For centuries, academies of higher learning around the world have at times been subject to intense pressure to change such things as what is taught, how it is taught, who teaches it, and how the academies are run. While no academics in the United States have been burnt at the stake, American colleges and universities have, over the years, felt…

The COVID-19 pandemic amplified existing inequities in higher education. This paper documents the stories of four precariously employed communication instructors in their transition to emergency remote teaching in March 2020. Through collaborative autoethnography, the instructors share their stories of reliance and compliance within the gig…

As higher education emerges from COVID-19 restrictions, the post-pandemic transitional moment provides Catholic institutions the opportunity to reconsider their reliance on adjuncts in core curricula. As tenure-track positions decline nationwide and universities increasingly source out coursework to temporary or part-time adjuncts and other…

The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), a public research university, has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to improving working conditions for non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) with a 20-year track record of progressive policies to improve the support for them. This commitment is manifested through a series of improvements in policies,…

The Higher Education sector has been through an array of changes, such as globalisation, massification, lack of job security, decolonisation and a number of technological advancements. These changes have impacted academic workload and have increased work pressure with resultant effects on family and work life balance. A review of the existing…

Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car . . . to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches…

Over the last several decades we have seen a fundamental transformation of higher education. Fifty years ago, 75% of faculty were in highly paid and secure tenure-track jobs, but today 75% are in non-tenure-track, or contingent positions. University administrators argue that this shift, and the low wages that accompany these positions, are…

Casual and sessional academic staff have traditionally been on the margins of institutional life despite the expansion of this cohort across the university sector. This paper details a project to address this lack of recognition through a workforce strategy to engage, support and effectively manage this often neglected cohort of the academic…

Advances in technology are classified as one of the external factors that trigger organisational change, even for Higher Education Institutions. The transition to e-learning presents new challenges as expectations and roles of employees and students evolve. The primary objective of this study was to investigate employee perceptions of the Open…

In the past few decades, especially since the 2008-09 economic downturn, the faculty of American colleges and universities has undergone a far-reaching transformation. Multiple factors, mainly extraneous to the campus itself, are reshaping higher education, and as a result a reprioritizing of the internal allocation of resources is occurring. The…

Adopting a pluralistic view of academics' informal learning that draws on Habermas (1987), this article suggests that a great deal of academic learning results from tensions and incompatibilities between individual interests and those of employing institutions increasingly resonant with the ideology of New Public Management (NPM), with its…

In four decades of teaching college English, the author has watched many good teaching jobs morph into second-class ones. Worse, she has seen the memory and then the expectation of teaching jobs with decent status, security, and salary depart along with principles and collegiality. To help reverse this downward spiral, she contends that what is…

This article sets out to explore how academics make sense of the current transformations of higher education and what kinds of academic identities are thereby constructed. Based on a narrative analysis of 42 interviews with Finnish academics, nine narratives are discerned, each providing a different answer as to what it means to be an academic in…

This brief article posits that the drive to privatize public services in the US (United States) coupled with growing economic inequality are now so extreme that they threaten a cornerstone of American liberal democracy--quality public education. The argument rests on the assumption that there is such a concept as "the public good". This idea of…

Higher education today is in the midst of massive transformation and the current landscape of change is unprecedented because of the sheer number of institution-molding forces that are at play and the pervasive impact these forces are having on reshaping the academy. These wide-ranging, seismic shifts have affected every aspect of faculty worklife…