I've been following with interest a discussion on H-Survey, a private listserv, about the use of student assistants in history departments. It was initiated by James Schick of Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, who moderates the list. He explains that his department has a terminal M. A. program and that in order to tighten the belt it is under pressure to employ first year M. A. candidates as undergraduate adjunct instructors rather than limiting them to being teaching assistants to members of the faculty. That means, of course, that a student with a B. A. and no graduate hours in history would be teaching their own sections of Pittsburg State's introductory history courses. Schick says that the department has resisted doing this and seeks advice from list members about what other departments have done. Should the department stand and fight or is this commonly done elsewhere?

If you have good information or advice for Professor Schick, I'm sure that he'd be glad to have it. The link to his name above gives you his e-mail address and he is receiving some suggestions off-list. If you know, for instance, of any recent studies of how first year graduate students are employed by departments, I am sure Schick would be happy to have that information. Listserv responses to his query suggest that the bottom line for his department at Pittsburg State would be whether employment of first year graduate students as adjunct instructors of undergraduates might threaten its credentialing with the North Central Association's Higher Learning Commission.

As I read the H-Survey discussion, I thought"What would Invisible Adjunct Do With This One?" and recalled Tim Burke's point that a University of Southern Mississippi or a Pittsburg State is the far more common experience of higher education in the United States than a Chicago or Michigan, Texas or Yale. And so it's come to this: that at our ordinary institutions of higher education we are contemplating putting 22 year old B. A.'s in charge of a class of first year college students and doing so because it's cheap.

When I was a kid in the Louisville suburbs, we often had female business college students boarding with us in return for light child-care and household help. They came to Louisville from rural communities in eastern Kentucky, where their prior experience was fairly provincial. One, in particular, told us that her illiterate uncle was a member of her county's school board and that he was opposed to education of females. That seemed quaint, but it was also common practice in her home county for a high school graduate to begin teaching in its public schools immediately on receipt of a high school diploma. They didn't have to be paid very much.

And so it's come to this: in the name of saving money, Kansas higher education authorities will revert to the example set by barely established and backward Appalachian public school systems. Reasonably literate administrators with earned doctorates will betray higher education's values and jeopardize Pittsburg State's credentialing in the name of saving money. And it isn't just in Kansas that this happens. Remembering that Invisible Adjunct has just given up her search for a job in an American higher education, I know that its administrators will betray the promise of its credentialing processes and employ much less well prepared people because they can be had cheaply. They betray all of us.
*With apologies to William Allen White