ikkinh 2 years ago

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  1. The 6 year 2002 cohort graduation rate for African American males at The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio was 5%. That is outrageous! Only 2.5% of the university's $400 million budget is spent compensating the 1,000+ part-time faculty who constitute over 60% of the total faculty. The university's president and 35 vice presidents earn in excess of 50% of what the 1,000 part-time faculty earn. The mean annual salary for an adjunct lecturer at UA who teaches 7/8 of a full-time equivalent load is $16,800 per year. Part-time faculty at UA receive no university sponsored health insurance. A part-time faculty member who wishes to purchase the least expense health insurance for a family of three while earning at the bottom end of the pay scale would spend 91% of their gross pay simply to purchase the least expensive health insurance option.

    If you want to impact student success, then normalize the roles of those who are interacting with those students. Pay a living wage with health benefits. Provide a career path for the nearly 1 million contingent faculty upon whose backs higher ed budgets are being balanced. A teacher's working conditions are a student's learning conditions.

    2 years ago
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  2. I agree about PT faculty. But it's a trend that's been developing for some forty years: essentially, we've built in the exploitations of part-timers (grad students, adjuncts, too, remember) to out higher ed system.

    Often, I have the sneaky, unhappy feeling that this is a derivative of 19th-century educational systems, in which the vast majority of public school teaching was done by grossly underpaid women.

    Now, we sit through endless tirades about teachers' unions--when the fact is (and not forgetting the problems in our teachers) that what's going on in all these tirades is the demand that we go back to them good ol' days, when schoolmarms did everything for a pittance.

    2 years ago
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  3. I agree, but what do you expect? How long has it been that people took the, "administrative track," through their education (doctorates in, "educational leadership," forsooth!) rather than evolve into admin through the course of a teaching career that was decades long?

    How much phony scholarship do we have from these folks, how many webinars on insane educational theories that are really all about policing the classroom and avoiding getting sued?

    Every good administrator I've worked with "came up through the ranks."

    If teacher training's a problem--what about admin training?

    2 years ago
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