“Speaking of Dignity”: Interviews with Non-unionized Adjunct Faculty Teaching in an English Department at a Catholic Church-affiliated University

This study considers the phenomenon of “dignity” as experienced by non-unionized, part-time, English Department faculty at a Catholic Church-affiliated campus in the Northeast region of the United States; I refer to the institution as Urban Catholic University. This focus is motivated by the apparent tension between Catholic social traditions regarding labor rights and worker dignity, on the one hand, and working conditions for adjuncts as described in the literature on higher education faculty employment. To wit, the labor-positive and union-affirmative tradition in Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has been unequivocally supportive of the rights of workers to unionize since the 1890s, but Catholic institutions tend to block enforcement of labor laws on their campuses on the basis of First Amendment protections against perceived government intrusion into religious matters. The literature review 1) clarifies the norms of faculty contingency in higher education (i.e., low wages, no benefits, part-time, temporary employment); 2) explores theories of organizational culture and learning and describes corporate influences on higher education; and 3) explicates the central role of dignity to CST. The conceptual framework of this study combines the social constructionist theory of knowledge and reality with a hermeneutic phenomenology that assumes experience and interpretation are inextricably intertwined. Both theories serve in this study to encourage adjunct faculty, who are often marginalized in governance and policy matters that affect their employment, to speak about their experience of working conditions in their own words. The hermeneutic design of the study includes semi-structured interviews and document/artifact analysis. The research question asks: How do non-unionized adjunct faculty employed by an English Department in a Catholic Church-affiliated university describe their experiences of “dignity” and how do those faculty reflect on the meanings of those experiences? Keywords: adjuncts, contingency, dignity, Catholic Social Teaching, phenomenolog

The productivity of ‘unnatural’ labial palatalization in Xhosa

Xhosa (Bantu, South Africa) has a pattern of labial palatalization.  When the passive suffix /-w-/ is added to a stem ending in a labial, the labial becomes palatal (uku-lum-a → uku-luɲ-w-a).  Two main types of analysis have been proposed for this alternation: (i) the ‘phonological analysis’, which states that the alternation is part of speakers' synchronic phonological grammar, and (ii) the ‘lexical analysis’, which states that speakers learn the palatalized passive forms as part of their lexical knowledge.         To distinguish between the two hypotheses, we conducted a wug test in which speakers of Xhosa were shown nonce verbs and asked to provide their corresponding passive form.  Since the phonological analysis requires there to be a synchronic phonological rule, speakers should passivize nonce forms in the conditioning environment.  Under the lexical analysis, however, speakers are predicted not to palatalize nonce forms, since the real-word palatalized passives they produce are simply stored in the lexicon.         Our results show a great deal of inter-speaker variation.  While some speakers produced palatalized nonce forms nearly 100% of the time, other speakers failed to produce any palatalized nonce forms at all.  We argue that labial palatalization may be analyzed in different ways by different speakers

Experimental Evidence for a Metallohydrolase Mechanism in Which the Nucleophile Is Not Delivered by a Metal Ion: EPR Spectrokinetic and Structural Studies of Aminopeptidase from \u3cem\u3eVibrio proteolyticus\u3c/em\u3e

Metallohydrolases catalyse some of the most important reactions in biology and are targets for numerous chemotherapeutic agents designed to combat bacterial infectivity, antibiotic resistance, HIV infectivity, tumour growth, angiogenesis and immune disorders. Rational design of inhibitors of these enzymes with chemotherapeutic potential relies on detailed knowledge of the catalytic mechanism. The roles of the catalytic transition ions in these enzymes have long been assumed to include the activation and delivery of a nucleophilic hydroxy moiety. In the present study, catalytic intermediates in the hydrolysis of L-leucyl-L-leucyl-L-leucine by Vibrio proteolyticus aminopeptidase were characterized in spectrokinetic and structural studies. Rapid-freeze-quench EPR studies of reaction products of L-leucyl-L-leucyl-L-leucine and Co(II)-substituted aminopeptidase, and comparison of the EPR data with those from structurally characterized complexes of aminopeptidase with inhibitors, indicated the formation of a catalytically competent post-Michaelis pre-transition state intermediate with a structure analogous to that of the inhibited complex with bestatin. The X-ray crystal structure of an aminopeptidase–L-leucyl-L-leucyl-L-leucine complex was also analogous to that of the bestatin complex. In these structures, no water/hydroxy group was observed bound to the essential metal ion. However, a water/hydroxy group was clearly identified that was bound to the metal-ligating oxygen atom of Glu152. This water/hydroxy group is proposed as a candidate for the active nucleophile in a novel metallohydrolase mechanism that shares features of the catalytic mechanisms of aspartic proteases and of B2 metallo-b-lactamases. Preliminary studies on site-directed variants are consistent with the proposal. Other features of the structure suggest roles for the dinuclear centre in geometrically and electrophilically activating the substrate

Moving Difference (MDIFF) Non-adiabatic Rapid Sweep (NARS) EPR of Copper(II)

Non-adiabatic rapid sweep (NARS) EPR spectroscopy has been introduced for application to nitroxide-labeled biological samples (Kittell et al., 2011). Displays are pure absorption, and are built up by acquiring data in spectral segments that are concatenated. In this paper we extend the method to frozen solutions of copper-imidazole, a square planar copper complex with four in-plane nitrogen ligands. Pure absorption spectra are created from concatenation of 170 5-gauss segments spanning 850 G at 1.9 GHz. These spectra, however, are not directly useful since nitrogen superhyperfine couplings are barely visible. Application of the moving difference (MDIFF) algorithm to the digitized NARS pure absorption spectrum is used to produce spectra that are analogous to the first harmonic EPR. The signal intensity is about four times higher than when using conventional 100 kHz field modulation, depending on line shape. MDIFF not only filters the spectrum, but also the noise, resulting in further improvement of the SNR for the same signal acquisition time. The MDIFF amplitude can be optimized retrospectively, different spectral regions can be examined at different amplitudes, and an amplitude can be used that is substantially greater than the upper limit of the field modulation amplitude of a conventional EPR spectrometer, which improves the signal-to-noise ratio of broad lines

A cross-sectional study of predatory publishing emails received by career development grant awardees

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the scope of academic spam emails (ASEs) among career development grant awardees and the factors associated with the amount of time spent addressing them. DESIGN: A cross-sectional survey of career development grant investigators via an anonymous online survey was conducted. In addition to demographic and professional information, we asked investigators to report the number of ASEs received each day, how they determined whether these emails were spam and time they spent per day addressing them. We used bivariate analysis to assess factors associated with the amount of time spent on ASEs. SETTING: An online survey sent via email on three separate occasions between November and December 2016. PARTICIPANTS: All National Institutes of Health career development awardees funded in the 2015 fiscal year. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Factors associated with the amount of time spent addressing ASEs. RESULTS: A total of 3492 surveys were emailed, of which 206 (5.9%) were returned as undeliverable and 96 (2.7%) reported an out-of-office message; our overall response rate was 22.3% (n=733). All respondents reported receiving ASEs, with the majority (54.4%) receiving between 1 and 10 per day and spending between 1 and 10 min each day evaluating them. The amount of time respondents reported spending on ASEs was associated with the number of peer-reviewed journal articles authored (p<0.001), a history of publishing in open access format (p<0.01), the total number of ASEs received (p<0.001) and a feeling of having missed opportunities due to ignoring these emails (p=0.04). CONCLUSIONS: ASEs are a common distraction for career development grantees that may impact faculty productivity. There is an urgent need to mitigate this growing problem