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…

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) professionals often serve as change agents tasked with leading university-wide EDI efforts. Charged with advancing EDI initiatives as part of the University mission, the Vice President of Equity Diversity and Inclusion (VPEDI) must navigate campus organizational and cultural barriers in order to effect…

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…

As a result of the health and safety concerns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, in Spring 2020 social work programs nationwide were required to make significant shifts in their instructional methods and field placements. These changes often resulted in faculty members taking on new or additional responsibilities related to teaching and field.…

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…

In recent years, states have sought to increase accountability for public school teachers by implementing a package of reforms centered on high-stakes evaluation systems. We examine the effect of these reforms on the supply and quality of new teachers. Leveraging variation across states and time, we find that accountability reforms reduced the…

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…

Education has been powerfully affected by the rise of a neoliberal political, economic and cultural agenda. The Australian experience since the 1980s is outlined. Educators need to understand neoliberalism, and also to think about the nature of education itself, as a social process of nurturing capacities for practice. Education itself cannot be…

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…