The most recent AAUP data show that fewer than a third of faculty in the United States are employed on tenure lines. Professional and local organizations, as well as idiosyncratic campus associations, are doing important work to address the crisis of contingency in the academic profession. For instance, the Organization of American Historians (OAH)—a group to which I and contributors of ideas for this article belong—has outlined formal institutional policies supportive of non-tenure-track faculty in the “OAH Standards for the Employment of Part-Time, Adjunct, and Contingent Faculty” and the “OAH Contingent Faculty Bill of Rights.”
The strength and momentum of the attack on tenure have also brought formal labor organizing and union struggles to the fore as the academy reckons with the deconstruction of secure faculty jobs. But it is a grave error to wait until unionization and contract fights begin before taking action. This was brought home to me at an adjunct faculty union conference when a steelworker told us that we were missing an important labor lesson: “Faculty can get together and start acting like they are a union right now. You don’t have to have permission to be in solidarity with each other!”
It didn’t take me long to see that, ironically, we academics had failed to learn some of the most basic lessons from the labor and working-class history that we teach—the lessons of wildcat strikes and rank-and-file organizing, and also of solidarity. This union member was gently schooling us on how to make history from below.
There are real, material obstacles to solidarity. At the most recent OAH conference in Chicago, one presenter at a panel on everyday actions of faculty solidarity sponsored by the Committee on Part-Time, Adjunct, and Contingent Employment (CPACE) made an uncomfortable observation: Tenured and tenure-track faculty benefit in assorted ways from contingent faculty labor. Course releases are made cheap enough to be granted when adjuncts are abundant, freedom from service courses or lower-level departmental courses is enabled by contingent faculty course assignments, and departmental resources (such as funding for faculty travel) would become more scarce if shared across the faculty as a whole.
Nevertheless, inspired by this wise steelworker, as well as by an incredible department chair who showed me just what is possible even within nonunionized institutions that lack tenure, I realized that administrative flexibility, discretion, and informality in many departments allow significant leeway. That leeway and informality can be wielded either to maintain unstated faculty hierarchies or to bind faculty together. The choice is up to us.
In fact, much can be done without reference to a dean’s office or the human resources department. It’s time to assert that the need for larger institutional change does not negate our responsibility to build both a culture and a reality in which at least the faculty, if not the administration, believe and act individually every day as though we are “one faculty.” Pointing to structural obstacles in the way of faculty equity must not be an excuse for inaction. We can make history from below.
The following everyday steps toward meaningful faculty solidarity, derived from that CPACE panel, begin with the essential cultural work of building solidarity across hierarchies of faculty employment and then move on to more material concerns. That the categories necessarily overlap with one another speaks to the need for the fuller integration of contingent faculty into the totality of campus and departmental life. Although for ease of presentation these steps are largely described with department chairs as the most immediate audience in mind, any tenure-line faculty member can pursue them with minimal modification: Expressing curiosity about a part-time faculty member’s research, designing courses to be cotaught with an adjunct instructor, having coffee with a contingent faculty colleague, or advocating for any of the below measures at departmental or faculty senate meetings can all be powerful means of creating a new institutional culture. I hope these ideas get us academics closer to the solidarity that that steelworker felt in his bones.
Culture and Inclusion
The AAUP’s One Faculty campaign, launched more than decade ago, grew out of the AAUP’s long history as an organization seeking to improve working conditions, shared governance, economic security, and academic freedom for all faculty members, regardless of rank or status, and drew on the principles set forth in reports such as Contingent Appointments and the Academic Profession and The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments. A critical first step in building “one faculty” is to recognize the teaching and intellectual contributions of all faculty members on campus and to incorporate contingent faculty more fully into the cultural life of departments.
Some practical steps fleshed out at the CPACE panel include the following:
Use the term faculty to mean all faculty, not only those who are tenured or on the tenure track.
Integrate offices and mailboxes of contingent faculty with those of other faculty.
Include contingent faculty on all relevant mailing lists related to department news and events.
Invite contingent faculty to faculty meetings (noting exceptions that may involve personnel matters) and to voluntarily join faculty committees (keeping in mind concerns about paying contingent faculty for additional scholarly and service activities).
Support voluntary contingent faculty representation in faculty senates or other representative bodies in accordance with the principles articulated in the AAUP report The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments.
Offer contingent faculty regular meetings with the department chair. Informal meetings over a cup of coffee can create collegiality and inclusion.
Form coalitions with kindred departments to provide support for chairs and to lobby deans or other administrators as a collective.
Teaching and Scholarship
As the people who do the majority of teaching on campus, contingent faculty, many of whom also pursue scholarship with little institutional support, have much to contribute to the intellectual life of departments. Recognizing these contributions will strengthen the solidarity among all faculty. These actions can create intellectual and pedagogical integration:
Offer contingent faculty upper-level course assignments (which may mean that tenure-track faculty will teach some general education courses) and courses cotaught with tenure-line faculty.
Include contingent faculty in seminars, reading and study groups, and collective research projects, and invite voluntary presentations of the scholarly work of contingent faculty.
Make department resources traditionally reserved for tenure-line faculty, such as funding for research, travel, and book projects, available to non-tenure-track faculty. Cooperation with scholarly organizations that offer grants and discounts may provide additional funds.
Make contingent faculty eligible for faculty awards and consider creating awards specifically for contingent faculty.
Work with librarians to maximize library privileges for contingent faculty, including privileges during semesters when they have no courses to teach.
Protect the academic freedom of contingent faculty as scrupulously as that of their tenure-track colleagues, in accordance with the AAUP’s recommendation in The Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments that “all faculty members should be afforded academic freedom and due-process protections, whether they hold tenured, tenure-track, or contingent appointments.”
Be clear and explicit about the role of student and peer evaluations for contingent faculty, which should mirror the role of those evaluations for tenured faculty.
Embrace online teaching assignments for non-tenure-track faculty, which can provide valuable flexibility.
Financial Considerations
As has been well documented, contingent faculty struggle with uncertain employment, low wages, and, often, a lack of health care and retirement benefits. Recognizing the financial burden under which most contingent faculty work and live is essential to full inclusion and solidarity. These measures can help:
Remember that contingent faculty are paid only for teaching and advocate for the goal that any work beyond that (service, committees, faculty development, and so forth) should be paid.
Allot informal or formal contracts to contingent faculty as early in the year as possible and work to minimize course cancellations.
Pay contingent faculty for development of new courses.
Establish policies (informally, if necessary) to increase pay per course over time.
Know your institution’s health-insurance policies. If adjunct faculty need to teach a certain number of courses in a calendar year to gain or retain health insurance, ensure that those who want or need health insurance are scheduled to teach enough courses to qualify.
Establish policies for sick and family leave for non-tenure-track faculty, informally if necessary.
Consider undertaking or requesting a local or regional study of comparable pay for contingent faculty.
When hiring for tenure-track positions, consider the department’s own contingent faculty first, not last, and consider all non-tenure-track experience as an asset rather than a liability.
Any one of these actions builds faculty unity and thus strengthens the collective faculty voice. Step by step, by recognizing in word and deed the important contributions of contingent faculty to the work and intellectual life of departments, we can pave a path toward the “one faculty” we need at this critical time for higher education.
This list of everyday actions of solidarity with contingent faculty was compiled and edited by Eva Swidler and includes additional suggestions supplied by James Barrett, Rachel Boyle, Claire Goldstene, and unnamed faculty chairs who attended the CPACE panel at the 2025 OAH conference in Chicago.
Eva Swidler teaches in the Department of Liberal Arts of the bachelor’s program at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She has been active in contingent faculty advocacy for two decades. Her email address is [email protected].