By Carl Straumsheim
New Jersey’s community colleges will this year consolidate how they hire and train non-tenure-track instructors, but some adjuncts are concerned the program will make it more difficult to find teaching opportunities in the state.
The initiative, scheduled to launch this summer or fall, will go live as a Web portal that connects aspiring adjuncts with community colleges searching for qualified instructors. In addition to simply serving as a job board, the website will allow adjuncts to post their profiles, making their fields of study visible to New Jersey’s 19 community colleges.
[…]While administrators praise the initiative, some adjuncts would rather see it as scrapped altogether. William J. Lipkin, a full-time adjunct professor for the past 12 years who teaches at four different New Jersey institutions, said he was frustrated with how adjuncts have been excluded from the design process.
“They don’t want to hear from us. They don’t want input from us,” said Lipkin, who serves as the treasurer of the national adjunct organization New Faculty Majority.
Lipkin said he feared a system where a department chair at one community college could post negative feedback on an adjunct’s online profile — in essence blackballing him or her from employment at other institutions. He also questioned why community colleges are courting instructors with no teaching experience instead of catering to the state’s estimated 15,000 adjuncts.
“I don’t see the benefit of this, at least for us,” Lipkin said. “It’s a benefit for the schools — they can go in and pick and choose.”
Lipkin said he saw no reason to change the more informal hiring system in place today, where adjuncts directly contact department chairs at individual schools.
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