Perspectives on Precarious Academic Labor

This review is part of a preview to the spring 2025 issue of Academe. The full issue will be published in May.

Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene. University of Illinois Press, 2024. 

Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education, edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene, is a unique exploration of the history of academic labor. The book draws on data tracing the growth of contingent employment, diverse personal narratives of academic workers in contingent appointments, and examples of effective challenges to the conditions of contingency. Ultimately, it provides direction to those looking to build solidarity across faculty ranks. The collection of essays offers a holistic integration of micro- and macro-level analyses, linking the current state of academic labor to the broader gig economy of the twenty-first century. While numerous works have appeared in recent years on the topic of the contingent academic workforce, this collection offers fresh perspectives with a compelling intersectional approach.

The first part of the book uncovers the history of the new contingent faculty majority and the transformation of higher education that made this possible. An essay by Gary Rhoades contextualizes the increasing reliance on adjunct and contingent faculty by framing it within the broader political economy of “academic capitalism.” He highlights the intersections of class, race, and gender, showing how the expansion of educational opportunities for women, people of color, and international scholars coincided with the rise of precarious faculty positions. This chapter effectively demonstrates how systemic inequities in education are deeply intertwined with larger societal structures, offering a stark picture of how exploitative economic forces have shaped the contemporary academic landscape.

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s essay broadens this historical lens by situating the evolution of academic labor within a longer timeline beginning before World War II and the postwar-era remaking of higher education that is often a point of reference for discussions of contingency. She connects the nature of labor practices in higher education to political and economic shifts linked to the legacies of enslaved labor, land seizures from Indigenous peoples, and the influence of Gilded Age tycoons and philanthropists. Shermer’s perspective on the historical geography of academia is enlightening, too, particularly in exploring regional differences between the predominance of private universities in the Northeast and public institutions in the West.

The historical scope of this book is one of its key strengths. By showing how privilege and exclusion have been baked into the structure of higher education, the book provides a much-needed context for understanding contemporary issues as a by-product of more than two hundred years of interactions of the education sector with the country’s political, economic, and social climates. (For example, we can better understand the reliance on student fees as the logical outgrowth of educational expansion without simultaneous investment of public resources.) Several contributions to the book show how entrenched inequities within and across academic institutions have led to higher education’s perpetuating these inequities instead of addressing them. Gwendolyn Alker, for instance, argues that acknowledging the broader issue of the undervaluing of women’s labor is essential to confronting inequality in academia. Through such historical analysis, these essays explain how the system of higher education has come to value profit over pedagogy, austerity over education.

The second part of the book delves into the lived experiences of contingent faculty, exploring the stigma, devaluation, and marginalization faced by adjuncts, postdocs, graduate student workers, and others in precarious academic positions. This section is notable for the diversity of voices it brings together. The essays include personal narratives of a broad array of people in contingent appointments: postdoctoral and research fellows, workers in STEM fields, older faculty, workers with disabilities, working parents, and people with minority racial and ethnic backgrounds. It is a refreshing reminder that contingent faculty are not a monolithic group, and that their struggles vary widely depending on their identities, academic disciplines, and institutional contexts. This variety underscores the need for solidarity across diverse academic communities to challenge the structures that maintain inequalities, a theme that is revisited toward the end of the book.

The personal-narrative section of the book offers not only powerful examples of the experiences of contingent academics but also recommendations for addressing the issues at hand as the authors discuss how they navigated and challenged the structures of power. At times, these firsthand accounts reveal uncomfortable truths. Claire Raymond, for example, pointedly reflects on how universities have shifted the scandal of their exploitative labor practices into a broad cultural shaming of the adjunct laborer; the underlying assumption that the academy is meritocratic suggests that those in contingent positions deserve their lot and all that comes with it. Identifying and reframing this process offers a way of cleaning off some of the “social dirt” of the status of contingent faculty members. These personal stories, while not surprising to me as a non-tenure-track faculty member, were compelling reminders of the emotional and psychological toll of serving in contingent positions. These essays also illustrate the strength it takes to persist and resist from within academia.

The final two parts of the book turn to potential solutions for addressing the problems of academic contingency. These sections, however, are less compelling than the first two. While the book highlights the need for the involvement of contingent faculty members in campus governance and unionization efforts, the suggestions for broader systemic change feel inadequate now. Many essays in this section offer a sense of optimism, especially with the renewed focus on unionization and solidarity-building efforts in the wake of important social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. However, questions about the durability of these efforts under the politically hostile environment of the second Trump administration weighed on me while I read this part of the book. I had the impression that the authors and editors wrote at a time when there was a spirit of implicit hope that what contributor Maria Maisto called the “rubble of Trump‘s American carnage” would be swept away rather than returning with a vengeance.

An additional omission of this book is that while it calls into question many aspects of higher education, it fails to critique the ethics of graduate education itself. Essays by Diane Angell and Erin Hatton highlight both the vulnerability and the potential power of graduate student workers. Yet some of the challenges facing contingent faculty members today are related to the oversupply of newly minted graduates for a shrinking number of secure academic positions offered by institutions that have shifted employment to contingent appointments. As I read about graduate students as contingent workers, I found myself asking about the ethics of continuing to train highly specialized workers who often have not been prepared for the realities of the academic job market they will face after graduation. Angell’s essay touches on this issue indirectly when she writes about the flaws in academia: “Like all cracks, those tend to widen when the support structures that should be in place are absent.” Are we complicit in mortaring over the cracks when we encourage promising undergraduates to go on to graduate school, especially if we are not explicitly discussing the issues raised in this book with all our students, undergraduate and graduate? 

Overall, this collection is a well-grounded exploration of how multiple biases (along the lines of class, gender, race, able-bodied status, and age), perpetuated over time, intersect within academic labor and organizing. An implicit message is that without addressing these systemic inequalities intersectionally, the push for unionization and collective action will be limited. As Alker points out, the us-versus-them mentality that divides tenure-stream and non-tenure-track faculty often prevents the recognition of the complex, multidimensional nature of the issues at hand and what we need to do, together, to make systemic change in higher education. When we overlook our collective power and instead focus on our differences, our organizing efforts can easily become fragmented and weakened if we fail to acknowledge and address these intersections.

Fure-Slocum and Goldstene’s book is an engaging contribution to the ongoing conversation about labor in higher education. It challenges us to reconsider the structures that have created, benefited from, and sustained academic inequality and offers nuanced insights into the ways academic workers are organizing for change. The book serves as both a call to action and a source of inspiration for those within academia who are fighting for better working conditions, as well as for those who may not yet fully grasp the realities faced by contingent faculty. At the heart of the book is the idea that while contingent employment is often linked to uncertainty—unstable schedules, time-limited contracts, unpredictable career trajectories—contingency should also be understood as a kind of dual dependency: While contingent faculty members may be dependent on the system, the entire academic enterprise is dependent on the labor of marginalized groups. This reframing is powerful and offers a new lens through which to view academic labor and its power.

Catherine L. Moran is principal lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire and a member of the executive committee of the UNHLU-AAUP, AFT Local #6770.