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Thursday, June 14, 2012

Welcome to my life, or at least, an unsavory part of it...

Good review of a book about toiling in the depths of adjunct-faculty hell. Don't know how great the book itself is, but as somsone who got paid a pittance to teach freshman comp over the past four years, as tuition continues to go up and up, I can attest that this is an educational scandal of national proportions. The adjuncts are suffering, overworked and underpaid as they are, the students certainly are not benefiting from the experience as much as they ought to be, considering the debt loads they are carrying.

The review, by Sarah Boslaugh on PopMatters, discusses In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, written by someone calling him- or herself "Professor X." The review begins:

"Americans have a schizophrenic relationship with education in general and higher education in particular. On the one hand, we worship education in the abstract as an equalizing force giving everyone in our supposedly mobile society a chance to make it on their own merits, and we tend to think that not only individuals, but also our larger society, benefits from more students enrolled in more formal education. On the other hand, we love to attack teachers, students, and the whole education system for being wasteful, dishonest, incompetent, out of touch with the real world… you name the insult, and an educator has probably heard it at one time or another."

Read the rest of the review here.

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