I can see the sense of very short term teaching contracts for visitors with extraordinary abilities or profiles who are actually visiting the Bay Area, say, but those of us who teach three years or more at SFAI have demonstrated our value and commitment to the institution in ways that deserve the recognition of multi-year contracts (at any rate for those who want them). There are reasons some adjuncts would want shorter-term contracts, there are reasons plenty of adjuncts might prefer a path of professionalization that is not the tenure-track, and there are reasons why an institution like SFAI would benefit from hiring qualified teachers in all of these circumstances. Providing more contract options that reflect the actual diversity of adjunct stakeholders and situations would benefit everybody.
SFAI's present one-size-fits-all model of over-abundant over-reliance on an utterly precarious adjunct workforce without any security, standing, or stake represents the systematic marginalization of teaching as a concern of a teaching institution to the short-term cost calculations of administrators indifferent to or alienated from the requirements of the real teaching practice without which none of these administrators would actually have a job at the school in the first place. It is a profound derangement of the mission of any school to force the majority of its teachers into a single insistent insecurity.
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