While some of us are aware that higher ed has been steadily moving away from employing mostly full-time, tenured and tenure-track faculty, replacing them with a part-time, contingent academic workforce, the latest AAUP report issued this summer shows the trend is accelerating. Precarious college teachers have increased by nearly 300,000 over the last decade, as conventional faculty employment stays pretty much flat. It’s part of a national trend in the wider economy that replaces permanent workers with lower paid, contingent staff—members of what we now call the gig economy.
The wide disparity is among the most glaring dysfunctions—along with vast student debt, falling enrollment, rising tuition and other dangers afflicting higher education—but it’s the least acknowledged. Rarely, if ever, does it take its place among the most troubling ails of academic life. It’s a silent disease, its symptoms largely ignored for over half a century.
According to the latest government data, higher ed contingent workers now occupy the lion’s share of the nation’s academic workforce at an overwhelming two thirds (68%), while tenured and tenure-track faculty have been reduced to a dismal quarter (24%). These numbers reflect a deeply troubling dependency on perilous academic workers, with some calling them the new faculty majority. In a topsy-turvy transformation, it’s a dramatic reversal from three decades ago, when the nation’s college instructional staff occupied nearly equal proportions of contingent and tenure-stream faculty.
It’s a common belief that professors teach most classes at our colleges, when the fact is that most students in American classrooms receive instruction from others, mostly graduate teaching assistants and adjuncts. If you wander down the halls, poking into classrooms, there’s no obvious, discernable difference between full-time, credentialed faculty and contingent instructors, especially when the two are assigned similar courses, often teaching right next door to each other in the same hallway. As in Shakespeare comedies, you often can’t tell who’s who, but in college it’s no laughing matter. Students mostly aren’t aware of who among their teachers is a tenured professor and who is an adjunct. And they don’t know which one earns a handsome wage and who makes just peanuts.
The other day at lunch at a nearby restaurant with family and friends, someone asked me what I was working on. I told them I was doing research for an article on the enormous share contingent labor occupies, compared to the relatively modest number holding tenure at our universities and colleges. Everyone at the table was taken aback, totally surprised, a sign—even if anecdotal—that this dirty secret is pretty safe. Mass participation of contingent faculty at our universities remains largely obscure, wrapped in a climate of silence, with adjunct faculty perpetuating the quiet by leaving their students mostly uninformed about their working conditions.
A recent survey reveals the scandalously unstable work most adjuncts experience, with a third earning less than $25,000 a year. Their meager compensation dips below federal poverty guidelines for a family of four, compared to the average annual salary of $112,000 for a full-time, tenured professor. Perhaps even more shocking is the median pay per course for adjunct instructors—a feeble $3,700—forcing many to run from campus to campus in a single semester to teach enough classes to pay their rent and grocery bills. Many know only weeks before a class begins if they will teach it. Most don’t get paid for academic work they perform outside the classroom. Less than half have health insurance coverage and even fewer receive funds for professional development, administrative support or even an office.
In Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education, published earlier this year, Sue Doe and Steven Shulman conclude, “Although contingent instructors are treated as if they have little value as individuals, their collective labor is the bedrock of the educational enterprise. The financial model of higher education depends upon contingent labor on the one hand, and relentless tuition increases on the other. Tuition increases drive up revenues, while contingent academic labor drives down costs.”
Results of research on the consequences of contingent faculty in the classroom are mixed, with some reporting that the quality of teaching adjuncts offer is equal to or better than that of tenured faculty. But since they are excluded from participating in university governance and commonly left out of department discussions about pedagogy, they’re largely outside academic efforts to improve the student experience.
“Colleges mostly use contingent faculty for teaching and learning,” Phil Hill, publisher of the On EdTech newsletter told me. “With tenure, you’re involved year after year, but adjuncts don’t get access to their courses until the last minute. So, if you care about quality teaching, you’re scrambling to make it happen.”
Robert Kelchen, head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, agrees: “There’s a very real concern about the quality of adjunct teaching.”
Do families who send their kids to college, paying increasingly stiff tuition, realize that most of the faculty at our universities are as precarious as Uber drivers?
The present totally unbalanced higher ed teaching staff results largely from financial stress at our colleges and universities since the 1970s, especially as state support shrank. Seeking a way out, schools cut corners by hiring cheaper, less credentialed instructors. Over time, when budgets continued to dwindle, hiring adjuncts became the default, routine practice, in the long run generating a tiered workforce with contingent workers occupying an academic underclass. Some sectors—community colleges, for-profit universities and fully online colleges—are commonly run almost entirely by contingent labor.
Precarious higher ed faculty represent the shock troops of the gig economy, with the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that freelancers or independent workers now make up 36% of the American labor force. Running at a slower rate than in higher ed, more than half of American workers are expected to enter gig employment in the next few years.
Frank Donoghue in The Last Professor, his book on the status of the profession, maintains, “In no other workforce is there such a wide disparity, both in income and in day-to-day life, between groups of people whose jobs, are in part at least, so similar.”
Today, adjuncts are rising up, breaking the silence. Responding to their perilous situation, which has worsened in the wake of the pandemic and inflation, they’ve broken through with strikes and other union action. Adjunct and graduate student unions are out on picket lines, battling for better working conditions and higher pay. This year alone, contingent workers at twelve campuses went on strike, often winning serious pay gains and other concessions, mostly under the leadership of old assembly-line trade unions such as the United Auto Workers and United Steelworkers, who long ago recognized the plight of contingent faculty, years before academic professional organizations such as American Association of University Professors, American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, who protected only their own, highly compensated tenure-stream members. But in a recent turnabout, many of the gains adjuncts made came from joint efforts by adjunct and prominent academic unions.
What’s been happening in higher ed over the last years, with contingent faculty taking over most college teaching, has become a cruel embarrassment, a structural deformity that continued budget hardship causes. Like an incurable disease, higher ed is stuck. It’s the way things are, a given, the academic air we breathe, so common few of us even notice. We are anesthetized.
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