Contingent Faculty

From the President: Reforming Faculty Identity

Last year the AAUP’s Committee on Contingency and the Profession issued an important report titled Tenure and Teaching-Intensive Appointments. I have repeatedly endorsed its recommendation that all long-term college teachers be granted tenure at the percentage appointments they currently have. I always point out that the proposal is budget-neutral. It doesn’t make institutions give contingent faculty members a living wage; it just gives them job security, though of course they’d be better able to agitate for improved working conditions if they were tenured.

Memory Loss

We must remember that we did not always have such a highly tiered system of inequality among faculty—and it does not have to be so.

Faculty Forum: Ways to Organize Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

Lecturers, adjuncts, instructors, postdocs, visiting professors, graduate student teachers, and others in non-tenure-track positions now constitute the great majority of faculty in US higher education. But many college and university policies were written decades ago and barely acknowledge the existence of faculty like me who work in contingent appointments.

Losing Our Faculties

The Fall of The Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and why it Matters. Benjamin Ginsberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn. Randy Martin. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Gigi Roggero (trans. Enda Brophy). Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.

Report Examines Working Conditions of Part-Time Faculty

In June, the Coalition on the Academic Workforce, a group that includes the AAUP, released an initial report based on data from its wide-ranging survey of the working conditions of contingent faculty. Nearly thirty thousand people replied to the survey. The initial report focused on part-time faculty members, from whom ten thousand responses were received.

Snakes and Ladders

Degrees of Inequality: Culture, Class, and Gender in American Higher Education. Ann L. Mullen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic. Professor X. New York: Viking, 2011.

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