This article provides a narrative response to a precariousness labour situation. The question it attempts to answer is: how does one cope with the precariousness and injustices of contemporary employment without becoming pessimistic or hopeless? The piece, based on the author's personal experience, argues that we can tell and write our career…

This article supports Bérubé's conclusion regarding the intellectual health of humanities scholarship. However, it argues that the case of "contingent faculty"--or academics with short-term or casual contracts--is in many respects different in Australia to the situation he outlines for the US. Whilst a variety of funding pressures have…

Tenure provides professors with a unique level of job security and utmost respect in the academy (Shea, 2002). Receiving tenure and progressing through the academic ranks are among the most visible and valued accomplishments for college and university faculty (Perna, 2001). Faculty who achieve excellence in teaching, research, and service readily…

Over the past few years, as cash-strapped states and school districts have faced tough budget decisions, spending on teacher compensation has come under the microscope. The underlying question is whether, when you take everything into account, today's teachers are fairly paid, underpaid, or overpaid. In this forum, two pairs of respected…

The midterm impact of the economic crisis on the employment situation in the EU member states varied largely (European Commission, 2010a, Chapter 1). Whereas the Baltic States, Ireland, and above all Spain registered job losses of more than 10 percent from immediately before to after the crisis, that is, between the second quarter of 2008 and the…

In this paper, the authors first discuss the Neumark and Troske piece, and then compare the U.S. context to that in Europe and Korea, as described by the Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench and the Cho and Shin contributions. Although they are in basic agreement with Neumark and Troske on the extent and depth of the current employment situation, they…

In this paper, the authors call for an approach that, in recognizing the economic realities facing most institutions, attempts to put aside objections that funding is simply not available to support an expansion of the current tenure system. In calling for the changes in faculty working conditions, the authors recognize that change will…

A combination of destructive trends in higher education--shrinking state budgets, stagnant student aid, the growth of corporate-style management, the overuse and exploitation of contingent faculty, increasing workloads and attacks on academic freedom--is weakening the educational integrity and professionalism of American colleges and universities.…

The full impact of the current recession on American higher education remains uncertain, but drops in applications, faculty autonomy and job security, frozen salaries and hiring processes, and scaling back of new facilities and programs are already being seen. American colleges face tough times ahead for teaching, research, and capital projects…

The author begins by asserting that tenure does have a future, even though cultural and economic trends in American higher education have brought it to near annihilation in the past decade. She is sorry to say that it has survived these trends for one troubling reason--tenure is the ultimate employment perk for very successful members of the…

Back in the 1970s, when the author was an art professor at California State University at Northridge, he had a colleague who absolutely would not say anything about anybody that he would not say to that person's face. Marvin Harden, the African-American artist, originally came to Los Angeles in the late 1950s from segregated Austin, Texas, to play…

For those who still see tenure primarily as a form of job security, the larger economic context should be plain. No one, not even in the traditional professions, can any longer expect a fixed pattern of employment in the course of his or her lifetime. In this article, the author discusses how this generation is witnessing the merging of the…

Job security is a relatively new concept in the ancient field of teaching art. Historically artists have created, and been judged on, their own credentials--that is, their art. The master of fine-arts (M.F.A.) degree, often described as a "terminal degree," or the endpoint in an artist's formal education, has long been sufficient for artists…

In "The Corrosion of Character" Richard Sennett contends that the storied nature of human experience is stunted by "conditions of the new economy". He argues that individuals are unable to develop "coherent life narratives" in the absence of job security. Thus, continuous employment somehow provides coherence: at…

The possibility that the No Child Left Behind Act could trump provisions of collective bargaining agreements with teachers has hung in the air as an open question since before the measure became law in 2002. But it should not anymore, says a report released last week asserting that the teachers' contracts have the winning hand. The debate began as…