Dushko Petrovich: LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Dear Reader,
I hope you are not reading this while driving, and I hope you aren’t reading this at home. If you’re driving, focus on driving. If you’re at home, try to forget the adjunct commuter lifestyle.
If you’re commuting, I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly is a friend to you on the train or the bus. Someone who understands you. A voice to accompany the pretzels and booze.
I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly makes you feel less invisible. I hope your department chair asks you what you are reading. I hope your students see this sticking out of your bag. I hope they say, “Adjunct Commuter Weekly, what’s that?”
If, on the other hand, you want to hide, I hope this helps you hide. As the business people hoist up their folded Financial Times to shield their faces, I want you to have a newsprint privacy curtain, too. Hold up your Adjunct Commuter Weekly and rest.
I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly helps you with the food, the scheduling, the worrying, the stress, the disease. I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly fits into your budget.
I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly touches all aspects of your life. I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly connects your life to other lives.
I want us to make serious political progress. I want us to organize and make real gains. I want us to fix academia and fix society. In the meantime, however, I want us to recognize our lives for what they are.
Adjunct Commuter Weekly will be a portrait of a generation. We taught young people from year to year, on unstable contracts and often for unfair wages. We wept in private as our health, relationships, and futures were sacrificed to the whims of increasingly corporatized universities. We didn’t have a place to gather. Until now.
I hope Adjunct Commuter Weekly provides a place for us to gather.
I hope to talk to you again on August 6th.
From the Road,
Dushko Petrovich
a multimedia platform for a growing and influential demographic 
” If you’re at home, try to forget the adjunct commuter lifestyle”
Thanks for putting out this publication!
I’ve had many conversations about the frustrations of this “lifestyle” with adjuncts here at UOregon,
Sometimes it feels like nobody understands or cares about this issue.
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Need to organize. Need to strike. Administrators use fear to keep us in line (fear we will be replaced in our jobs). I’m sick of it but each one of us toils alone and is unwilling to take action unless other part-timers do the same. All we need is ONE day! If across the country all of us take the same day off (and publicize that we are going to do this!) then we can have a bargaining chip. But if that boycott fails (can we get everyone in the country to take ONE day off?), then that will send a clear message that we are not organized and are unwilling to stand up for ourselves.
What do you think?
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Congratulations on the much-needed publication – and for fighting the good fight! Also, for a little levity, you might want to check out this Community College’s adjunct “recruitment” page…. Cheers! http://coweye.org/adjuncts.htm?acw=1
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Thank you for starting this publication. I think it’s incredibly timely. The adjuncts at my university voted to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and we’re about six months in to negotiating with our employer here in the Midwest. We have more than 400 voting members.
We’re hoping to get a contract that offers us some degree of job security and a wage increase. Our experience working with SEIU has been positive. I encourage other adjuncts to consider joining a union so your voice can be heard in the halls of the administration. Individually our ability to negotiate is minimal. Working together as a group, we have a chance at improving the situation.
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It will take an exodus of adjuncts from higher ed for things to change. Adjuncts are victims of some unpleasant trends in higher education and colleges appear unable to stop themselves from taking advantage of the plentiful and cheap labor.
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