Among the most important labor stories of the past forty years is the transformation of college and university teaching at campuses across the United States from a stable, middle-class job that included health and retirement benefits to one where the majority of faculty are temporarily employed without the certainty of continued work or benefits. Today, approximately 75 percent of those teaching in higher education, at both public and private institutions, are contingent faculty, a category that includes a variety of arrangements—from adjuncts paid per course to postdocs and those on multiyear contracts—but all of whom lack the financial and intellectual protections of tenure. Throughout the decades it has taken for this change to occur, there also has been resistance to its consequences for faculty, students, and the place of higher education in society.
In Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education, Joe Berry and Helena...
