Fact Checking the Experts

by Kevin B. English

The Internet has made self publishing very easy and convenient and, most importantly, available to the masses.  In turn, many comments and remarks are taken out of context.  This morning I ran across such a case.

1. I received the following tweet from Daniel Pink, a famed and respected author and lecturer.

DanielPink: RT @skap5: In 1960 75% of college instructors were full time tenured or tenure track professors. Today only 27% are.

My take away from this was “this is bad”.  Not sure if that is what the author intended, but that was my take away.

2.  I then pasted the entire tweet into Google to see if I could source the Tweet.  Below is what I came upon next.

Strangle the Future

By Tim Tyson on December 31, 2009 6:46 AM

“In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.”

“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”

I’m glad I went to university when I did. I had some of the most amazing professors!

Ooohhh, this is really bad.  The implication is that non-tenured professors are worse teachers than tenured track teachers.  Better be careful.

3.  After some more researching I found the original source material, a New York Times article.  Guess what,  there are some positives and negatives to having non-tenured professors.

The possible negatives:

1.  “It’s sometimes harder to track down adjuncts outside of class, because they rarely have offices or even their own departmental mailboxes.”  Hmmm, this could also be said of tenured track professors.  I know that our local community college requires the same office amount of office hours of tenured track and non-tenure track professors.

2. “It’s not unusual for adjuncts to be hired at the last minute to teach courses they’ve never taught. And with no job security, they may consider it advantageous to tailor classes for student approval.”  A very valid point in my opinion.

The possible positives:

1.  “If you take a strict anti-adjunct stance, you may miss out on some star instructors — Barack Obama taught a seminar on racism and the law at the University of Chicago Law School as an adjunct.”

2.  “Professoring part-time is a hobby for overachieving architects, graphic designers, lawyers and entrepreneurs, all of whom can share insights from real-world experiences (my emphasis) that full-time academics haven’t had.”

The crux is that,

“Before making assumptions that an adjunct is bad, Google them,” Mr. Cohen says. “You may find that real estate teacher is one step removed from Donald Trump’s V.P. on LinkedIn, and these are the types of people you want to meet.”

And lastly, back to the contention that

“In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make.”

I never could find the source for this quote.  The New York Times article doesn’t refer to the source, nor is the author’s email address made available.  I wrote the New York Times requesting the source of the quote. I will keep you posted.

(As an aside,  I think an interesting high school classroom assignment would be to take a piece of quoted writing and source the quote back to the author and make the determination of whether the quote was used in context or out of context.)

Comments?  Thoughts?

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