American higher education is in the midst of a staffing crisis. More than three quarters of faculty members work off the tenure track, often with no job security, low wages, and few prospects for advancement. While the contingent labor force is diversified--including highly qualified but part-time laborers piecing together positions at multiple…

A substantial body of research, conducted over more than 50 years, makes clear that faculty-student interaction is a key factor in promoting student success, particularly among those students who most need support, such as first-generation college students and students of color. This research is consistent, pervasive, and has informed the…

The miserable pay of adjuncts and the transformation of colleges and universities into business are no longer foreign concepts in the public realm. What is a surprise, though, is that large companies, such as Target and Starbucks, take better care of their employees than those in higher education. This article focuses on the contrast between the…

Policy and practice in higher education today are defined and limited by what many have claimed are "new realities" confronting colleges and universities. Gary Rhoades contends that three of these are embedded in the just-in-time hiring practices, the at-will conditions of work, and the depersonalized curricular delivery models assigned…

In this article, Robert Golden envisions the current trends in practice at State University of New York (SUNY) in Plattsburgh, being so firmly entrenched as to still be the same practices in place 60 years into the future. He notes the decline of full-time faculty, the rise in the numbers of contingent faculty, the increasing use of massive open…

The alarming stories from adjunct faculty, who now comprise a majority of higher-education teachers nationally, share troubling commonalities. The frustrations are financial, personal, and professional. In decades past, most adjunct faculty worked full-time outside of academe and taught an occasional course based on a particular expertise or…

As anyone who has ever defended a thesis or been on a tenure track must know, American institutions of higher education have rigorous and finely calibrated ways of according respect to those who work in them. What they do not have enough of is respect from those beyond their gates. The author argues that the system that created the two-tiered…

This article presents the outcomes from a case at Marquette University (USA), brought by seven Ph.D. adjuncts who had completed their doctoral programs and were currently teaching part-time as they sought full-time positions elsewhere. The case identified a disparity that is happening at many U.S. colleges and universities that increasing rely…

There is a growing concern among faculty and administrators in higher education institutions that shared governance is being diminished, primarily due to the decline of tenure-track faculty and growth of contingent faculty who have been historically excluded from formal participation in university governance. Although the role of faculty in…

Recounts how the part-time faculty at Chicago's Columbia College (Illinois) dramatically improved salaries and gained a strong voice in college decision making through unionization. Emphasis is on the negotiation process which worked to obtain the group's goals without undermining the "rather friendly college environment." (DB)

Two graduate teaching assistants, veterans of the Yale (Connecticut) "grade strike," discuss the importance of graduate students to the academic enterprise and how "the casualization of academic labor" impacts on higher learning in general and faculty in particular. They urge faculty to join with graduate assistants to check…

Describing economic and professional marginalization of adjunct faculty and reluctance of tenured colleagues and administrators to work for change, calls for institutional caps on percentage of courses taught by adjuncts, a pay rate closer to 75 percent of tenured salary rather than the current 25 percent, and time limits on adjuncts teaching full…