The Global Voices Online site has a story on Part-time Lecturers and Suicide that matters. A number of humanities lecturers have committed suicide after spending years in part-time sessional work with no promise of a professorship. Would we know if we had a similar situation here in Canada? Increasingly we are dependent on sessional teaching to cover courses as we handle budget cuts by not hiring tenure-track or even just contract faculty. My guess is that a few departments may get to 50% of their teaching being done by part-timers. Why is this? Sessionals, hired one course at a time, are a cheap way to get quality teaching, especially if the sessionals are led to believe they might eventually get the coveted positions. Full time faculty benefit because we can keep our research positions while letting help for a fraction of our salary. At what point should we be honest with ourselves and admit that a university cannot afford tenure track faculty for teaching and deal with the effects by creating teaching positions that have some stability instead of stringing on recent graduates. Is Korea ahead of us in confronting the desperation of part-time faculty? Will it take a suicide for anyone to notice here?