The Academy of Broken Dreams
by Tim Pettipiece
(excerpted from University Affairs, September 3, 2014)
A lot of attention has been paid in recent months to the plight of part-time and non-tenured faculty teaching at North American universities, sometimes known as the “adjunctification” of university teaching. I can comment only on the Canadian experience, which by recent accounts is a far better situation than in the United States, where part-time professors can actually be impoverished.
Still, the reality is that at many institutions in both countries, the percentage of undergraduate teaching being done by non-permanent staff has dramatically increased.
This development is relatively recent. Throughout my entire university education (1996 to 2006) I don’t recall taking a single course that was not taught by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member. Yet here I am, one of the no-longer-silent majority of university teachers with little to no hope of permanent employment.
For a long time, I thought it was just me, that I had somehow failed in some key aspect of my dossier. I know now that I am not alone. An entire generation of scholars and scholarship is being lost due to this dramatic shift in academic hiring. In fact, not one person from my PhD program cohort has managed to land a tenure-track position.
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