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,…

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…

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…

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 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…

Providence, Rhode Island, is one of those gritty eastern mill towns that wears its centuries-old history on its sleeve. Like many American cities, Providence is home to a struggling public school system with chronically low-performing schools. They include Roger Williams Middle, where last year only 17 percent of eighth-graders scored at or above…

The loss of full-time tenure faculty positions along with the overuse and financial exploitation of contingent faculty (part-time, full-time nontenure track and graduate employees) are roiling higher education around the country. This is called the academic staffing crisis. Many are undoubtedly working through the bargaining process to improve the…

The 2002 restructuring of the national curriculum in all Japanese public elementary and secondary schools includes a reduction and reallocation of instructional hours, and the addition of a new "integrated studies" course, with an emphasis on more individualized, cross-curricular thematic projects. This reform comes at a time when a…