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 essay outlines several themes that encapsulate the findings from the authors'--both professors of education--previously published study, "The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers," and sheds light on several areas that urgently need further probing. Suggestions for ensuring a productive future for the…

Discussions of higher education in the U.S. are driven today by the language of finance rather than of pedagogy--more specifically, the language of financial hardship. Terms like "shortfall," "cutback," and "retrenchment" set the tone and shape the policies that force austerities and lead to "triage" in…

The progressive gains of college faculty since the 1960s (affirmative action, ethnic studies, expansion of access to higher education, emergence of faculty unions) are threatened by social and political shifts toward conservatism. Senior, tenured faculty are challenged to use their privileged positions and the gains made in recent decades to…