General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Underpaid 83-Year-Old Professor Died Trying to Make Ends Meet by Working Night Shift at Eat an' Save [View all]tomg
(2,574 posts)- 45 years in academia and teaching on all levels and in all capacities( ta, adjunct for over 15 years, tenured prof 20 years) I find full-time academics in general utterly and I think often willfully oblivious to the working conditions of those who are not on tenure track. Again, this is from my own experience only but by and large, my colleagues are all uniformly liberal in their politics and voting practices and completely Randian in their daiiy practices towards their non-tenured and junior colleagues ( at least when it comes to cutting up the pie). More often than not, they are simply playing into the hands of administration. Professor Vojtko was an adjunct, probably the toughest and worst academic position to hold.
What the Duquesne administration did was utterly despicable, but they are the administration and what can you expect from them with the corporatization of the university. In a way I actually hold them less morally culpable ( although clearly they are). I don't know about the Duquesne Faculty Governance system or how its contracts work, but if they are anything like where I work ( we actually compete against them and are ranked in the same type and class), I doubt the faculty contract negotiators did much, if anything, to alleviate the plight of adjuncts. At our last contract vote, a few of us raised the issue of adjunct pay and representing them in negotiations. Our chief negotiators replied to the effect that "adjuncts were not our problem."