Adjuncts are discussing these titles on the Colorado Adjuncts Blog: http://coloradoadjunctsblog.blogspot.com/

How the University Works

Higher Education and the

Low-Wage Nation

By Marc Bousquet

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 earns 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.

Bousquet exposes the seamy underbelly of higher education—a world where faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates work long hours for fast-food wages. This is urgent reading for anyone interested in the fate of the university.

Moving a Mountain

Transforming the Role of Contingent Faculty in Composition Studies and Higher Education

Edited by Eileen Schell and Patricia Stock

How can the academy improve the working conditions of those who teach most of the core curriculum in higher education today: part-time and non-tenure-track faculty?

In Moving a Mountain, policymakers, academic administrators, and tenure-stream and contingent faculty focus on the field of composition as they address this question in case studies, local narratives, and analyses of models for ethical employment practices. Despite their different political stances, institutional settings, and reform agenda, contributors argue persuasively why it is in the academy’s best interest to reconsider the roles and rewards it has offered contingent faculty.

Losing Out

Four Essays on Adjunct Labor in Higher Education

By Isaac Sweeney

These four creative essays were originally published between October 2009 and January 2011 in national venues, such as The Chronicle Review and Academe. The essays offer a unique perspective, backed by personal experience and research. They focus on the unfair world of adjunct, contingent, and non-tenure track labor in higher education, which has come to rely heavily on underpaid and often-underappreciated faculty members.

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower

Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

By Joe Berry

Joe Berry has made a vital contribution to the most urgent subject on many a campus: the sudden transformation of the teaching workforce, the degradation not only of teachers but also of students and of society's gains from higher education.

Everyone who teaches, every humane administrator and every alert student will want to read this book. It is even possible that Reclaiming the Ivory Tower will light the fire for a rebuilding of basic values of American education.

—Paul Buhle, Brown University

Academic Apartheid

Waging the War on Adjuncts

By Sylvia DeSantis

In response to institutionalized oppression, professional disregard, and overt lack of agency, a silent majority speaks out. This book responds to the pervasive “adjunct for hire” trend with a collection of poignant international essays covering a wide depth and breadth of experience (overseas, online, small private colleges, large state institutions) while uncovering the challenges implicit with living and working as an academic on the borders of the ivory tower.

Adjunct employment practices often occur outside the boundaries of professionalism; too commonly are academics hired into teaching positions without the benefits of job security, adequate wages, health benefits, or even minimal professional resources, such as office space, a desk, or even use of a copier.

DeSantis documents the agency and experiences of adjuncts always already subsumed by this classist shift.

Embracing Non-Tenure Track Faculty

Changing Campuses for the New Faculty Majority

By Adrianna Kezar

The nature of the higher education faculty workforce is radically and fundamentally changing from primarily full-time tenured faculty to non-tenure track faculty. This new faculty majority faces common challenges, including short-term contracts, limited support on campus, and lack of a professional career track.

Kezar documents real changes occurring on campuses to support this faculty group, unveiling the challenges and opportunities that occur when implementing new policies and practices.

Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers

Writing Instruction in the Managed University

Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott and Leo Parascondola, Eds.

The editors bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instruction—a field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other “disposable” teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience.

Academic Sharecroppers Exploitation of Adjunct Faculty and the Higher Education System

By Wendell Fountain

The term "academic sharecroppers" is used synonymously with the nomenclature "adjunct faculty" because of the minimal financial and other support given to adjunct faculty by institutions of higher learning. This book is a result of the research, personal observations, and experiences of an academic sharecropper that spans nearly three decades. The issues of what is right, just, and fair are addressed relative to the failure of the academic system to properly recognize and reward adjunct faculty-academic sharecroppers.

This book maintains that ethical and moral breaches by administrators in the higher education industry need to be addressed at the societal level.

Over Ten Million Served

Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces

Edited by Michelle Masse and Katie Hogan

All tenured and tenure-track faculty know the trinity of promotion and tenure criteria: research, teaching, and service. While teaching and research are relatively well-defined areas of institutional focus and evaluation, service work is rarely tabulated or analyzed as a key aspect of higher education's political economy. Instead, service, silent and invisible, coexists with the formal, "official" economy of many institutions, just as women's unrecognized domestic labor props up the formal, official economies of countries the world over.

By analyzing the actual labor of service, particularly for women and racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, contributors expose the hidden economy of institutional service, challenging the feminization of service labor in the academy for both female and male academic laborers.

The Fall of Faculty

The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

By Benjamin Ginsberg

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda.

This book examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities.

Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics.

The Invisible Faculty

Improving the Status of

Part-timers in Higher Education

By Judith Gappa and David Leslie

This book presents a stunning portrayal of the complexities of part-time faculty and their working conditions, and an exemplary set of practical but universally applicable recommendations for change. The conclusions and recommendations are so clear and compelling that one can only wonder how we permitted current conditions to develop.

--Ellen Earle Chaffee

Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs

North Dakota University System

Ghosts in the Classroom

Stories of College Adjunct Faculty — and the Price We All Pay

By Michael Dubson

Corruption, exploitation and cruelty are the main ingredients in this book about college adjunct faculty, issues not usually associated with the grand manners and political correctness of higher education. It is an anthology of essays written by college adjunct faculty about their experiences working in higher education. They are written by people who are now in the field, those have landed permanent jobs, and those who have left the profession for a better life. The contributors have worked at expensive, private schools, Ivy League schools, public universities and community colleges. Adjunct faculty are paid on a course-by-course basis only and given few, if any, benefits and no job security.

Adjuncts are discussing these titles on the Colorado Adjuncts Blog: http://coloradoadjunctsblog.blogspot.com/