Could University Sessional Instructors Be Directly Compensated by Their Students in an Age of Academic Capitalism?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the striking phenomena of our time in universities across Canada is the large presence of sessional instructors in both undergraduate and graduateprograms. This is partly due to the increasing production of people with doctorates who would like to be part of the university professorate but for whom there are little fulltime job opportunities. Universities in Canada are not in a steady expansion phase of the sort that was common immediately after the Second World War and in the early 1960s and 1970s. Many universities may be expected to increase their student numbers, often students from outsideCanada who pay higher fees, but are not expected to increase their permanent faculty numbers. In many cases the reward for engaging in this expansion of student numbers is more money directly to departmental or Faculty coffers. But there is no guarantee that these numbers or this money will hold. So the solution is to hire recent doctoral graduates who can teach the courses but to whom no immediate prospect of a permanent, tenure track job can be offered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.020 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".