So, I thought I would volunteer to do this since I would like my institution to participate more actively in the program, and since it appeared to mean four hours of work in a place I was going anyway, in exchange for a night in a hotel and a fuel reimbursement — fair enough, if not a very good honorarium, since including travel time it prices me out at about $20 an hour.
To illustrate further: since I make $54,000 for a theoretical 40 weeks of work in a year, at a theoretical 60 hours a week or 2,400 hours in all, my normal wage is 540 divided by 24 or $25 an hour, so compensation here is a bit low; if you do not include travel time it is rather higher but still not particularly high.
Then I discovered I was to print out, at my own time and expense, 66 applications, and read these and do data entry on them before even undertaking such travel. I considered resigning but decided to speed read instead. But I am not doing a particularly careful job and I am never doing anything like this again, as it is utterly outrageous.
I do not know how long I ought to spend on those 66 applications but when I looked at the file my thought was that it was worth 33 hours. That was why I was going to resign; then I decided to do it in 6 hours. So this will be 10 hours of work, plus 10 of travel time, for the equivalent of $250, or $12.50 per hour; 10 of those hours are hours in which I would not be working anyway but the other 10 are stolen from my vacation time and my research time, 5 from each. So doing this is “my funeral,” as it is said.
Think of yourself and your research only. Never volunteer for anything, never show up for anything, never do anything to be collegial or to be nice. Never have these words seemed so true to me as they do now. I have never regretted volunteering for anything as much as I do this, and I spit on the stingy-ass government that is compensating at this level for this kind of work.
But I still say FUCK the faculty who, following precisely this advice, passed on applications in the state in which I have received them. I know where you are and I can tell who you are, and you are not respectable beings.
You make nearly twice what I do and teach half as much. You do not publish that much more, and you have far better facilities and research funding than I do. You have told me how you suffer and I am sorry for you, but at this point I have no respect for you at all.
If you are writing a letter of recommendation or you are responsible for processing and declaring as good a certain kind of application from your institution, act like the Office of Research or the Internal Review Board — proof their statement of purpose and give feedback. You have the time and it is an important teaching activity. Do it. There are entire institutions with cultures of doing this and of not doing it, and it is clear; be one of those who do, it is good for you and yours.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Yet according to the mainstream media, we are all overpaid lazy layabouts.
Stay strong!
The whole premise of this country is coercing free labor out of people, I was reminded last night by, of course, a Black person. People will do whatever they can to get that out of us. And we give in, although it is harder to convince us to do anything for “free” on our own behalf (like occupy the state capitol Wednesday, the only thing worth giving up a research day for — instead, someone wants to have a 7:30 AM meeting to consider improving grading options for students, the very students who have voted in this horrible legislature).
(I am still trying to work out why, exactly, I am so irritated at all of this, as one ALREADY KNOWS these things. But I am still outraged to see up close:
– the conditions in which some applications for grants and fellowships are actually rated
– the zero care given applications at certain institutions, in a program where there are official internal reviewers
Too much exploitation, too much free labor, too much treatment of people like cattle to be herded)
One knew all of these things already about industry and capitalism and so on and yet I am irritated to watch, or perhaps irritated to be caught and used even harder than I had expected.
And yet people don’t make the connections. Follow the money. Is it coincidental that the Washington Post which recently published the article by David C. Levy trashing higher education professors as overpaid and underworked also owns Kaplan University, the for profit online educational institute that would benefit financially from the Levy ethos?
Not coincidental. And Kaplan doesn’t do research, which he does seem to value in that article. He’s just trying to drive adjunct pay down, by alleging to the public that they make what research professors at well paid places make, but don’t do research.