Organizing the Academic Precariat in the United States

Abstract

Faculty labour in the United States is increasingly "contingent", as tenure-track and tenured positions are rapidly being replaced by "adjuncts", "lecturers", "instructors" and other faculty who lack traditional protections of academic freedom and job security. In light of this, contingent faculty have been actively organising themselves into unions on many campuses. Unionisation efforts for non-tenure-track faculty have often been highly successful, yet significant hurdles remain. Although it is common to refer to all faculty outside the tenure-system faculty as "contingent", 2 this umbrella term masks enormous variation in pay, benefits, working conditions, job security and inclusion in governance. The diverse range of institutional types within the United States (US) higher education system (community colleges, four-year public universities, for-profit colleges, private liberal arts colleges and elite research universities, to name a few), and its unusual degree of decentralisation, add further complexity to our understanding of precarious American academic labour. The Growth and Consequences of Contingency Between 1975 and 2015, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) reported that the proportion of the US academic workforce made up of full-time, tenure-line positions fell from 45 per cent to 30 per cent, while in the same period the share of full-time non-tenure-track and part-time faculty grew from 34 per cent to 57 per cent (the rest were graduate student employees). By 2015, contingent positions of all types accounted for 70 per cent of all instructional staff appointments in American higher education (AAUP, 2017). For full-time non-tenure-track faculty, job security, compensation, protection of academic freedom and inclusion in shared governance are all inferior relative to their tenure-track colleagues. The chasm is even wider when comparing tenure-system faculty to part-time contingent faculty. 1 The authors are listed alphabetically and are among the members of the American Sociological Association's Task Force on Contingent Faculty. Thanks to Luke Elliot-Negri for comments on an earlier draft of this article. 2 Contingent faculty are those in non-tenure-track positions that are contract-term bound or temporary. These may be part-time or full-time. The hiring institution makes no commitment of long-term employment to these faculty.