My bid for the UMUC faculty advisory council failed again, but I came in a very close second with the field quite a ways behind us. I had some great campaigner for me here in the European Division:

See http://www.umuc.edu/gov/fac/election07.shtml for the complete results. Scroll down to "adjunct."

I'll give it another go next year!

A colleague-adjunct who is following the FAC election wrote me today expressing general agreement with my program, but concern with my intent to raise the top limit for teaching loads. She is concerned that higher teaching loads will concentrate the shrinking number of courses on fewer and fewer adjuncts, leaving some out in the cold. I answered:

You make a good point. I have been in your position, although not that explicitly in that I am never quite sure why I sometimes get and sometimes don't get courses in particular terms. With the exception of a few rocky terms, the system has been good to me, I trust my director to be fair and I haven't felt the need to go begging for courses every term. If as FAC I start hearing complaints from others, however, I would represent those interests.

It is an interesting issue: Do we adjuncts who have been in the game for several years try to get higher teaching limits and seniority rights to shut the door on the constant stream of "younger" adjuncts knocking at the door? Or do we have solidarity with all who are adjuncts and move to share our shrinking job with a stable or perhaps even occasionally growing body of co-adjuncts? As one of those silly people trying to feed a family from within the "adjunct trap," I feel a pull in both directions. The short version is that I don't have an easy answer. Here are two ideas that speak obliquely to your concerns:

I think course limits should be loosened in principle because there are situations where the limit leads to problems: instead of giving some adjunct one more course, they have some other adjunct or collegiate driving endless distances for example, or they fly in some more expensive collegiate from the States for a year (here speaks my European perspective). The directors should have the flexibility to delegate more courses if there is a need.

What I have long wanted is some greater transparency in the system of how courses are delegated. That would make it clearer to everybody what is actually going on. There might be some kind of implicit seniority in place. There might be implicit variations in the course limits based on who is where. I have been hesitant to make a program point out of this, however, as it might end up backfiring on me personally or all of us collectively. If directors were bound by some rigid system or knew that all their decisions had to be publicly justified, some totally new animal might emerge that would not necessarily make us happier. We need dialogue amongst ourselves about what we really want before we can approach the administration with an alternative.

A third idea - effecting only those here in Germany, so it is a side issue for most of you - that is probably way outside anything I could do as a FAC representative, but which is something I have thought about for years, would be to get the SOFA changed. Long-term people abroad should be able to get collegiate positions without having to be hired from stateside. We would be cheaper for both the DoD and UMUC and we would feed money into the German system by paying German taxes and not having an ID card to spend our money on Doritos in the PX. Correct me if I am wrong, but my impression is that this would help everybody.

I would be very interested in getting more input on any of these ideas.

I have decided to run again as the UMUC Europe representative of the UMUC Faculty Advisory Committee. I ran last year and finished in the top four, so my colleagues have encouraged me to give it another shot. Here's my pitch:

I have been singing about the dismal fate of the life-long adjunct (mp3) at faculty meetings for several years now. I will be one of the first European adjuncts on the FAC, and as such will have the improvement of our conditions on my agenda, but these coincide with the interests of adjuncts in Asia and Adelphi as well.

A glance at the FAC constitution shows that the FAC directly advises the provost and the president on every matter of university policy. While the FAC role is seen as advisory, it is in fact also representative. In recent years, the adjunct has been the exploited migrant worker of the U.S. university system. This has been bad for faculty and for universities. Therefore, my role will be that of an advocate for adjuncts all over the world. We need:

- an up to date pay raise consistent with current inflation rates. We haven't had a raise in three years!
- a clear career path to collegiate status if we so desire
- broader tuition remission benefits (beyond the current “scholarships”)
- access to health insurance and retirement benefits
- clearer regular policies for course assignments and seniority rights
- raising the current 15 credit limit on teaching loads.
- reducing class size, especially in DE courses. Current average globally is 28. Classes of over 30 are common.

In my capacity as a FAC member, faculty salaries in general and especially benefits for adjuncts are definitely at the top of my list of priorities.

See also: http://hatlie.twoday.net/stories/4357132/

As I re-work my graduate-level course on the Renaissance and Reformation and consider required readings, I am faced with the challenge of finding the books I want while staying within the understandable budget limits set by the history department. There are primary sources widely available online and, in addition, for students who want them, cheap in hard copies. The secondary literature is still expensive, however. There are some books available in the school e-brary, but there are (again, understandable) limits on pages per session and on how many students can be reading it at once. If I want to do a seminar-like class where all six to ten students read the same whole book for one discussion, that could run into problems.

Then I got an idea. It is probably not new or original, but here it is: No more academic publishing houses. With academics paying more and more out of their own pockets to have books published and hard copies getting more and more expensive, and more and more free media attracting the attention of students and other adults, we could just go totally author-driven. That means:

- Authors write, format and publish their own books.

- University electronic libraries could store the electronic copies. If they want, they could limit the books they accept, or limit acceptance to certain labels or collections, to impose a brand of exclusivity or peer review. A system whereby each book has one "home server" with an unchangeable copy, and that is what academics and researchers would cite, might establish itself. Or something like JSTOR for books.

- Those libraries could impose restrictions on whether an author could make revisions. So these works would remain as stable as books and not as changeable and unreliable as web pages.

- Anybody can access, download and print out any books they want from these libraries. I suppose a price could be imposed, but it could be circumvented fairly easily through "pirating."

What would happen?

- The cost of publishing and access for things like research and education would plummet. Online classes would work much as before. Live seminars would either have people discussing with only their notes in front of them or, if they want the book, to print it out and bring it along or have a lap-top or e-book reader with them.

- The responsibility of the author would be more total. There would be a lot more books, because it would all be vanity publishing. Average quality of published material would decline, as authors go to print without as much expert help. Either the libraries would do the sorting out and would start to compete for ranking of exclusivity for what they allow on their servers, or there would be a flood of books and reviewers in each field, whose reputations would establish themselves, would bring some books to the fore while others sink. That is not much different than what already happens, but the start-up costs for a "flop" would be almost nil in this case.

- Instead of getting almost no royalties, the authors would get no royalties. Universities could take some of the money they save from publishing and spend it on research grants, perhaps.

- The cost of actually having a hard copy would probably go up, as the reader would have to print and bind his or her own copy. It would be a question of quality, of course. A plastic spiral binding would be cheaper.

Although I was at the Chicago American Historical Association meeting where it was founded, I had never heard about the Historians Against the War movement until yesterday. I quickly signed their petition. Their concern is not only with the international implications of our pre-emptive war policy (see the National Security Strategy of the United States from September 2002), but also with the growing threat to our civil liberties at home in the United States. The latter issue has been a continuing concern of the American Historical Association as well.

I would encourage my fellow professional historians and history teachers to check out the webpage and sign the statement.

My paper was well received at the conference on Baltic Germans in Sankelmark. I also took the opportunity to photograph 30 "Sites of Memory" in and around Hamburg and Flensburg.

Several months ago I went on Wikipedia and changed Simon Bolivar into a communist by adding to the article on him that he was the "founder of the Second Venezuelan Worker's and Peasant's Commune." That change stayed up on Wikipedia for three weeks! I tried a bolder experiment a short time later by making Abraham Lincoln into a lapsed Catholic. That got corrected within five minutes by a fellow editor who wrote, "This is Abraham Lincoln president of the United States." The implication was hopefully not that a Catholic could never be president, but that I had mistaken Lincoln for some other Lincoln, an 18th-century clockmaker, perhaps.

I have since learned that I am not the only scholar testing the veracity of humanities articles at the online encyclopedia. Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, made several changes to Wikipedia articles - some plausible and hard to check, others rather ridiculous and easy to check. All of his additions were corrected by fellow editors withing three hours. Halavais is blogging about it at alex .halavais.net.

Read about Halavais and other Wikipedia issues at yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on Wikipedia by Brock Read. It goes into many of the issues that scholars and teachers are constantly discussing: the scholarly reliability or lack thereof, "digital Maoism", the quality of natural science articles vs. the problematic nature of humanities articles, the well-known case of John Saigenthaler, Jr., etc. It mentions two scholarly projects to grade Wikipedia articles. One finds these issues - and student over-reliance on Wikipedia - constantly discussed by teaching faculty and at history conferences.

I must admit I use Wikipedia. It is a great source of images and links and, sometimes, to get a good first impression of a topic. I also generate most of the traffic for my Sites of Memory webpage by posting back-links at Wikipedia. But I must be counted among the skeptics for other uses. Read my take on how to use and not use Wikipedia at hatlie.de.