While Sara had a bunch of great material and ideas, the one that resonated most deeply with me was her ongoing collaboration with Anne-Marie Deitering.  This is one example of their work: a piece about embedding information literacy in FYC.  As I see it, this kind of collaboration across disciplines and departments is exactly what we, as compositionists, should be doing.

Given the current pace for tech development, the flurry of new online tools, and the overwhelming tides of information, there is no way we can be experts at everything.  Therefore, it behooves us to not just work with people to get things done; collaboration, in and of itself, seems like one of the best and most efficient ways to harness our own unique skill sets with others and work toward a common project.

As a side note, it has been my experience that librarians can be some of the coolest, quirkiest, and most interesting folks around (outside of comp, of course ).  Compositionists work with texts.  Librarians work with texts.  If we share our perspectives, means of categorizing (please do not hit me with theories about categorization!  Please!), and tools for organizing, perhaps we can better crystalize our own understandings and pass on the best, most efficient tools to our students so that they can achieve the success they construct for themselves.

I am sure that some adjuncts—maybe even a majority—want to preserve their academic freedom and protect their work.  Near as I can tell, the universities largely devalue and dismiss our work.  Why?  Because if they actually valued our intellectual contributions, we would be paid more.  And if we were paid more, then we would accrue more social standing, power, and respect.  Unfortunately, pay scale equals respect in this culture (this is true in the academy as well in spite of cries of denial), and if you make more money, you have greater value.  If you have greater value, as determined by pay scale, it makes it harder for a university to come after you.  Oh yes, they can still come after highly paid and/or tenured folks if they are motivated.  However, it is far easier to dismiss a low-paid adjunct than a high paid tenure tracker.

Parity in pay means an increase in respect from colleagues and the institution.  This respect means being heard, and it means greater protection from the whims of power holders and public personalities.  If you do not have decent pay, then you are accorded little respect.  Little respect equals little protection which means little academic freedom.  Not only can you not pay your power bill, but you have to keep your mouth shut in order to keep your job.

While tenure trackers are our colleagues, and we like to regard them as peers, it is hard to struggle or be concerned about our tenured colleagues’ academic freedoms when we cannot pay our bills.  And when we have to pay for dental work on an over-taxed credit card, the freedom to trash the president or the bourgeoisie pales in comparison.  It really is a matter of priorities.

Academic freedom and protections usually arrive with pay increases, not before.  Pay us more, give us health benefits, and you will likely see academic freedom flourish.

From “The Rhetoric of the ‘Job Market’” (204-5):

Under the current system of academic work, the university clearly does not prefer the best of most experienced teachers; it prefers the cheapest teachers.  Increasingly, that means the creation of nontenurable full-time instructorships and other casual appointments, a casualization that has unfolded unevenly by discipline and is especially pronounced in English and writing instruction.  In this instance, Bowen has again simply applied the dominant logic and assumed that, even within the context of a general assault on the tenure system, “of course” managers would hire the best “doctoral product” available.  From the posture of common sense, it seems reasonable to assume—as many people have—that the replacement of tenured positions with “full-time” term contract positions means that person holding doctorates will be awarded those jobs.  The fashionable notion that we have an “oversupply” of degree holders sustains this assumption: many graduate faculty imagine that their students who don’t get tenurable work will be leading contenders for contract positions, in which, it is further assumed, they will pursue the scholarship, teaching, and service that they would have done in a tenurable position, albeit on a more sped-up basis, less well paid, and without the protections of tenure.  While it is true that numerous degree holders seek and would gladly accept these positions, the facts are quite clear: holders of doctorates have not enjoyed a preferential status for those jobs.  Non-tenure track positions have been awarded to persons with the doctorate in numbers large enough to substantially reduce the overall percentage of Ph.D. holders in the full-time workforce.