Please don't do it. Stay away from the fetish video. You're only 25, so you can accumulate debt and probably be done with both school AND paying off said debt by the time you're your early 40's. Maybe even a little sooner.

Look back 10 years, to when you were in high school, or a little farther back, to when you were 11 or 12, if you can remember. Did most ordinary people really believe you could go to a local department store or Walgreens or Walmart and buy an off the rack phone that could take pictures and transmit them instantly to the other side of the country, or Argentina, or Australia, probably set up and ready to go before your folks were out of the parking lot, on their way to the next errand? How about Youtube and Myspace, and related phenomena? Nowadays if you can't get the local TV station interested in your Rodney King video(1991), you can just upload it yourself.

We already have facial recognition software, although presently it's not a low-cost consumer good. What about in 10 or 15 years? If there is a market demand, it will happen. Maybe you'll be up for tenure at that point.Please don't do the video, even once.

Go to school, and best wishes.

Blog of a tenured professor at an elite college:

http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?page_id=4

Article from The Chronicle of Higher Education:

For decades it has been happening everywhere in academe, but nowhere in particular.

The sweeping shift toward non-tenure-track academic labor has been one of the most worried-over trends in American higher education. But it has been charted mostly with broad-brush data, which give little indication of the trend's progress at the institutional level.

With a publication called the Contingent Faculty Index, released this week, the American Association of University Professors has set out to fill in those gaps.

Drawing on data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in 2005, the AAUP has compiled the numbers of tenured, tenure-track, part-time, and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members employed at 2,617 American colleges and universities.

The index, which does not present a set of rankings, also reports the number of graduate students employed by those institutions. Like the survey of faculty salaries published by the association every year, the faculty index will, its authors hope, function as a report card that calls institutions to account for their hiring practices.

"Most of the conversation about the use of contingent faculty has been at the aggregate level," says John W. Curtis, director of the AAUP's department of research and one of the authors of the report. As a result, he says, academics have grown accustomed to thinking of the trend as "something that happens elsewhere."

Now, the AAUP hopes, those same academics can quickly look at the index to find data for particular instititions — like Boston University, where full-time non-tenure-track professors almost outnumber tenure-track professors, and the College of Dupage, a community college in Illinois, where adjuncts outnumber full-timers more than three to one.

The index's cumulative findings confirm the omens that have loomed large to academic-labor activists for years: Since the 1970s, the proportion of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in the American professoriate has dwindled from about 57 percent to about 35 percent, while the proportion of full- and part-timers working off the tenure track has grown from about 43 percent to 65 percent.

Moreover, the proportion of professors in line for tenure has shrunk faster than the proportion of those who already enjoy tenure. The interpretation: "We really don't have a replacement generation of faculty on the tenure track," says Mr. Curtis.

Florence Hatcher, a member of the AAUP's Executive Council, says data from the index will be a handy tool at the collective-bargaining table. Unions and other faculty groups will be better able to hold colleges accountable to their own stated policies on hiring, she says. Faculty groups will be able to compare their colleges' hiring practices with those of peer institutions, and they can take those numbers to members of Congress, to the public, and to accreditors.

Joe Berry, chairman of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and an instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, says accreditors have seemed to become less and less alarmed at the new hiring practices.

Once upon a time, he says, "faculty activists looked at the accreditation moment as one when they could exercise some leverage" on the question of non-tenure-track hires. But in recent years, with the accreditation of for-profit institutions like the University of Phoenix — where nearly all faculty members work part time — the potential for arm-twisting at accreditation time has probably diminished, he says.

For all of the index's potential value in collective bargaining, Richard J. Boris, director of the Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at the City University of New York's Hunter College, wants no one to lose sight of the larger issue.

"I hope [the index is] used to open a conversation about what has happened to the academic labor force in this country," and "about whether the American university can prosper and remain the world's greatest higher-education institution with this form of labor policy," he says.

Such a conversation, says Mr. Boris, should include college presidents, national associations, and national unions, as well as any local constituencies that have a stake in the labor practices at a given institution.

Like most academic-labor experts who have tried to study the rise of nontraditional faculty members, Mr. Berry scrounged for good data when he was writing his recent book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press, 2005).

While the U.S. Education Department has collected information from administrators on colleges' hiring practices for years, the task of mining and assembling the data into some useful form was a monumental project — one that activists like Mr. Berry have been anxiously awaiting.

"It needed to be done," he says. "It was well beyond what an individual researcher could do."

It is difficult to make broad comparisons among institutions using the index data, he notes, given that different colleges count their at-will employees in different ways. That and other factors, like differences in geography and institutional structure, make it "very difficult to compare apples and apples," says Mr. Berry.

Moreover, administrators often report incomplete data to the federal government, he says. In the past, when faculty activists have gotten hold of the hiring data that administrators have sent to Washington, the reliance on non-tenure-track labor has struck them as underreported — sometimes hugely so, says Mr. Berry.

Ms. Hatcher, the AAUP official, agrees that such problems with the Department of Education data are likely to surface in the index — which is part of the point of releasing it, she says. She imagines that some professors will be alarmed by the index, not because of how many non-tenure-track faculty members it reports at their institutions, but because of how few.

"We expect them to look at this and come back to us and say, 'This is not correct,'" she says.

In that way, says Ms. Hatcher, opening the data to an audience will only improve the accuracy of the reporting down the line.