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Dear Colleagues,
Let me start by saying that I am an adjuncts, I have a PhD, I love to teach, and I feel very highly valued by my department, Information and Library Science in the School of Informatics and Computer Science, at Indiana University.
This is an interesting conversation because it reflects many different perspectives. One perspective that I haven’t seen is that enrollments swell when the economy is poor and adjuncts are needed for extra sections of requirements as well as to offer additional classes to reflect demand. Once the economy improves, enrollment drops and adjuncts are not needed again. I tell my students that I know when I’ve been fired because my name does not show up on the list of courses being taught. Fortunately, we have a department chair who is very good about communicating with adjuncts, so that last sentence is hyperbole. However, I am a temp worker who is called in for occasional overflow work.
There is another perspective that is also missing and that is knowledge transfer between tenure track faculty, administrators, and adjuncts. When adjuncts teach during autumn and spring semesters during the day, there are many opportunities for conversation about courses, students, the school, and real life. When adjuncts teach at other times, those opportunities do not exist. During good economic times, the interactions between adjuncts and TT faculty obviously goes down.
The real world work an adjuncts performs outside of class includes a lot of business skills that tenure track faculty may not have had the opportunity to garner. In addition, adjuncts must deal with information from very different perspectives than that of TT faculty. Library and Information Science teaches unerringly about the objects that hold information: documents, as memory devices. What adjuncts learn is that for our patrons and clients documents are tools that may even have their own agency. Those concepts of documents as tools and having agency, are not just foreign to library science, information science, and even archival science. Those concepts are alien because they require a much larger perspective on how those tools are used in culture than LIS teaches. Those concepts also require a much greater skill set to manage and deliver the tools than LIS contemplates. My work as a records management consultant requires me to understand corporate culture and business processes in addition to many different aspects of LIS, even when my client is a rare books library. Those skill sets make adjuncts look unfocused in contrast to the research areas of TT faculty. Those skill sets are embraced by other professional schools like business, medical, and the law. LIS, not so much.
All that said, however, to have an accredited professional school means dancing to the tune of the accrediting agency. I have heard law school deans of top 10 law schools complain that law school education could be so much more if it were not for accreditation. If those entities do not understand or value how information and documents are actually used by humans, then the schools will not reflect that knowledge, and the tenure track faculty will neither explore nor teach it.
Best wishes,
Carol E.B. Choksy, PhD CRM PMP
CEO
IRAD Strategic Consulting, Inc.
317-294-8329
Adjunct Lecturer
Department of Information and Library Science
Indiana University, Bloomington