Contingent Academic Labor
Contingent Academic Labor

Author: Daniel B. Davis

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-07-03

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1000978613

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Contingent Academic Labor is a concise guide that offers higher education professionals a way to measure the degree of equality taking place in work environments for non-tenure track faculty across institutional settings. It frames the relevant issues and examines the nationwide situation facing contingent faculty across the professional landscape. The goal is to review contingent faculty treatment, and offer a standardized way to identify both equitable and unjust practices that impact adjunct faculty and their students by extension.The main feature of this guide is The Contingent Labor Conditions Score, a tool to help evaluate current labor practices that impact adjuncts in both positive and negative ways. The report card measures 3 areas of labor conditions:*Material Equity: Pay, job security and benefits*Professional Equity: Opportunities for advancement, professional development, academic freedom, sense of professional inclusion, and job satisfaction*Social Equity: Gender and race parity between contingent and non-contingent faculty in proportion to the population servedThis book will be useful for administrators and labor organizers alike in assessing the degree of exploitation, or empowerment, in their own institution. The Contingent Labor Conditions Score, as a standardized tool, will serve audiences on both sides of the discussion in creating positive steps forward, improving not only contingent faculty working conditions, but ultimately improving student outcomes.

The Gig Academy
The Gig Academy

Author: Adrianna Kezar

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1421432714

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why the Gig Academy is the dominant organizational form within the higher education economy—and its troubling implications for faculty, students, and the future of college education. Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year—less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers. In The Gig Academy, Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators. The authors conclude by examining the strengthening state of unionization among university workers. Advocating a collectivist, action-oriented vision for reversing the tide of exploitation, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott urge readers to use the book as a tool to interrogate the state of working relations on their own campuses and fight for a system that is run democratically for the benefit of all. Ultimately, The Gig Academy is a call to arms, one that encourages non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative and tenure-track allies to unite in a common struggle against the neoliberal Gig Academy.

Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity
Contingency, Exploitation, and Solidarity

Author: Seth Kahn

Publisher: CSU Open Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781607327653

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Composition scholars and activists have long documented the exploitative conditions of adjunct faculty. While documentation matters, continued data-collecting too often precludes movement towards equitable treatment. This collection highlights actions and describes efforts that have led toward improved adjunct working conditions in English departments"--Provided by publisher.

How the University Works
How the University Works

Author: Marc Bousquet

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 0814791123

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Uncovers the labor exploitation occurring in universities across the country As much as we think we know about the modern university, very little has been said about what it's like to work there. Instead of the high-wage, high-profit world of knowledge work, most campus employees—including the vast majority of faculty—really work in the low-wage, low-profit sphere of the service economy. Tenure-track positions are at an all-time low, with adjuncts and graduate students teaching the majority of courses. This super-exploited corps of disposable workers commonly earn fewer than $16,000 annually, without benefits, teaching as many as eight classes per year. Even undergraduates are being exploited as a low-cost, disposable workforce. Marc Bousquet, a major figure in the academic labor movement, exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education—a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. Assessing the costs of higher education's corporatization on faculty and students at every level, How the University Works is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower
Reclaiming the Ivory Tower

Author: Joe Berry

Publisher:

Published: 2005-11

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower examines the situation of adjunct professors in U.S. higher education today, describes the process of organizing them to improve their conditions of work, and puts forward an agenda around which adjunct labor can mobilize and transform the universities. In the last twenty years, higher education in the United States has been eroded by massive reliance on temporary academic labor—professors without tenure or prospect of tenure, without benefits, working without offices or research assistance, often commuting between several campuses, and paid a fraction of the salaries of the tenured colleagues. Contingent faculty now constitutes the majority of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities. Analyzing the changing composition of the academic workforce, assessing the strength of new organizing initiatives among adjuncts, and weighing up their strategic options, this is the most comprehensive and engaged account to date of an issue that will become increasingly important for the future of higher education in the United States and in the global context.

The Adjunct Underclass
The Adjunct Underclass

Author: Herb Childress

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-04-24

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 022649666X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car . . . to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage. Welcome to the life of the mind in the gig economy. Over the past few decades, the job of college professor has been utterly transformed—for the worse. America’s colleges and universities were designed to serve students and create knowledge through the teaching, research, and stability that come with the longevity of tenured faculty, but higher education today is dominated by adjuncts. In 1975, only thirty percent of faculty held temporary or part-time positions. By 2011, as universities faced both a decrease in public support and ballooning administrative costs, that number topped fifty percent. Now, some surveys suggest that as many as seventy percent of American professors are working course-to-course, with few benefits, little to no security, and extremely low pay. In The Adjunct Underclass, Herb Childress draws on his own firsthand experience and that of other adjuncts to tell the story of how higher education reached this sorry state. Pinpointing numerous forces within and beyond higher ed that have driven this shift, he shows us the damage wrought by contingency, not only on the adjunct faculty themselves, but also on students, the permanent faculty and administration, and the nation. How can we say that we value higher education when we treat educators like desperate day laborers? Measured but passionate, rooted in facts but sure to shock, The Adjunct Underclass reveals the conflicting values, strangled resources, and competing goals that have fundamentally changed our idea of what college should be. This book is a call to arms for anyone who believes that strong colleges are vital to society.

Contingent Work
Contingent Work

Author: Kathleen Barker

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 9780801484056

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The successful 1997 strike by the Teamsters against UPS, and the overwhelming support the American public gave the strikers highlighted the impact of contingent work--an umbrella term for a variety of tenuous and insecure employment arrangements. This book examines the consequences of working contingently for the individual, family, and community.

Professors in the Gig Economy
Professors in the Gig Economy

Author: Kimberley Tolley

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2018-05

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1421425335

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Machine generated contents note: Preface, by Kim Tolley Acknowledgements 1. From Golden Era to Gig Economy, by A.J. Angulo 2. Understanding the Need for Unions, by Adrianna Kezar and Thomas DePaola 3. A Long History of Activism and Organizing, by Timothy R. Cain 4. Union Organizing and the Law, by Gregory Saltzman 5. A Just Employment Approach to Adjunct Unionization, by Joseph McCartin and Nicholas Wertsch 6. Unionizing Adjunct and Tenure-Track Faculty at Notre Dame de Namur, by Kim Tolley, Marianne Delaporte, and Lorenzo Giachetti 7. Unions, Shared Governance, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Elizabeth K. Davenport 8. Forming a Union, by Shawn Gilmore 9. Wall to Wall, by Luke Elliot-Negri 10. California State University East Bay, by Kim Geron and Gretchen M. Reevy Conclusion, by Kim Tolley and Kristen Edwards Contributors Appendix Index.

Discourses of Denial
Discourses of Denial

Author: Thomas A. Discenna

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-22

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1317277775

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Discourses of Denial explores the myriad ways that the labor of those employed by universities is situated as somehow distinct from ordinary labor. Focusing on a variety of sites where academic labor is discursively constructed in popular consciousness including among the professoriate itself, its critics and detractors, the unionization struggles of graduate students, the invisibility of contingent academics and the resistance to the unionization of student athletes. Merging Critical Rhetoric (CR) with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) this study examines myth that "academic work is not the same as other labor" (Pason, 2011, p. 1786). The denial of academic labor functions to underwrite an attack on labor in all of its variations producing what Berardi (2009) calls a "new kind of worker [who] value[s] labor as the most interesting part of his or her life and therefore no longer opposes the prolongation of the working day but is actually ready to lengthen it out of personal choice and will" (p. 79). The professoriate is, therefore, not a retrograde figure of more genteel times but the emblematic figure of late capitalism’s transition to cognitive labor and with it an unceasing colonization of the human lifeworld.

Hybrid Teaching
Hybrid Teaching

Author: Jesse Stommel

Publisher: Hybrid Pedagogy Incorporated

Published: 2020-02-23

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780578852355

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How can education survive in a post-truth era full of alternative facts and a reality-TV star armed with nuclear codes and a Twitter account? We must recognize that teaching is political. Schools need to help students counter the social erosion of trust in knowledge. Preserving that trust, we have seen, can help preserve democracy.Trust, like politics, involves people. In their classes, people learn to see themselves as members of communities and also to engage the world around them. Schools have a responsibility to support students as they learn. With the rise of anger-fueled nationalism around the world, it is clear that caring for others has never been so vital.It is also clear that technology and capitalism will not solve education's problems. Social media companies promise connection but create echo chambers and conspiracy-mongering. Ed-tech companies promise insights and solutions while delivering surveillance and suspicion. Education must connect the personal to the technological-it can no longer afford to work offline. All teaching is necessarily hybrid.Pedagogy, people, and politics influence each other, and educators of all stripes have an opportunity-a responsibility-to build human connections with ethical technology.Gathering the voices of over two dozen progressive educators, this volume combines perspectives from across academia and around the globe. The authors in this book use critical digital pedagogy as a guide for navigating today's turbulent global political climate. Timely and accessible, Hybrid Teaching challenges higher education faculty and administrators to consider the political implications-and the political power-of teaching.