Across the United States, almost three-quarters of those teaching in colleges and universities today are employed as contingent faculty. This is a reversal from the period before the economic turmoil of the 1970s, when three-quarters of the faculty held tenured or tenure-track positions. These precarious academic workers—ranging from part-time course-by-course adjuncts to faculty in full-time, long-term, non-tenured track positions, to graduate student workers—share the worries and uncertainties that plague other workers in today’s gig economy. These include little to no job security, few if any health care benefits, insufficient retirement savings, and diminished professional status. Our book, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History, explores the history and current challenges faced by contingent faculty – and how workers are fighting back.
Contingent faculty have responded to precarity with a range of actions—raising their voices to influence departmental and campus practices, steering professional organizations to become more inclusive, and organizing faculty unions to bargain collectively at a time when union density in many sectors continues to drop. These challenges to contingency in higher education help ensure academic workers get a fair shake, students get the education they need and deserve, and colleges and universities can reclaim their vital public purpose.
Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education examines contingent academic work through the lens of labor history. Between sets of bookend essays that situate the volume in a larger historical and political context, and with personal accounts threaded throughout, our book narrates a history of contingency in higher education. The book has three main parts. First, a set of essays examine the political economy and structure of contingent academic labor. That is, what accounts for the “making of a contingent faculty majority”? Second, contributors explore adjuncts’ day-to-day realities and struggles in the academic workplace. How do precarity and the low status of contingent faculty shape contingent faculty members’ everyday workplace experiences? Third, the volume addresses contingent faculty’s advocacy work, organizing, and collective bargaining. How are contingent faculty and others fighting for better working conditions and better learning conditions? And how are challenges to contingency also central to the battle to reclaim higher education’s public purpose?
The two-dozen scholar activists who contributed essays to this volume come from a range of disciplines, bringing a wealth of varied experiences. While making clear the complexity of this history, the essays also underscore the common threads of contingent academic labor. Whether holding part-time or full-time appointments, contingent faculty are viewed by administrators as a “flexible” budget line. They teach the largest introductory courses, but with insufficient resources. Many struggle to make ends meet. The uncertainty of future employment is especially wearing on these academic workers, but also a hardship for students who hope to take a future course, need a mentor, or ask for a recommendation letter.
The psychological costs of contingency are also significant in a system built on the myth of meritocracy. With only a quarter of the faculty in the tenure stream, the odds are high that a recent PhD graduate will land on the contingent track. Timing, location, and luck—not merit—are the main reasons most end up on this path of precarity rather than clinching one of the few tenure track jobs. And from that point on, a number of factors make it difficult to find an academic job with more stability, including limited research opportunities, heavy teaching loads, and crumbling confidence.
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In addition to diagnosing the problem, contributors to Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education address the many ways that adjuncts and their allies have challenged contingency, especially through organizing and collective bargaining. Essays analyze campaigns by contingent faculty, graduate student workers, and combined efforts with tenure stream faculty to secure better pay and benefits, longer-term contracts, and improved working conditions. The essays look at both successes and shortcomings in these endeavors.
The book’s contributors also explore the relationship between rising rates of contingency and academic freedom. While the high percentage of faculty off the tenure-track explicitly diminishes their access to the protections of academic freedom, it also undermines academic freedom across campuses by implicitly weakening the voices of all faculty. Ultimately, this changes the public purpose of education.
Envisioned as a book of both scholarship and activism, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education is intended to be a tool for labor unions, advocacy organizations, and other higher education workplace groups interested in tackling the problem of contingency. The editors and contributors were happy, for instance, to be a part of a Higher Education Labor United (HELU) two-part Reading and Actions series built around the book, as well as a session with the Temple University Adjunct Constituency Council. With this in mind, we have made available a Reading and Discussion Guide for the book to support education and organizing efforts, such as through creating workplace based study and solidarity groups.
Just as the working conditions among the vast majority of academic workers reflect broader economic and social trends related to work—insecure employment, low pay, limited access to benefits, and decreasing autonomy—so too does the response reflect contemporary trends—intensified organizing, protest, and alliance building. Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Education aims to capture the essential elements of the transformation of faculty positions into gig employment, to consider the implications of that transformation for all of higher education, and to highlight ongoing resistance to this transformation.
The book Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education is available for purchase here.
