Home > Insight

InResponse: Letters to the Editor

Berlin is bland but Zoë is zesty
Berlin can have an altering effect on one’s personality. After returning from over a year in Berlin, I was starving intellectually. Nothing was intriguing and everyone lacked conviction.

This semester, if it was the intriguing and provocative I sought, I had only to find Zoë’s column in The Metropolitan. From men’s indifference to the plight of woman to the abysmal food choices we have on Auraria Campus (especially after the closure of the Daily Grind) Zoë’s columns challenged the unquestioned status quo.

Freshman year and a lifetime ago I unfairly designated Zoë as a red, feminist, “Creative Resistance” ideologue; today I see Zoë, among other things, as a person who helped me cope with my remaining time in Denver.

For that I thank her, and if she so fancies I would enjoy meeting next semester for a cup of fine coffee, as to express personally my respect.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Tim Kish • kisht@mscd.edu

Adjuncts can't help that they can't help
This letter is in reply to the Josie Klemaier article “Metro seeks immediate increase in full-time faculty.” As members of the Metro State Adjunct Organizing Committee (MSAOC), we take issue with the statement “Adjunct faculty members are part-time instructors who often have careers outside of teaching and are not available for advising.”

While adjuncts are part-time instructors at Metro, a significant number would prefer to have a full-time position but are precluded from that opportunity due to limits placed on adjunct positions by Metro’s policies. In the groundbreaking survey of adjunct faculty conducted in fall of 2005 by the MSAOC, 56% of respondents stated that teaching was their primary source of income. Seventy-nine percent of the adjuncts surveyed wished to work full time in higher education, and only had outside part-time positions to supplement their less-than-full-time Metro teaching incomes. Currently many adjuncts are unsure on how many classes, if any, they will be teaching this upcoming spring semester. Therefore having a job off campus is a financial necessity, not a manifestation of any lack of commitment to teaching or to Metro.

With regards to the issue of advising, adjunct faculty are not given training nor paid for the additional time required to advise students. In many departments, 20 or more adjuncts share one office, with at most only one or two computers among them. Thus, it is not that adjuncts do not want to advise students, but that the school has not given them the resources to do so.

While the present college administration desires to employ more full-time faculty, it is difficult to see how they can reach their goal. At CU-Boulder, a full-time tenure-track teaching position teaches two classes per semester. There are also graduate students in many departments to assist with teaching and grading for the professors, allowing them to continue their research. At Metro, the same position requires double the teaching load, four classes per semester, with no graduate students to help. Does it truly make sense to require the tenure-track candidates to have an extensive research background, when they will have little time to continue that research as a professor here at Metro?

Metro is a great teaching institution. Even though there is a desire and maybe a need for Metro to expand its mission to include more research, teaching will always be a significant and important part of Metro’s mission. The quality of Metro’s teaching resources, most of whom are currently adjuncts, is what makes our school great – people who love to teach. The administration’s plan to primarily hire those with extensive research experience, and apparently to place less importance on teaching, is a disservice to the entire student body. Members of the MSAOC implore the administration to reflect on who currently constitutes the majority of the quality teaching resources at Metro and to retain the adjuncts who have tirelessly delivered the bulk of the quality teaching for which Metro is famous. The path to “pre-eminence” need not start with the dismissal of quality adjunct instructors nor with the removal of opportunity for the very people, the adjuncts, who have demonstrated their commitment to excellence and to Metro in spite of the lack of commitment from Metro to them.

Sincerely,
The Steering Committee for the Metro State Adjunct Organizing Committee
Christine Dupont-Patz, Art History; Howard Flomberg, Management; Claire Hay, Earth & Atmospheric Science; Melvena Rhetta-Fair, Management; Norman Schultz, Philosophy; Laurel Thompson, English; Mark Weigand, Anthropology and Sociology