Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education

Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education
Author: Eric Fure-Slocum
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2024-01-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0252055209

An educational crisis from its origins to present-day experiences In the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs. This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the realities of the contingent faculty system through the lens of labor history. Essayists investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket and illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace. Other essays delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a clear call to reclaim higher education’s public purpose. Interdisciplinary in approach and multifaceted in perspective, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education surveys the adjunct system and its costs. Contributors: Gwendolyn Alker, Diane Angell, Joe Berry, Sue Doe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Claire Goldstene, Trevor Griffey, Erin Hatton, William A. Herbert, Elizabeth Hohl, Miguel Juárez, Aimee Loiselle, Maria C. Maisto, Anne McLeer, Steven Parfitt, Jiyoon Park, Claire Raymond, Gary Rhoades, Jeff Schuhrke, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Steven Shulman, Joseph van der Naald, Anne Wiegard, Naomi R Williams, and Helena Worthen

Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education

Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education
Author: Eric Fure-Slocum
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: Collective bargaining
ISBN: 9780252045547

An educational crisis from its origins to present-day experiences In the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs. This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the realities of the contingent faculty system through the lens of labor history. Essayists investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket and illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace. Other essays delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a clear call to reclaim higher education's public purpose. Interdisciplinary in approach and multifaceted in perspective, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education surveys the adjunct system and its costs. Contributors: Gwendolyn Alker, Diane Angell, Joe Berry, Sue Doe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Claire Goldstene, Trevor Griffey, Erin Hatton, William A. Herbert, Elizabeth Hohl, Miguel Juárez, Aimee Loiselle, Maria C. Maisto, Anne McLeer, Steven Parfitt, Jiyoon Park, Claire Raymond, Gary Rhoades, Jeff Schuhrke, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Steven Shulman, Joseph van der Naald, Anne Wiegard, Naomi R Williams, and Helena Worthen

The Gig Academy

The Gig Academy
Author: Adrianna Kezar
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 259
Release: 2019-10-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421432714

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.

Remaking the American College Campus

Remaking the American College Campus
Author: Jonathan Silverman
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-10-06
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1476663335

The built and landscaped spaces of colleges and universities radiate and absorb the values of the cultures in which they were created. As economic and political forces exert pressure on administrators and as our understanding of higher education shifts, these spaces can transform dramatically. Focusing on the utopian visions and the dystopian realities of American campus life, this collection of new essays examines campus spaces from the perspective of those who live and work there. Topics include disability, sustainability, first-year writing, underrepresented groups on campus, online education, adjunct labor, and the way profit-driven agendas have shaped colleges and universities.

Through the Prism of Gender and Work

Through the Prism of Gender and Work
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2023-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004682481

This book examines women’s activism in and beyond Central and Eastern Europe and transnationally within and across different historical periods, political regimes, and scales of activism. The authors explore the wide range of activist agendas, repertoires, and forums in which women sought to advocate for their gender and labour interests. Women were engaged in trade unions, women-only organizations, state institutions, and international and intellectual networks, and were active on the shopfloor. Rectifying geopolitical and thematic imbalances in labour and gender history, this volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of women’s activism, social movements, political and intellectual history, and transnationalism. Contributors are: Eloisa Betti, Masha Bratishcheva, Jan A. Burek, Selin Çağatay, Daria Dyakonova, Mátyás Erdélyi, Dóra Fedeles-Czeferner, Eric Fure-Slocum, Alexandra Ghiț, Olga Gnydiuk, Maren Hachmeister, Veronika Helfert, Natalia Jarska, Marie Láníková, Ivelina Masheva, Jean-Pierre Liotard-Vogt, Denisa Nešťáková, Sophia Polek, Zhanna Popova, Büşra Satı, Masha Shpolberg, Georg Spitaler, Jelena Tešija, Eszter Varsa, Johanna Wolf and Susan Zimmermann.

Workers in Hard Times

Workers in Hard Times
Author: Leon Fink
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2014-02-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0252095979

Seeking to historicize the 2007-2009 Great Recession, this volume of essays situates the current economic crisis and its impact on workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day capitalist marketplace. Contributors use examples from industrialized North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to demonstrate how workers and states have responded to those shifts and to their disempowering effects on labor. Since the Industrial Revolution, contributors argue, factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Contributors also posit a varying dynamic between political upheaval and economic crises, and between workers and the welfare state. The volume ends with an examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. A sobering conclusion lays out a likely future for workers--one not far removed from the instability and privation of the nineteenth century. The essays in this volume offer up no easy solutions to the challenges facing today's workers. Nevertheless, they make clear that cogent historical thinking is crucial to understanding those challenges, and they push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless. Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.

The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom

The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom
Author: Michael Bérubé
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 127
Release: 2015-04-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137506121

This book is a lively, passionate defence of contemporary work in the humanities, and, beyond that, of the university system that makes such work possible. The book's stark accounts of academic labour, and its proposals for reform of the tenure system, are novel, controversial, timely, and very necessary.

American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century

American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Michael N. Bastedo
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2023-01-31
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421444410

Now in its fifth edition! An indispensable reference for anyone concerned with the future of American colleges and universities. Whether it is advances in information technology, organized social movements, or racial inequality and social class stratification, higher education serves as a lens for examining significant issues within American society. First published in 1998, American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century offers a comprehensive introduction to the complex realities of American higher education, including its history, financing, governance, and relationship with the states and federal government. This thoroughly revised edition brings the classic volume completely up to date. Each chapter has been rewritten to address major recent issues in higher education, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the movement for racial justice, and turmoil in the for-profit sector. Three entirely new chapters cover broad-access colleges, race and racism, and organized social movements. Reflecting on the implications of ethnic and socioeconomic diversity within higher education, the book also grapples with growing concerns about the responsiveness and future of the academy. No other book covers such wide-ranging issues under the broader theme of higher education's relationship to society. Highly acclaimed and incorporating cutting-edge research, American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century is now more useful and engaging than ever. Contributors: Michael N. Bastedo, Philip G. Altbach, Patricia J. Gumport, Peter Riley Bahr, Joy Blanchard, Julia Brickfield, Michael Brown, Katherine S. Cho, Daniela Conde, Charles H. F. Davis III, Hans de Wit, Peter D. Eckel, Martin Finkelstein, Denisa Gándara, Liliana M. Garces, Roger L. Geiger, Leslie D. Gonzales, Jillian Leigh Gross, Jessica Harris, Nicholas Hillman, Julia Rose Karpicz, Robert Kelchen, Adrianna Kezar, Lisa R. Lattuca, Demetri Morgan, Rebecca Natow, Anna Neumann, Audrey Peek, Laura W. Perna, Gary Rhoades, Tykeia N. Robinson, Roman Ruiz, Wonson Ryu, Lauren T. Schudde, Jeffrey C. Sun, David A. Tandberg

Garden Crafts for Kids

Garden Crafts for Kids
Author: Diane Rhoades
Publisher: Sterling Publishing (NY)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1995
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 9780806909981

Get ready for plenty of gardening fun as kids become adventurers, explorers, scientists, chefs, inventors, and friends of the earth -- all in one! They can plant their own family tree, camp out ill a bean teepee, start a garden in a boot, or grow potatoes in old tires. Whether they live in a house or an apartment, in the country or the city, kids can grow vegetables to eat, flowers to smell (and even eat!), and other plants to enjoy. They'll learn to test soil; water, weed, mulch, and fertilize their garden; make friends with earthworms; and see how to use the moon as a planting calendar. Projects grow out of gardens, just as plants grow in them. Make a wooden caddy to transport supplies, or spruce up tools with brightly colored painted designs. Create homemade cards with pressed flowers or sweet-smelling sachets stuffed with herbs. Make a birdhouse out of a gourd or a toad villa with flowerpots. There are plenty of tasty treats to try, too -- gourmet flower cupcakes, sweet forest honey, ginger soda, apple leather, herbal tea, zucchini cake, and nasturtium delights. Instructions are even included on how to put together and operate a produce stand to sell homegrown produce and homemade items. Featuring plenty of full-color photos and fascinating facts, these fifty great activities will inspire kids to get their hands dirty and keep their thumbs green throughout the year!

Understanding Academic Freedom

Understanding Academic Freedom
Author: Henry Reichman
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421442159

"This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to academic freedom, surveying its history and application to research, teaching, and public expression, as well as its treatment in the legal arena and its applicability to students"--