We all know about the “proletariat,” but what about the “precariat?” It’s a pun of sorts, designating the class of people who labor in academia in a permanently precarious state of employment—the adjuncts and contingent faculty who increasingly make up the majority of faculty at many institutions.
The travails of the precariat were at the center of a public conversation sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. Panelists sought to answer a weighty question: what does the loss of stable, well-compensated employment within academia mean for the future of higher education?
Their answer, in short, was “nothing good,” but, as always, the problem is far more complex than that.
Dr. Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, first traced the history of the precariat, pointing to an abrupt divergence in institutional hiring practices. Since 1995, the number of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty has barely budged, percent-wise. Meanwhile, the number of non-tenure-track and part-time faculty has dramatically expanded.
According to the MLA’s Academic Workforce Data Center, the number of part-time faculty has gone from 379,700 in 1995 to 757,700 in 2011; comparable to 393,500 tenured and tenure-track faculty in 1995 and 430,600 of the same in 2011.
“The precariat academic workforce should always be at the center of all of our public policy, of our legislation, including the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, loan forgiveness, and any other matter that has to do with faculty members in their positions,” Feal said.
To better illustrate the situation, Feal compared colleges and universities’ labor forces to an “iceberg.” The most visible members of the faculty—those “above the water”—are the tenured or tenure-track professors. Submerged beneath them are the larger body of “temporary,” non-tenure-track faculty who support and in many ways make possible the work of their better compensated and more widely recognized peers.
