Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History

In American society and beyond, higher education has long been understood as a powerful engine of upward social mobility and, more broadly, as something like an insurance policy on our life chances. We are told that a bachelor's degree is the key to higher wages, more secure jobs, and greater social recognition and that a graduate degree leads to even better outcomes, especially as four-year degrees become more common. In assuming that degrees hold equalizing power and tasking education with the burden of fixing socioeconomic inequality, these narratives overlook how neoliberal institutions of higher education reinforce and compound disparities within and among students, faculty, staff, and administrators and how academia increasingly runs on the exploitation of a stratum of academic workers barred from job security: contingent and non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty, including adjunct professors, lecturers, and graduate student workers who teach classes piecemeal, on semesterly contracts, and/or at several universities at once. Membership in this class of academic workers is characterized by a shared set of poor working conditions: compensation based on credits or classes taught rather than hourly wages or salaries; limited-term contracts, often circumscribed to the academic year or semester; diminished recognition in the workplace, particularly vis-avis tenure-track faculty; and few to no benefits, such as health insurance and retirement. Contingent faculty constituted about 61 percent of instructional faculty at four-year institutions, 84 percent of instructional faculty at two-year institutions, and more than 99 percent of instructional faculty at for-profit institutions in the US in 2017 (US GAO, 2017). In 2021, contingent faculty constituted about 68 percent of instructional faculty at nonprofit Title IV universities (Colby, 2023).

In Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History, editors Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene call attention to this growing cohort of contingent faculty who, despite their “contingent” or “adjunct” status, work to fill some of the most central functions of the university: teaching and advising undergraduates, designing syllabi and coursework, and shouldering administrative duties within their departments. The volume assembles a wide array of contributions—historical analyses of the neoliberal transformation and marketization of the American university, essays recounting and theorizing personal experiences outside of the tenure track, analyses of quantitative data on precarious academic workers across the US—into a critical new labor history of the academic precariate, whose social status has been rendered invisible and interchangeable despite the fact that their labor power keeps the academic machine in operation. In understanding academic work as cold, hard labor, the contributors insist on viewing academia as a shared space in which students, educators, and administrators must work together toward producing education as a common good, with all parties informed by the notion that “faculty working conditions are student learning conditions” (156). Taking this view, we can then understand academic workers as part of a broader constellation, a perspective that enables expansive solidarity across the working class and allows us to resituate the university as a potentially powerful nexus of radical education and radical social action.

The volume proceeds in four sections. Part I, “The Making of a Contingent Faculty Majority,” historicizes the current plight of precarious academic workers within the long shadow of the market transformation of the university. In the economic stagnation of the 1970s, public funding for higher education declined; at the same time, growing beliefs in the economic promise of scientific and technological innovation led to increased investment in universities’ research capacities (58-65; see also Popp Berman, 2012). These market-driven policies and logics persist in shaping how different higher education institutions, disciplines, and personnel are evaluated today. In chapter 2, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer examines the long history of “uncertain finances, fiscal catastrophes, and unseemly labor practices” (40) in US higher education dating back beyond the 1970s to the appropriation of Indigenous land and slave labor to build these very universities in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Her historical analysis clarifies that “finance's longstanding and increasing importance to the business of education epitomizes how colleges and universities have continuously reflected, shaped, and sustained the prevailing … norms [that] have largely kept postsecondary schooling a private luxury instead of a public good” (51), a reality that sustains the ongoing exploitation of academic labor. In chapter 6, Sue Doe and Steven Shulman use federal data on the higher education workforce from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to compare the compositions of contingent labor with calculated instructional costs per student. Although colleges commonly justify the choice to expand adjunct employment as a management decision to cut instructional costs, Doe and Shulman's analysis reveals that those private nonprofit colleges employing the highest rates of adjunct faculty seem to be generating the most instructional surplus. Although data limitations prevent the authors from advancing stronger claims, their findings suggest that the casualization of academic labor is linked to the transformation of the university from a public provider of a common good into a private business entity. The success of the university as a corporation, the authors argue, relies not only on the increased supply of adjunct labor power but also on the continued precarity of these workers, which prevents faculty solidarity by dividing academic workers into two hierarchical classes.

Precarity is not only an abstract economic condition but also viscerally felt and experienced day in and day out. Part II, “Contingency at Work and the Workplace,” provides thick description of what this precarity looks and feels like via a set of personal essays from contingent faculty members at universities across the US. In chapter 8, Claire Raymond draws on Mary Douglas's concepts of purity and danger to frame her own experiences as an adjunct lecturer treated as an “incomplete professor” who is “at once cast out of and retained within the social body of the university” (113-114). She recounts a departmental chair once telling her that “adjuncts are failed PhDs” (120)—a clear illustration of her observation that “the myth that academia is a meritocracy fuels the shaming of the adjunct, who is seen as deserving of her fate” (117). In chapter 11, Erin Hatton draws on interviews conducted with PhD students from a broader qualitative study on legally unprotected workers to illustrate that the recasting of academic work as a “labor of love” reinforces narratives that academic work isn't “real work” and diverts attention from the highly unequal power relations within academic work. She argues that “a more capacious definition of contingent work is therefore one that accounts for the expansive power that bosses can wield over workers, broadly defined … Reframing contingency in this way is, thus, not just an academic enterprise. It is a political one with real-world consequences for contingent workers in the academy and beyond” (153).

It seems that the unequal power systems and unfair labor practices enforced by the market university are producing, above all, their own grave diggers. The dramatic expansion of contingent academic workers—about 50 percent from 1970 to 2013 (Finkelstein et al., 2016)—triggered a major boom of collective mobilization among contingent faculty, postdoctorate workers, and graduate student workers beginning in the 2000s. Part III, “Challenging Precarity and Contingency in Higher Education,” reviews the successes and challenges of contingent academic worker unionization and organization to date. One big barrier to organizing success for contingent faculty has been bargaining unit composition—whether tenure-track, NTT, and other campus workers bargain as separate units or as a collective entity. In chapter 14, William A. Herbert and Joseph van der Naald argue that the biggest challenge in overcoming separation has been the ethos of “professionalism,” which has historically divided tenure-track from NTT faculty as well as faculty from campus staff in unionization. In chapter 16, Anne McLeer reflects on her experiences overcoming these divisions to build “imagined communities” among precarious academic workers as a graduate student organizer in the 2002 campaign to unionize faculty and students at George Washington University:

Successes in base-building by challenging narratives of meritocracy and professionalization have led to the successful creation of some “wall-to-wall” local bargaining units that have brought tenure-track and NTT faculty, graduate students, and campus staff together under one big roof, such as the Communications Workers of America's United Campus Worker (CWA-UCW) network, which has expanded since 2000 into thirteen locals across the US (27).

In Part IV, “Paths Forward for Academic Labor and Higher Education,” the contributors look toward the future of labor organizing in higher education. In chapter 19, Naomi R. Williams and Jiyoon Park urge tenure-track faculty to actively support and build alliances with contingent faculty to generate crossrank solidarity: “too often, administrators create wedges between faculty by offering incentives to tenure-stream faculty bargaining units at the expense of contingent faculty. In these cases, tenure-stream faculty unions must center the needs of their most vulnerable colleagues” (261). In chapter 20, Claire Goldstene concludes the volume by reviewing the myriad ways in which contingent faculty are isolated within universities. They are physically segregated within departments (a barrier to forming physical communities of interest for unionization McLeer discusses in chapter 16) and disqualified from full intellectual membership in their departments (as Raymond reflects on in chapter 8). They are also made to feel as though these poor working standards result from personal qualities or shortcomings rather than structural inequality, which Diane Angell in chapter 9 and Miguel Juárez in chapter 10 address via intersectional examinations of the myths of meritocracy that pervade academic contingency, considering gender, race/ethnicity, ability, and family educational history as additional axes of inequality.

In our public imagination, the university casts multiple and conflicting images: the promised land of socioeconomic opportunity; a business entity seeking to maximize revenue, status, and managerial power while casting the resulting costs onto the workers; a place of public good “educat[ing] [people] to contest workplace inequalities, imagine democratically organized forms of work, and identify and challenge those injustices that contradict and under-cut the most fundamental principles of freedom, equality, and respect for all people who constitute the global public sphere” (Giroux, 2007, 104). Goldstene argues that so long as the exploitation of contingent faculty and other precarious academic workers continues, the public good of education is undermined, a fact that “fundamentally alters the role of the university in the public sphere”: “The rise of contingency is, finally, about who controls teaching and the very purpose of an education” (276). The perspectives in this volume collectively demonstrate that the democratic function of an education, its intended nature as a public good, and the just and equal treatment of all workers are ideals well worth fighting for—and that scholar-activism should not be seen as an optional burden undertaken in addition to scholarship but is, in fact, part and parcel of what it means to be a scholar and academic worker. Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education renders visible the unequal processes of the university to those who are not immersed in it and asks all academic workers to question our commitments to and places in this unequal system—how can we break down existing walls to build a bigger house, working together in the fight for fair working conditions and equal recognition and protecting higher education as a public good in the process?