On reading today's NY Times most-emailed list

When the media discuss academia, and in this case the tenure track's apparent demise, I always find myself getting irritated. (I also bristle at any movie about classical musicians, the only other professional world I know anything about.) The article's main thrust is that students are getting a lesser education with the growing reliance on adjunct teachers at big state universities, even though (and this is reiterated every time, and it is true) adjunct teachers are often as good as (if not better than) tenure track teachers. The main problem, according to the article, is that these part-timers, often teaching as many as 6 courses at 3 or 4 different institutions in a semester, are rarely around outside of class time, and thus cannot adequately support their students.

From my perspective, the main problem isn't so much the impact on students, but the impact on intellectual life in general. By assuring professors "academic freedom" (a concept that has lost any real specific meaning these days), tenure provides an absolutely essential secure environment for the pursuit of sometimes abstract, abstruse, not-immediately-applicable ideas and research projects. Such space for intellectual pursuit is increasingly rare--among professional intellectuals as well as students--to the point that it doesn't even come up in an article like this.

The point is not necessarily that more serious intellectuals make better teachers--we all know they often don't, though some of my "worst" teachers in college, who mumbled or strayed from the point or designed poor assignments or failed to put time into grading papers or never showed up for office hours, were the ones I learned the most from because, at one point or another, they said something really profound, different, thought-provoking that changed things for me.

The point is that academia has been, and should continue to be, one of the rare places in our hyper-capitalistic, consumerist, over-worked, stressed-out society where thinking for the sake of thinking should be allowed to happen.

And adjuncts simply do not have time for this, unless they have other sources of income and are teaching merely for fun (which does account for some, actually). Most, however, are working their asses off with little or no job security and mounting resentment against the academic caste system. Few have time to spend on research projects, going to conferences, or (my preferred mode of intellectual activity) just sitting and thinking. Few get to design new courses or consider larger curricular issues, and most get plugged into existing courses, and sometimes even existing syllabi.

Which means fewer and fewer people, besides the increasingly powerful administrators, have time or space to think seriously about what it means to be an educated person. (And don't even get me started on all the time the shrinking pool of t/t profs are now required to spend thinking about "assessment," which, in my experience, is mainly about providing nice digestible sound bytes for syllabi and administrators.)

OK, time to get off my soapbox and get some work done!