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Without any immigration courts, Montana is tough for immigrants looking to build new life
The drive from Billings to Las Vegas is nearly a thousand miles. That’s 14 to 15 hours of windshield time, winding through some of the roughest, most isolated country in the continental U.S. Imagine that U.S. forces recently evacuated you from Afghanistan, where the advancing Taliban would have killed you as a member of the […]
Derailed: A series about life off the tenure track
The Daily Montanan and author Carrie La Seur produced a series of stories focusing on the Montana University System’s growing reliance on non-tenure, adjunct faculty — who often work for low wages, no benefits and no office. The trend of using adjunct faculty is a nationwide problem as public universities and colleges spend less and […]
Derailed: Pushing back against the adjunct system
Around the U.S., tenure is under fire by anti-intellectual forces who consider higher education a politicized operation, oppose public education ideologically, want to squeeze the last dollar out of public institutions for private enrichment, or all of the above. The rise of exploited adjuncts threatens the tenure system itself. Professional organizations are sounding alarms. “Tenure […]
Derailed: How students are impacted by adjunct faculty
Bess Lovec, a former dance adjunct at Montana State University-Billings, echoed the common adjunct refrain of appreciation for her “incredible, hungry, eager, positive, hard-working” students, paired with frustrations in her underpaid, term by term teaching role. Although adjuncts were teaching half the classes in her department, she was never invited to a faculty meeting. She […]
Derailed: No protection, limited benefits. Adjunct faculty describe working conditions
“You almost have to be convicted of a felony to be thrown out of a tenured job, but I can be fired at a moment’s notice over anything,” said an adjunct who teaches full-time in the sciences with a master’s degree, taking year-to-year contracts in the Montana University System with no job security but basic […]
Derailed: Life Off the Tenure Track even more difficult for women, people of color
In 2018, Dr. Thea K. Hunter, 62, a Columbia University history Ph.D. and longtime member of Madeleine L’Engle’s Manhattan writers’ group, died from conditions related to overwork and lack of health care, according to an article in The Atlantic. Described by colleagues as a “brilliant scholar” and “beautiful writer,” she had resigned two years into […]
Derailed: Life Off the Tenure Track
Melissa Holmes left Butte in the dark, no later than 7 a.m., to crawl along wintery roads if necessary and still be on time to teach computer science classes seventy miles away at Helena College, a community college in the public Montana University System. As a lecturer, she had no office, so she’d nap in […]