The state of academic labor is bad. Most people who make their living as professors are untenured, at-will employees evaluated by little more than the customer satisfaction ratings of a tiny proportion of their students. A quarter of the faculty members who responded to a survey conducted by the AFT for its 2020 report An Army of Temps said that they relied on public assistance, and 40 percent said they struggled to cover basic household expenses. Avoiding this fate is not a matter of conducting breakthrough research or redoubling one’s dedication to the craft. Rather, academics’ careers are largely determined when they apply to graduate school. According to a 2022 study published in Nature, 80 percent of all domestically trained tenured or tenure-track faculty members completed their graduate studies at just 20.4 percent of universities. Five universities—the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University; the University of Michigan; the University of Wisconsin–Madison; and Stanford University—account for more than one in eight. Moreover, those who hold the highest-paid, most secure jobs are more likely to have their research portfolios captured by the priorities of private enterprise. The average salary of assistant professors is $83,672. For full-time lecturers, who generally hold non-tenure-track appointments, it is $73,810. Adjusting for inflation, these salaries have not meaningfully changed in over twenty years, AAUP analysis of federal data shows.
It doesn’t make sense to speak of a single ivory tower anymore. In its stead is an iron plinth of student debt upon which stands a decidedly thinner ivory tower that casts a long shadow over an academic underclass with few prospects for advancement. In the ivory tower there are staircases (albeit narrow and crowded) up to six-figure salaries, strong tenure protections, travel funds, generous grants, and prestigious fellowships. Out on the iron plinth are 5/5 teaching schedules, semester-length employment contracts, and competitions for meager reimbursements for travel to conferences where you can give a ten-minute presentation to an empty room.
Writing on the state of academia frequently compares a luxurious past—days when graduate school had a coherent teleology that culminated in a lifelong career with a defined research interest, engaging classroom discussions, and no more administrative work than was absolutely necessary—with an austere present. Too often this mindset does more to romanticize the past than to set useful organizing goals in the present. To the extent the “good ol’ days” ever existed, they were enjoyed almost exclusively by the white men of the mid–twentieth century. And even today we’ve done a poor job of opening the faculty lounge to everybody. As of 2022, nonwhite men and women made up just 27 percent of all full-time faculty, even though they made up 42.2 percent of the American population, government data show.
In what follows, I look at the state of academic labor today with as little fantasizing about the past as possible. There are several benefits to this approach: First, I am not interested in Making Academia Great Again. That is, I contend that there was never a time worth returning to. When having a PhD gave you a good shot at getting a tenure-track job, it was largely a function of the poverty imposed upon and active denial of education to anyone who wasn’t a white man. And second, while it is theoretically possible that we could live in a world where the job security of the imagined “good ol’ days” could be distributed to all regardless of gender or race, there is no viable political force that is willing to deliver such a thing. I argue, then, that we must break out of the frame that presents tenure as something recently lost that must be restored. Instead, let’s just look at academic labor as it is right now, for better or worse.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of fall 2022, 842,407 full-time and 665,234 part-time faculty members were working across all degree-granting postsecondary institutions. However, AAUP analysis shows that less than a third of all nonmedical instructional faculty members will ever hold tenure, and just 23 percent are currently tenured. Pay across the academic workforce runs from a subminimum wage supplemented by food pantries and public assistance to million-dollar salaries, generous benefits, and expense accounts. The work academics perform is equally disparate, ranging from the academic equivalent of short-order cooks teaching hundreds of students a day to distinguished professors with enormous labs and budgets. The tenured few are concentrated at large universities with significant research portfolios, while community colleges are mostly staffed by part-timers and those off the tenure track. Women and individuals from underrepresented minority groups disproportionately hold nontenured and part-time positions. One bright spot is that the highest proportion of nonwhite faculty are in the assistant professor rank; once they advance through the career ladder, these individuals will increase the percentage of full professors who are faculty of color from 19 to 27 percent—assuming that they do progress through the faculty ranks and that universities are allowed to exist in any recognizable form for that long. The faculty members of American universities as a whole are far less diverse than the student bodies that US colleges and universities enroll.
Whether any one academic has a shot at finding a job opening for a tenure-track or even a full-time job is heavily determined by one’s chosen field. According to recent analysis by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) based on the breakdown in the Department of Education’s Classification of Instructional Programs, “business” had the most institutions reporting new assistant professor hires, followed by health professions, biological/biomedical sciences, visual/performing arts, and education. The three areas with the lowest hiring rates were library science, liberal arts and humanities, and theology. High ratios of tenure-track to non-tenure-track appointments among existing faculty do not necessarily indicate that new hires will be able to secure tenure-track positions, however. Despite all the new hiring going on in the health professions, those fields still have some of the lowest proportions of tenured professors. Liberal arts and humanities, meanwhile, have both the lowest rates of new tenure-track hires and one of the highest proportions of current non-tenure-track faculty, with about two-thirds working off the tenure track. This suggests a trend that any liberal arts professor already knows: Colleges and universities are in the middle of a massive reorganization of long-term labor investments away from providing a well-rounded education and toward market-based vocational training.
The latest data from CUPA-HR indicate that the highest average pay goes to faculty in business ($116,000), law ($112,000), engineering ($106,000), and computer science ($96,000). Health professions, which are a big mover in all these statistics, also have a high average salary ($85,000). The lowest salaries go to faculty in theology ($71,000), English language and literature ($72,000), and library science ($72,000). CUPA-HR notes that these salaries are mostly driven by factors exogenous to the university: private-sector jobs that are high-paying and competing for talent. Still, these averages represent a fairly narrow band of middle-class incomes, not the sumptuous, mahogany-walled lifestyle some might assume.
To give some structure to this enormous and vastly unequal labor force, I focus below on the three major commitments that have traditionally defined academic work: teaching, research, and service to the institution.
Teach, Research, Serve
Teaching is, by and large, the work of the untenured, who are paid much less than their tenure-track colleagues. In a 2017 study of public institutions in North Dakota and Ohio, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated faculty earnings for teaching duties and found that part-time and full-time faculty members holding contingent appointments were paid about 60 percent and 10 percent less per course section, respectively, than their full-time tenure-track counterparts. The GAO also found that faculty members holding contingent appointments teach about 45 to 54 percent of classes at four-year public institutions, with higher proportions at two-year public institutions, many of which lack a tenure system. At my own university, the union completed an analysis of teaching and found that tenure-track faculty taught only 35 percent of all undergraduate course seats. From the student’s perspective, then, the first years of college are dominated by poverty-stricken professors who have little time between their multiple jobs to answer emails, hold office hours, or properly prepare for class. By graduation, most undergraduate students will have been taught by someone who has a tenure file with original research and publications, though likely too late to develop the sort of professional rapport that would go into a compelling letter of recommendation.
Research is a quite different matter. In 2023 American universities spent $108.8 billion on research and development. The largest share of this money ($47 billion) went to salaries, wages, and fringe benefits, federal data show. By definition, most of that spending is done by institutions categorized in the Carnegie Basic Classification system as R1 universities, which are also the institutions with the highest proportion of tenured professors (though it is only 36 percent). One might assume, then, that these job protections would yield more risk taking, more principled (if unpopular) stances, and behavior that would be free from the usual strictures of corporate employment. But reaching the top of the ivory tower means first getting one of the few graduate positions in the top five institutions, then continuing to produce grant-winning research for many years. As a result, those with the most job security are socially conditioned in a very particular way.
Not all grant money is the same, nor is it evenly distributed. In 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services gave out the vast majority of federal funding, and life sciences departments, in turn, received the lion’s share of federal funds: $35.7 billion compared with, say, social work, which got $14.8 million the same year. While 60 percent of university grant expenditures comes from public sources, the mere 6 percent of funding ($6.2 billion) that comes from business is tightly concentrated at the most elite institutions and has a profound impact. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Federal funding keeps researchers on an academic track,” whereas “a higher share of private funding increased the propensity to work at incumbent firms, suggesting that one reason firms may sponsor research is to train or recruit researchers.” There was a similar impact on the outputs of the research. The more public money that is involved, the more likely the results of that research will stay in the public domain. Just “a 10% increase in the mean of the share of federal funding reduces the probability of any patenting by about 50% of the mean,” the US Census Bureau reports.
The field with the highest ratio of industry to public funding was, unsurprisingly, business management and business administration (0.288). This was followed by various engineering subfields (ranging from 0.220 to 0.103), law (0.210), and health sciences (0.144). Interestingly, humanities also ranked high, at 0.174. (Ratios were calculated by combining federal, state, and local funding amounts and dividing by business funding sources as reported in table 3 at https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25313. Excel and Microsoft Copilot powered by ChatGPT-5 were used for the calculations, which the author reviewed for errors.)
The institutions that receive the most business money for research and development are not surprising. The five institutions that account for one in eight domestically trained tenure-track professors all rank within the top fifty of 644 institutions whose research and development funding is monitored by the Higher Education Research and Development Survey, with Stanford at tenth place and the University of Wisconsin–Madison at forty-seventh. In between those five are other universities with household name recognition: Columbia, New York University, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and so on.
Something more interesting happens, though, when we look at business funding as a proportion of government funding. Many of the institutions with the highest business-to-government funding ratios have a distinctly conservative ideological character to them. The institution with the highest ratio of private to public money is Abilene Christian University, a small R2 institution that produces many evangelical ministers and Christian music producers. It did not begin admitting Black students until 1961. Another institution that stands out is New College of Florida (the author’s alma mater), a public liberal arts college that was radically reshaped by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who installed new conservative trustees and a president who upended the faculty and closed programs like gender studies. The new board and its allies have set a goal of turning this public institution into a “Hillsdale of the South,” referring to the conservative private college that proudly states it does not take any state or federal money so as to “maintain institutional independence.” Also high on the list is the Claremont Graduate University, which has close—though informal—ties with the Claremont Institute, a highly influential right-wing think tank.
Industry’s capture of academic research is worth examining more closely. While universities still get most of their research money from public sources, business-funded projects have outpaced public research nationally since the late 1980s. This change is attributable in no small part to the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which allowed researchers and their employers to own and profit from the intellectual property they produce. “Research driven primarily by commercial interests,” writes Melissa L. Finucane of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “is usually focused on immediate financial returns and not on long-term societal benefits.” She goes on, “Scholars have documented exhaustively how industry-sponsored academic research is biased in favor of the interests held by fossil fuel, tobacco, pharmaceutical, sugar, and other industries.”
Of course, the pressures of business have only increased with the second Trump administration’s attack on public research funding. According to The New York Times, researchers are experiencing a “fundamental shift in how grants are funded—one that means more competition for funding, and less money and less time to do the research.” In 2025 both the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health awarded fewer grants, had their proposed budgets slashed, and stopped awarding grants to any project that mentioned diversity or equity. Philanthropy, corporate research labs, and the whims of billionaires will certainly step in to fill the profitable gaps, but many important areas of research will be left understudied. Fewer fellowships and the evaporation of diversity efforts mean that we will have fewer new researchers focused on only a handful of projects. What’s the point of tenure protections, one is forced to wonder, if a researcher’s funding is predicated on for-profit interests?
Finally, let’s look at service. Unlike research, from which part-timers and non-tenure-track workers are largely excluded, and teaching, of which they are expected to do the yeoman’s share, service encompasses an eclectic collection of tasks and responsibilities that can bring both prestige and pain. Because non-tenure-track faculty are often barred from serving on committees for such tasks as tenure review or department self-studies, the onus for an increasing amount of administrative work falls on a dwindling few tenure-track faculty members. Administrators, largely composed of former faculty members who have left research and teaching behind, now circulate more among themselves than within the ranks of working faculty. The result is an ever-widening gap between those who do the work and those who administer it. And an even larger gap exists between those tasked with most of the teaching and those who do most of the budgeting. It should be no surprise, then, that as knowledge workers are separated through the centripetal force of business thinking, the pay disparities and workloads also become unbalanced. “Growth in salaries for college and university presidents,” according to a recent AAUP report, “has outpaced the growth in full-time faculty salaries for years.” Presidential salaries now average $713,381 for PhD-conferring institutions, with presidents making $4.87, on average, for every dollar made by a full professor.
Attenuating Tenure
The data paint a sad, lopsided picture. On one side are disciplines stuck in a structural problem of labor overproduction that existed well before austerity made its contradictions acute: Tenure-track faculty must produce new graduates to advance their own careers, yet their departments are not growing fast enough to pay for the rarefied labor they produce. For example, according to one analysis, in 2022 English departments produced five PhDs for every two assistant professor job openings. The rest become members of the academic underclass, taking whatever work they can find or exiting academia completely.
On the other side are disciplines that reproduce researchers but also produce industry personnel who may need advanced degrees. These are the sorts of departments that are making the most tenure-track appointments right now. Anyone who has worked at a university in the last decade will instantly recognize the incentive schemes that drive this difference in hiring: Administrators see themselves as managers of workforce development, not stewards of knowledge. Students and their families, because they must take on debt to finance education, select their degrees primarily based on the expected return on investment.
What I’ve shown here is a tiered academic world in which a small few, largely chosen before they have their PhDs in hand, gain the lion’s share of funding and job protections but are also the most captured by industry—and so take fewer risks and are less likely to speak truth to power. The vast majority, meanwhile, are proletarianized knowledge workers whose labor both props up the university and contributes to the overproduction of their own kind—resulting in a continuous spiral that drives down their negotiating power and salaries.
Tenure was designed in part to protect truth-tellers from reprisals; but today, at the highest echelons of the ivory tower, it is a credential one earns mainly through dedication to private interests. In the disciplines that do not readily or directly produce profitable intellectual property, tenure is the result of a medieval marriage pact between the degree-conferring institution and the hiring institution. That is, institutions without name recognition look to raise their profile by hiring and retaining those with more prestigious degrees. These degrees are less useful for attracting financial capital, but they are crucial for social capital.
The approach I have taken here puts a fine point on a blunt fact: Tenure is arbitrarily distributed. For every well-deserving person who claws their way onto the tenure track, there are a dozen others who are just as deserving but simply didn’t make the cut. Tenure is never going to be a way for all working-class academics to find dignity at work, economic stability at home, or prestige among their peers—at least, not tenure as it has existed. But there is room for a bit of optimism here. Unions offer a more egalitarian, cooperative form of worker protection than the rat race of tenure. Tenure assumes individual achievement as the sole means of advancing in a career, while union protections recognize that collective effort and collaboration should result in universal betterment. When we stop fetishizing the tenure track as such and start focusing on job security (which must include academic freedom), pay, and benefits the way workers in every other sector do, we can graduate from the academic underclass.
David A. Banks is the officer for contingents for the Albany Chapter of United University Professions (UUP/AFT-2190) and a lecturer in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Sustainability at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America (University of California Press, 2023).