In 2020, a contingent faculty member working at California State University, the largest public higher education system in the US, taught between two hundred and three hundred students per term and earned $40,000 annually. This shocking reality is the subject of a timely collection edited by historians Claire Goldstene and Eric Fure-Slocum. Goldstene and Fure-Slocum collected chapters from scholars of composition, history, sociology, labor, theater, economics, and biology. Part I surveys trends regarding contingent faculty; Part II constructs a labor history of college teaching; and Part III shares case studies of solidarity and division. Three-quarters of the contributors list contingent teaching in their bios, making this collection representative of the profession. Adjuncts’ individual voices matter and so do their collective institutions.
Contingent Faculty intervenes in the historiography of higher education by deemphasizing the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP’s) protection of faculty speech through tenure and elevating labor unions’ protection of non-tenure-track faculty through contracts. AAUP members pushed the organization to act like a union in the late 1960s, but labor lawyer William A. Herbert and sociologist Joseph van der Naald’s chapter pinpoints the year 1975, when only 55 percent of all faculty positions were contingent, as the moment when the AAUP turned against adjuncts.
The advocacy organizations Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, founded in 1996, and New Faculty Majority, founded in 2009, secured incremental change through low-cost, high-status policies such as retaining university email addresses, accessing mailboxes, offices, and libraries, and participating in faculty governance, and “chipped away” at federal labor, education, and tax rules that hurt contingent workers. In her chapter, SUNY Cortland composition instructor Anne Wiegard shares the example of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) helping New Faculty Majority improve adjuncts’ access to unemployment benefits.
Strategies to unionize higher ed workers across rank and/or institution failed to reduce adjuncts’ ranks. Herbert and van der Naald note that AFT locals combined full-time and part-time faculty in the 1960s with mixed success. Some state labor boards mandate separate bargaining units, which, as sociologist Gary Rhoades documents in his chapter, have increased since 2000. UK historian Steven Parfitt reports on the University and College Union and its “slow accumulation of small victories” for faculty of all ranks and staff (p. 234). The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) pursued a “metro strategy” to connect hard-to-reach workers in Washington, DC, Miami, and Boston, while the AFT organized Philadelphia, and the United Steel Workers recently revived its Pittsburgh-targeted strategy. Historian Anne McLeer, currently working as an SEIU organizer, won adjuncts pay increases of between 40 and 65 percent beginning in 2008 in Washington, DC, and Maryland.
Contingent Faculty’s contributors attribute the growth of adjunct positions to different economic forces, including academic capitalism, marketization, corporatization, and exploitation. Historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer traces the roots of academic exploitation in land-grant universities’ expropriation of Native American land and the use of enslaved labor to build campuses such as the University of North Carolina. Today, student loan debt has left students indentured. Labor educators Joe Berry and Helena Worthen observe that Vietnam War veterans, divorced women, and racially and ethnically diverse students began taking classes just as public funding fell, and institutions hired more adjuncts to balance their budgets. Colorado State University’s Sue Doe, a professor of composition, and Steven Shulman, a professor of economics, analyze federal data to argue that administrators reoriented universities away from teaching by extracting “instructional surplus” from faculty to spend on “luxury and status goods” (p. 84).
Theater instructor Gwendolyn Alker shares another reason adjunctification continues: tenure-stream faculty also benefit from “instructional surplus.” Adjuncts teach most undergraduate courses at many institutions, enabling tenure-track faculty to take research leaves and teach advanced students. Claire Goldstene, a former adjunct now working as a consumer regulator for the state of California, observes that the introductory courses adjuncts teach are among the “most difficult, with the heaviest workload and the greatest challenges” (p. 271). A Massachusetts community college cut former adjunct Aimee Loiselle’s original history of hip-hop course to accommodate a tenured faculty member’s specialty. Loiselle noted that the department’s most secure adjuncts asked for the least because they were retired K-12 administrators and military personnel. Labor history instructor Trevor Griffey finds that some faculty willingly share “instructional surplus:” part-time faculty in Peralta won salary parity with full-time faculty in the California community college system in 2020. Legislation may extend this kind of victory, but wins are precarious. For example, as Griffey notes, Cal State teaching conditions deteriorated after instructors secured a “gold standard” contract in 2001.
Alker and Raymond consider historical as well as present-day gender divides in educational work that perpetuate faculty contingency. Alker argues that teaching, advising, and committee service is valued less than research, writing, and publishing, and thus women, who do more care work than men, struggle to get tenure. Alker suggests that faculty “broaden the frame” of their work by describing themselves as teachers, but this diminishes women scholars’ hard-won distance from their role as mothers in the educational workplace. Feminists such as Raymond reject maternalistic expectations. She refused to counsel Duke students or charm colleagues, emotional labor that might have improved her working conditions. Raymond’s disgust at a female adjunct who “was able to perform flirtatiousness” and secure a “stable position” demonstrates the fragility of gender-based solidarity (p. 119).
Bracingly honest and insightful essays by biologist Diane Angell and historian Miguel Juárez show how adjuncts are innovative teachers. Angell taught as many as ten different courses in a five-year period, including an intro to biology class for aspiring doctors and first-generation college students at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota. Embracing a “nothing to lose” attitude, Angell found the fun in teaching cutting-edge research, received National Science Foundation grants for mentoring, and hosted elementary school students. Juárez partnered with librarians at two Texas campuses to bring 3D printing, podcasting, and gaming to his introductory lecture courses at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Grounding himself in both his local and academic communities, Juárez did unpaid service work to expand students’ access to history and ideas. Angell heard that retirements would create job openings as a graduate student in the 1990s while Juárez began his doctoral education in the 2010s after working as a librarian. Together, their experiences demonstrate how the end of mandatory retirement in 1994 means that fewer young scholars are hired, but older graduate students have longer careers.
Graduate and postgraduate workers are a significant source of contingent labor. Large research universities run on the labor of graduate workers who instruct, grade, consult with students, and conduct research in faculty labs. Labor historian Jeff Schuhrke details Illinois public university campaigns to defend tuition waivers, reduce fees, standardize course assignments, subsidize family healthcare, protect international students, and raise salaries, organizing struggles that were punctuated by strikes in 2019 and 2022 at the University of Illinois Chicago. Sociologist Erin Hatton conducted a study of twenty chemistry, molecular biology, and biomedical PhD students, four of whom faced harassment or bullying with little recourse. Rutgers labor studies professor Naomi R Williams and graduate worker Jiyoon Park argue for “cross-rank solidarity” and suggest actions to build solidarity: meet part-time colleagues, know their working conditions, compensate them for research and service, and interview them for tenure-stream positions.
One topic missing from these essays is the systematic conversion of adjuncts to tenure-track faculty. The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties first negotiated terms to convert individuals and positions in its 1999 contract, and hundreds of adjuncts have been tenured since. Crucially, the contract caps adjuncts at 25 percent of faculty.
Future collections should draw a further connection between K-12 and higher education labor organizing. New Faculty Majority’s slogan, “Faculty working conditions are students learning conditions,” was used by Mary Ellen Riordan, who in the mid 1960s became the first female union president to sign a K-12 teacher union contract. While striking over pension cuts in the UK in 2018, history instructor Steven Parfitt and his colleagues were heartened by photos of support sent by West Virginia K-12 teachers also striking at that time. If solidarity can cross oceans, it can cross campuses.
