What's Missing Here...

2/ that don’t even address the criticisms let alone provide a compelling contrary argument.

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 12, 2023

Missing in the discussion of the adjunct professor at Hamline is how much higher education rests on the backs of adjuncts now.

Adjuncts who have no academic freedom protection, no shot at tenure to protect them, adjuncts who are never full-time employees and work only on a contract basis.  They are easy to fire for any reason or no reason (dependent, I realize, on applicable state laws, if any) and can simply not be renewed for the next semester.

(My experience as an adjunct was perfectly pleasant, but I worked semester to semester.  If I didn't pick up any class assignments, I didn't work that semester.  Toward the end of my "tenure" with the college I worked for for almost 20 years, I was applying for the maximum load each semester, and never getting it.  "Maximum load" was part-time; anything less was ultimately not worth the effort.  It would cost me as much to drive to work as it did to get paid for my work.)

So the problem here is the way Hamline kowtowed to a minority of a minority.  That's what everyone is focussed on.  And it's a bad look.  Had this professor used images of God from William Blake (particularly his illustrations for the Book of Job, where God is the God of Abraham) and orthodox Jews had objected to the idolatry (literally a graven image; Blake was an engraver), would anyone have listened?  I mean, it's a stupid reason to fire a teacher.

But adjuncts work at the pleasure of the university.  That's the real problem:  what the adjunct-dependent system of education (cheap labor, higher profit margins) is doing to education.  Blake's images of God (probably as responsible for our ideas of God as old white man with beard as Thomas Nast's drawings gave us the 'official' Santa Claus) are a part of art and literary history.  Do we cover that up to protect delicate sensibilities?  Do we go full Ashcroft? (Bush's AG who had statutes of Justice draped because she was depicted as a nude female form.)  But more importantly:  is this how we run our institutions of higher learning?

I mean, this wasn't in Florida.  Ron DeSantis didn't do this.  No government official did.  And why was it so easy to do this?  What does that ease mean for the quality of education we will be upholding, or expecting?

That's the root of the problem.