Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education

Contingent faculty are a fixture in higher education today, with almost three-quarters of the people teaching in colleges and universities employed as adjuncts and non-tenure-track faculty. Like other gig economy workers, they face little job security, low pay, and few benefits. Contingent faculty also bear the wear-and-tear of professional and personal disrespect. Contingent Faculty: A Labor History uses the tools of labor history to examine how structural changes have heightened contingency in colleges and universities, how this precarity shapes day-to-day faculty experiences in academic workplaces, and how contingent faculty and their allies resist collectively in the face of this higher education crisis. As an interdisciplinary volume bringing together scholars of varying ranks and positions (from contingent faculty to tenure stream faculty to organizers and activists) from a range of institutions (from research universities and small colleges to unions), this book considers how contingency marginalizes teachers and scholars, degrades academic work, impinges on students’ education, and threatens even tenured faculty members’ security—all in the name of flexibility, austerity, and innovation. These essays also grapple with the gender, racial, and class inequities that permeate this history and contemporary challenges. Efforts to organize contingent faculty and graduate worker unions, while up against daunting odds, hold the potential to address job grievances, bolster security, contest the relentless corporatization of the university, and reclaim higher education’s public purpose.