America, Y U no pay adjuncts living wage?!

CNN, aka Contains No News, may be back to actually containing some news. I just watched their Ivory Tower program. A good, wide-ranging discussion of the cutting edge issues facing higher education today. There was a lot worth discussing but I would like to focus on the "hack education" segment. A speaker in that portion made three good points.

Education is:

1) Content,

2) A network of people who can help you in life, and

3) The credential.

I think this is perfectly true.

In a fascist, imperialist country with neoliberal universities destroying the humanities and social sciences we must ask the crucial question:

How can we reimagine education to fulfill these objectives in a way that bypasses colleges and universities and creates new scholarly journals run by adjuncts and contingent professors?

An extremely tall order, to be sure, but I think it is the future we must pursue. Because the past really isn't working. And technology makes a lot of new things possible.

But maybe MOOCs aren't it. They have terrible student persistence rates, customer satisfaction and learning outcomes.

Udacity, Cousera, EdX and the like still need to be given a fair shake and time to work out the kinks. But the initial data is not indicating the Brave New World we thought we had in our grasp.

My peripatos, this perpatos, our peripatos, is open for a walk.

Let us journey and reason together.

Let us be realists, let us demand the impossible

Adjuncts, contingent professors, newly minted Ph.D.s, Romans, country men and womyn, lend me your ear!

We know the issues, the struggles, the hustle, the grind.

We know what we want to do. We want to inspire students to greatness and conduct high quality, peer reviewed research, while also earning a living wage.

We do not know quite how to demand that out of the ever-increasingly corporatized neoliberal university.

I envision a journal to come - peer-reviewed by adjuncts, contingent professors, and newly minted Ph.D.s.  Serious in nature - and worth little for your CV - but - you know what? - let us presage an entirely new way of approaching the crisis in the humanities and social sciences education labor market in the Anglophone world.

If you want to chair the publication of any discipline or anti-discipline committee in the humanities and social sciences, gather at least two other top adjuncts in your field and send us a 250 word proposal. Let us begin to create an entirely new paradigm for higher education. One to be built upon the labor of the least empowered but most numerous faculty among us: the adjuncts, contingent professors, newly minted Ph.D.s.

We know the crisis. For starters, most of us can barely afford to live!

We want to be public intellectuals.

Let us move forward figuring it out together in this our agora and rise along together.

All political perspectives will be welcome. All methodologies, qualitative and quantitative. Disciplinary, inter-disciplinary and anti-disciplinary. The only requirement is that we are share a political and labor commitment to improving our collective economic and intellectual position in society while still delivering great teaching and great peer-reviewed research to the public. But let the peer reviewers and the MOOC providers begin to be us.

We can figure out how to monetize it later.

The adjunct rebellion starts now.