Mad Professors: The adjuncts are at the barricades

from In These Times:



Mad Professors
The adjuncts are at the barricades.

BY Rebecca Burns


After years of earning low wages, Jack Dempsey and his co-workers decided to organize. They were sick of disrespect and intimidation on the job, and desperate for benefits and job security.

Some might be surprised to learn that this predicament describes Dempsey’s life as an adjunct professor of English at Bentley University in Massachusetts. But in nearly 12 years working there, he’s never received a promotion or benefits. “We’re living on a Band-aid,” he says. “If somebody gets sick, they’re finished. People are so afraid of losing the little bit of bread that they have that they’re afraid to speak up. But we’re going to try to change that.”

On May 9, adjunct faculty at Bentley filed petitions for a union election to join Adjunct Action, a new project of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Earlier this year, Adjunct Action began a push to unionize part-time faculty at private schools across the Boston area, an effort that’s part of an emerging focus within the labor movement on contingent faculty in higher education.

That so many advanced degree-holders are toiling in poverty conditions flies in the face of the assumption that higher education is a path to prosperity. But low wages and precarity in fact represent the new norm. Tenure-track faculty now constitute just 24 percent of the academic workforce, an all-time low, according to an April report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/15080/mad_professors/